Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann (Klagenfurt, 1926 - Rome, 1973) was an Austrian poet and writer, and one of the most important voices in German-language literature of the twentieth century. She is remembered for her poetry, her short stories and her radio plays, as well as for her reflections on language, truth and the condition of women in postwar Europe. In 1963 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by the philologist Harald Patzer.

The daughter of a schoolteacher who had been an early member of the Austrian National Socialist Party, she first studied law and then philosophy, psychology and German philology at Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. In 1949 she earned her doctorate in Vienna with a dissertation on the critical reception of Martin Heidegger's existential philosophy. Her growing doubts about existentialism went hand in hand with a deepening interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein.

After the war she worked at the radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot, run by the American occupation forces, which gave her a steady income and a broad view of contemporary literature. She became part of Gruppe 47, which awarded her a prize in 1953 for her first poetry collection, Die gestundete Zeit (Time Deferred). That same year she moved to Rome, where she would spend much of her life.

Her initial aim was to renew the German language, since she believed that no new world can be built without a new language. Over time her interests shifted towards love and its violence, the failure of communication between couples and the tragic situation of women, which led her from poetry to prose. In her Frankfurt lectures of 1959 and 1960 she argued that literature must be read in its historical context.

In her prose, fascism appears not as something that ended in 1945 but as a force that survived in human relationships, above all in men's oppression of women. Malina (1971), the first volume of the unfinished tetralogy Todesarten, was the last book she published in her lifetime, and it earned her the Anton Wildgans Prize in 1972.

Her final years were marked by alcoholism and dependence on medication. She died in Rome in 1973, after a fire and a hospital stay for severe burns, and the exact cause of her death remains unclear. Her work was left unfinished.

After her death she became a reference point for feminist readers and for the so-called women's literature movement in Germany. The prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, awarded every year in Klagenfurt, bears her name.