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"
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