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.

'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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"