Describing the living, duty of the living

The Letters to Felician, written between May 1945 and 1946, are addressed to an imaginary person – a lover, a brother, an alter ego, a double – to whom she voices her uncertainties, her joys, her expectations. Reading these letters reveals a passionate young woman, beset by profound feelings of loneliness, and confronting premonitions of an exceptional destiny. From her earliest childhood, Ingeborg Bachmann’s elegance had been based on her sense of responsibility. She was one of those ill-fated people who never manage to shake off their sense of duty :

“I wonder a thousand times every hour
Where this awareness of a burden comes from,
Dull pain, always deep.”

In the autumn of 1945, at the age of nineteen, she left Carinthia to begin her studies in philosophy, which she completed five years later, having earned her PhD. It must have taken a great deal of courage for a young woman traumatised by the war and its atrocities to go on believing in life and beauty, to decide to dedicate herself exclusively to the pursuit of truth in her writing! In Bachmann’s opinion, truth was essentially rooted in experience. Only the experience of war, of fear, of love, of writing, could form the foundations of anything new. All thought came from the university of life. She discovered devastated Vienna and its cafés, fell in love with that city, so bleak, yet so full of promise. From 1947, she was involved in the legendary circle that formed around Hans Werner Richter, Group 47, which met at the Cafe Raimund. She began by publishing poems and short stories with the help of this intellectual and artistic group which she revitalised with her passion for the absolute and her precocious lucidity. In 1948, she met Paul Celan, a Romanian poet with whom she carried on an impossible yet vitally important love affair for the next twenty years. This was documented by their correspondence, Heart’s Time, in which their exchange of missives between Vienna and Paris (where Celan had made his home), are full of missed opportunities and the difficulty of finding common ground. In 1953, Bachmann stopped the radio work which paid her a living wage and travelled to Italy. She had just been awarded her first literary prize for her poetry collection, Borrowed Time, which persuaded her to focus exclusively on literature from then on.

Under Foreign Skies

She travelled to Ischia, then Rome, where she would end up strolling along the banks of the Tiber in search of a new direction. After war-ravaged Vienna, she saw Rome as a shabby, faded city marked by growing social inequality. In 1955, she spent a semester at Harvard University in the USA, travelled to Paris, then back to Vienna and even Klagenfurt to visit her parents. She returned to Rome, then Naples, Venice, Paris again, then Rome again, always Rome, where she would have liked to remain. Wandering, the act of travelling without the possibility of return, was an integral part of Ingeborg Bachmann’s life and work. Eventually, she found herself forced to work for the Bavarian radio in Munich. In May 1958, she wrote the radio play The Good God of Manhattan and unknowingly brought about the meeting that was to change the course of her life.
Max Frisch, the German language Swiss writer, heard her radio play and wrote to her expressing his admiration. For five years, travelling between Rome, Zurich and Berlin, they lived every day as if it might be their last, throwing themselves into a turbulent love affair, full of break-ups, reconciliations, and frequent estrangements when their desire to be together conflicted with their irreconcilable lives as artists. Finally, in 1962, overwrought and at breaking point, they split up for good. In his biography about her, Hans Höller wrote that this devastated Ingeborg Bachmann. Some of Max Frisch’s novels openly talked about their relationship and led Bachmann to say later that she might consider making up with wolves but not with men.

Love, the Assassin

From the late 1950s, the theme of love became inseparable from that of the barriers to communication between men and women, and that of the fatal domination people inevitably exert over each other. Franza, Malina, Requiem for Fanny Goldmann are all novels that describe women in pieces, incapable of experiencing love other than through the lens of passion, oppression or loss. Their heroines are women who know just how attractive they are. Alone, or living in unconventional coupledom, they continually waver between melodramatic existential seriousness and caustic self-mockery. Each of these women is obsessed by love and its deepest lows: “what’s he going to do once he’s finished biting my shoulder.”
The verdict is clear: no one recovers from love. People are badly burned and ravaged by love. It represents their dark side. Love is a murderer tolerated by society and sought by the mesmerised victim – one of love’s mysteries. The war, in fact, has never ended, it continues in the private sphere because “There are words, looks that can kill, no one notices, everybody is clinging to a facade, a complete distortion”. With extraordinary insight, Ingeborg Bachmann describes the internal upheavals, the cracks regarded as laughable, the people paralysed by an overall lack of tact and smug off-handedness.
Bachmann admits to living excessively. We take her word for it. A strong, uncompromising woman in defeat as in victory, it is clear from her books how hard it was for her to be one of the builders and rebuilders of the 20th century. Like Simone de Beauvoir – whom she admired greatly – she was one of those women who decided to tackle age-old acts of violence head on, in order to prevent other people’s lives from being an ordeal. Describing anguish, failure, loneliness as an ode to life, to love, was a way of renewing her faith in others and her respect for human relationships.

The future book

Throughout her life, Ingeborg Bachmann pursued the idea of the future book, the one that might somehow fulfil her. The one that would satisfy her need for recognition, that would forever unite estranged lovers or that would honour the unique bond :

“If you really want I will write a book for you which doesn’t yet exist. But you have to really want it, want it from me, and I’ll never demand that you read it. Ivan says :
Let’s hope it’ll be a book with a happy ending.
Let’s hope so”

In acceptance speeches (Georg Büchner Prize in 1964, Anton Wildgans Prize in 1972) and in theoretical essays (Frankfurt Lectures), Bachmann explores a utopian language, a language that crosses the boundaries of the norm, combining registers and genres, attentive to the human element in all its depth and impenetrability. She never gave up this quest for the ideal book which might finally speak the truth about being and the I, that could contain the I as well as the other. The remarkable modernity of her language probably comes from the fact that she viewed it – like any human relationship – as both a blessing and a punishment, as a promise and a threat.