Ingeborg Bachmann

In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion.

Malina

Greatly expanded bilingual edition of the 1994 Marsilio edition, Songs in Flight.

The Collected Poems

Darkness Spoken

Mark Anderson

The Description for this book, In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, will be forthcoming.

Selected Poems

In the Storm of Roses

These two fragments of novels, Ingeborg Bachmann's only untranslated works of fiction, were intended to follow the widely acclaimed Malina in a cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Although Bachmann died before completing them, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann stand on their own, continuing Bachmann's tradition of using language to confront the disease plaguing human relationships. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted upon the living from outside and from within, through history, politics, religion, family, gender relations, and the self.Bachmann's allegiance to the twin muses of memory and history, as well as her perception of fascism as not being limited to the context of the war but also existing within the intimate relations of everyday life between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, psychiatrists and patients' are supremely evident in The Book of Franza. Here, Bachmann follows a woman who escapes from a sanitorium and, after years of silence, sends her brother a cryptic telegram. Rightly suspecting that she has fled her sadistic husband -- a renowned Austrian psychiatrist whose intimate relations have merged with his studies of concentration camps -- her brother finds her in their childhood home. Together they travel to Egypt, where Franza slowly begins to regain her bearings. But Franza's desire to cleanse herself by journeying into the heart of the desert's void ends in tragedy, as she becomes the victim of a horrible act of violence.Unlike Franza, who attempts to flee her past but fails, the heroine of Requiem for Fanny Goldmann makes no attempt to escape her history. Thisnovel tells of the demise of a Viennese actress who is manipulated by a younger, ambitious playwright to advance his career. Deception follows disloyalty; the final treachery comes when the playwright portrays her in a novel, which secures his fame and, in Fanny's eyes, robs her of her future. Caught in a perpetual stasis, Fanny suffers in total obscurity, as her present is stolen from her as well.Whether analyzing the place where the self begins and the power of history ends or the ways in which women are forced to be complicit in their mistreatment at the hands of men, Bachmann's critical approach to the human psyche is unparalleled. Mesmerizing and profound, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann constitute the final evidence that Ingeborg Bachmann is the most important female German-language writer of the postwar period.

The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann

Michael Mitchell

Hans Höller

Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) is recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer, her War Diary is not a day-by-day journal but a series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entries—all the more remarkable taking into account Bachmann's young age at the time—reveal the eighteen-year-old's hatred of both war and Nazism as she avoids the fanatics' determination to “defend Klagenfurt to the last man and the last woman.” The British occupation leads to her incredible meeting with a British officer, Jack Hamesh, a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in 1938. He is astonished to find in Austria a young girl who has read banned authors such as Mann, Schnitzler, and Hofmannsthal. Their relationship is captured here in the emotional and moving letters Hamesh writes to Bachmann when he travels to Israel in 1946. In his correspondence, he describes how in his new home of Israel, he still suffers from the rootlessness affecting so many of those who lost parents, family, friends, and homes in the war. War Diary provides unusual insight into the formation of Bachmann as a writer and will be cherished by the many fans of her work. But it is also a poignant glimpse into life in Austria in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the reflections of both Bachmann and Hamesh speak to a significant and larger story beyond their personal experiences.Praise for the German Edition“A minor sensation that will make literary history. Thanks to the excellent critical commentary, we gain a sense of a period in history and in Bachmann's life that reached deep into her later work. . . . What makes these diary entries so special is . . . the detail of the resistance described, the exhilaration of unexpected peace, the joy of freedom.”—Die Zeit

With Letters from Jack Hamesh

War Diary

Hörspiel

Der gute Gott von Manhattan

Verzamelde verhalen

Radyo oyunları

Ingeborg Bachmann'dan seçme yazılar

Bu tufandan sonra

Sämtliche Gedichte

Il trentesimo anno

Ingeborg Bachmann hat mit >Das Buch Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann zwei Geschichten mit letalem Ausgang geschrieben. Sie berichten schonungslos über die soziale Gewalt und die moralischen Verbrechen innerhalb der Gesellschaft, die von keiner Justiz geahndet werden. Die Schicksale von Franza Jordan und Fanny Goldmann belegen: Die Gesellschaft ist der allergrößte Mordschauplatz. Requiem für Fanny Goldmann sollte nach dem Willen Ingeborg Bachmanns mit Malina und dem Buch Franza den Zyklus Todesarten bilden - ein Projekt, das sie nicht zu Ende brachte. Sterben wird nicht als Exitus, als Folge von Krankheit, Koma und Tod beschrieben, sondern als Folge eines Existierens, das falsch anfing und verlief.

Das Buch Franza

THREE PATHS TO THE LAKE, Ingeborg Bachmann's second and final collection of short stories, consists of five narratives about the lives and loves of five different women. Socially uprooted and emotionally isolated, each protagonist struggles with possibilities for survival in the 1960s. Bachmann's portraits reflect a compassionate yet unswerving perception of humanity.

Three Paths to the Lake

Paul Celan

Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence. Collected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living--as a woman, as a man, as writers. In addition to the almost 200 letters, the volume includes an important exchange between Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, who married Celan in 1951, as well as the letters between Paul Celan and Swiss writer Max Frisch. "Scarcely more breathlessly and desperately can two lovers ever have struggled for words. Little known among German literary historians, the relationship between these two poets amounts to one of the most dramatic and momentous occurrences in German literature."--FAZ, on the German edition

Correspondence

Collection of seven short stories. Orig. pub. in Austria in 1961.

Stories

The Thirtieth Year

Seçmeler

A bililngual edition of a revealing short work the great Austrian author.

Letters to Felician

A new translation of some of the most outstanding works by Ingeborg Bachmann

The Ingeborg Bachmann Reader

Last Living Words

»Das ist der schönste Sommer meines Lebens, und wenn ich hundert Jahre alt werde – das wird der schönste Frühling und Sommer bleiben. Vom Frieden merkt man nicht viel, sagen alle, aber für mich ist Frieden, Frieden!« 1945, unmittelbar nach Kriegsende, notiert die achtzehnjährige Ingeborg Bachmann diese Zeilen in ihrem Tagebuch. Aus ihnen sprechen die Abscheu vor der NS-Ideologie und die Erleichterung über das Ende der Nazi-Herrschaft. Der euphorische Ton hat noch einen weiteren Grund: Ingeborg Bachmann hat sich in den britischen Besatzungssoldaten Jack Hamesh verliebt, einen Wiener Juden, dem 1938 die Emigration gelang. Er befragt die junge Frau zunächst zu einer Mitgliedschaft im »Bund deutscher Mädel«; es entsteht bald eine enge Freundschaft. Dennoch wandert Hamesh im Frühjahr 1946 in das damalige Palästina aus. Zum ersten Mal wird Ingeborg Bachmanns Kriegstagebuch vom Spätsommer 1944 bis zum Juni 1945 vollständig aus dem Nachlaß publiziert. Der Band versammelt zusätzlich sämtliche erhaltene Briefe von Jack Hamesh an Ingeborg Bachmann. Zusammen mit den Journalaufzeichnungen entsteht so ein einzigartiges Dokument des Dialogs zwischen den Kindern der Opfer und der Täter.

Ingeborg Bachmann

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