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The first English translation of the essays, lectures, and other
critical writings of the celebrated Austrian poet, novelist, and
public intellectual, one of the most influential postwar writers in
German. The Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the
most important postwar writers in German. Her work is enmeshed with
the intellectual and cultural developments of the period: she was
influenced by European modernism in the early 1950s, experienced
the sweeping changes of the 60s, and worked until her death in 1973
on her celebrated and sprawling "Todesarten" (Ways of Death)
project, on the decades following National Socialism. Her poetry
and prose confront what she called "the sickness of our time": the
subtle connection between patriarchal society, catastrophic history
in the form of National Socialism, and the subjugation of the
Other. Even during her lifetime, Bachmann achieved a prominent
position in postwar German-language literature. Interest in her
literary output increased sharply in the early 1980s with the
publication of the first edition of her works, and has been growing
steadily ever since. Bachmann's impact on German literature is
comparable to that of Virginia Woolf on English literature. Just as
an appreciation of Woolf's poetic oeuvre, and that of other women
writers, is impossible without reference to "A Room of One's Own,"
the critical writings of Bachmann enhance our awareness of not only
her own works, but also those of many other writers, philosophers,
and artists. As the only translation of Bachmann's essays,
lectures, speeches, and theoretical texts into English, The
Critical Writings will be a valuable tool for students of
Comparative Literature and German literature and cultural studies.
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War Diary (Paperback)
Ingeborg Bachmann; Contributions by Jack Hamesh; Edited by Hans Holler; Afterword by Hans Holler; Translated by Mike Mitchell
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R251
Discovery Miles 2 510
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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--ll 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.
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Malina (Paperback)
Ingeborg Bachmann
1
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R312
R254
Discovery Miles 2 540
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'An intense, courageous novel, equal to the best of Virginia Woolf
and Samuel Beckett' The New York Times Part detective novel, part
love story, part psychoanalytic case study, Malina is a staggering
portrait of a writer trying to tell her own story in a world
dominated by men. 'I was subordinate to him from the beginning, and
I must have known early on that he was destined to be my doom' A
woman in postwar Vienna walks a tightrope between the two men in
her life. There is her lover Ivan, beautiful and unavailable, who
obsesses her. And there is Malina, the civil servant with whom she
shares an apartment: reserved, fastidious, exacting, chillingly
calm. As the balance of power between them starts to shift, she
feels her fragile identity unravelling, gradually revealing the
dark, bruised heart of her past.
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Correspondence (Paperback)
Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan; Translated by Wieland Hoban
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R480
R413
Discovery Miles 4 130
Save R67 (14%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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 Gisele 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
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The Radio Family (Paperback)
Ingeborg Bachmann; Translated by Mike Mitchell; Afterword by Joseph McVeigh
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R431
Discovery Miles 4 310
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of post-war
German literature's most important novelists, poets, and
playwrights. Influenced by Hans Weigel and the legendary literary
circle Gruppe 47, Bachmann gained international renown for her
poems, short stories, and novels, and won numerous awards for her
work. Sadly, her life ended abruptly in October of 1973 when a lit
cigarette burned down her apartment causing Bachmann to suffer
severe burns that would eventually prove fatal. The author was only
forty-seven, and her tragic death left what could have been a long
and lustrous writing career regretfully stunted. Nearly twenty
years after her death, during an estate sale in Vienna, fifteen
episodes of the popular Viennese radio drama The Radio Family were
discovered. Remarkably, they happened to be written by Ingeborg
Bachmann herself, who had been a writer on the show just after she
graduated university. The Radio Family was a popular radio soap
opera broadcast in the American sector of occupied Vienna in the
1950s. The program focused on a middle-class Viennese family and
their everyday life. Topics ranged from birthday parties and
holiday plans to profiteering and currency fraud in the commercial
sector, and Austrians' involvement in the Nazi past. All fifteen
scripts have now been compiled and masterfully translated,
revealing an early and significant piece of Bachmann's body of
work, while simultaneously offering a rare glimpse into Vienna's
quotidian history.
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War Diary (Hardcover)
Hans Holler; Ingeborg Bachmann; Translated by Mike Mitchell
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R375
R282
Discovery Miles 2 820
Save R93 (25%)
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Out of stock
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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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Enigma - Selected Poems (Paperback)
Ingeborg Bachmann; Translated by Michael Lyons, Patrick Drysdale
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R483
R455
Discovery Miles 4 550
Save R28 (6%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), an Austrian, is considered to be one
of the most distinguished German-speaking poets of the years
following World War II. As a female poet of the twentieth century,
she can have had few rivals for the sweep and force of her
imagi-nation. She was born in Carinthia, a part of southern Austria
close to the borders of Slovenia and Italy. She was from the first
aware of frontiers, and much of her poetry is about place,
belonging and not belonging, and about her yearning for a world
without borders and above all for a world at peace. Other themes
were her fear of a return to the conditions and attitudes of
pre-war life and, again and again, the complexity of love -- its
emotional highs and the bitter pain when it goes wrong. This
collection is called Enigma, the title of one of the poems.
Bachmann herself was enigmatic, both as a person and as a poet.
Much of her poetry expresses her feelings in a figurative way, the
ideas appearing at a tangent to their underlying meaning, and she
loved to play with the intermingling of dream and reality. However
her work is not difficult if one simply listens to the music of the
lines and enjoys their wealth of imagery and the energy of their
emotional involvement. This translation has been prepared for the
general reader rather than the academic and for students of
literature who are not fluent in German. The translators have
stayed as close as possible to the meaning of the original and to
the forms, rhythms, and general feel of the German verse, and they
have used rhyme when there is rhyme in the original. They have also
followed Bachmann in using a simple, everyday choice of words,
avoiding any artificial poetic language. Bachmann ceased to write
poetry in the 1960s, over forty years ago. Yet her poetry remains
as timely and appropriate today as when it was written. She should
be viewed as a world poet rather than an Austrian one, and it is
hoped that this collection will make her work better known and
admired in the English-speaking world.
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.
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