The Genius of Incompletion

With the publication of her first book of poetry in 1953, Ingeborg Bachmann was seen, in the German-speaking world and very quickly in Europe as a whole, to be one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria, Bachmann had a childhood scarred by Nazi control of Austria and by World War II. She studied law and philosophy and graduated from the University of Vienna in 1950.

In her poetry and fiction, Bachmann boldly confronted the Nazi contamination of the German language; as the narrator says in the story “Among Murderers and Madmen” in her first story collection, “The Thirtieth Year,” “No new world without a new language.” Constantly refusing to avoid the guilt and responsibility for what the Nazis had done in Germany and Austria, she took upon herself the task of delineating the ways in which Austrians’ lives were entangled as a result of the war: “In those days, after ‘45, I too thought that the world was divided, and forever, into good and evil, but now the world is already dividing again, and again differently. It was almost impossible to take in, it all happened so imperceptibly, now we are mixed together again so that a fresh division can be made, once more we have the minds and the deeds that have sprung from other minds, other deeds.”

Through the late 1950s she was one of the most prominent members of the famous Group 47, a socially active group of writers, and an outspoken advocate of the necessary public role of the writer as social critic and proponent of literary innovation, as well as being a peer and intimate friend of such writers as Paul Celan, Max Frisch and Uwe Johnson. By the early 1960s, Bachmann had moved from poetry to fiction, having also written two opera librettos for composer Hans Werner Henze and a number of radio plays.

With the passage of time, and because of the corrupting silence about the lingering effects of Nazism during the ‘50s and early ‘60s in Austria and Germany, Bachmann came to realize how the very fascism that had murdered millions of people was still present and might be seen as the defining characteristic of how people related to each other and, in particular, how men treated women. “Their good marriage--as they called it--was founded precisely upon the fact that he understood nothing about her body,” says Charlotte in the story “A Step Towards Gomorrah,” in which she begins to explore the possibility of a lesbian alternative. “He had certainly entered and wandered through this strange region, but he had quickly settled down where he found it most comfortable.”

But do not think that Bachmann is a dry, carping ideologue who fitted reality into a predetermined mold. Since the publication in 1961 of “The Thirtieth Year,” she has been concerned with perceiving the human condition, how individuals deal with memory and the inadequacy of language to render those memories. As Undine says in “Undine Goes”: “We stood on a station for the north, and the train left before midnight. I didn’t wave; I made a sign with my hand meaning this is the end. The end that has no end. It never came to an end. One should have no hesitation in making the sign. It isn’t a sad sign, it doesn’t put a circle of black crepe round stations and highways, less so than the deceptive wave with which so much comes to an end. Go, death, and stand still, time. Use no magic, no tears, no wringing of the hands, no vows, no entreaties. None of all that. The commandment is: leave one another, let eyes suffice for the eyes, let a green suffice, let the easiest thing suffice. Obey the law and not an emotion. Obey loneliness. Loneliness into which nobody will follow me.”

All of Bachmann’s characters are caught in “the complicated age called the present.” Yet, as Karen Achberger has written in “Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann,” all of her writing is informed by her wide reading in philosophy and psychology, and behind many of her sentences lurks the presence of among others: Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Dostoevski and Celan. As one experiences layers of literary references in books like “Moby Dick” and “Absalom, Absalom!,” the reader is always aware in Bachmann of the deep reading that has gone into her books and at the same time how this knowledge does not interfere with the reader’s pleasure. A first reading is an incitement to rereading.

The latter part of Bachmann’s life was consumed with her writing project, “Ways of Dying.” Her intention was to write a vast work of many volumes, but she was able to finish only the overture, “Malina,” before her death in a horrible apartment fire in Rome in 1973. In a preface to a public reading from parts of “Ways of Dying,” which is printed as a foreword in the new book, she stated: “The book, however, is not simply a journey through an illness. Ways of dying also includes crimes. This is a book about a crime. . . . It seeks to reveal something, to seek out something, namely something that has not disappeared from the world. For today it is infinitely more difficult to commit crimes, and thus these crimes are so subtle that we can hardly perceive or comprehend them, though all around us, in our neighborhoods, they are committed daily.

“Malina” is a magisterial and luxuriously difficult novel. Composed of many voices, of many forms and techniques, it offers itself as the story of an unnamed female narrator trying to find a voice appropriate to her true self and to describe her involvement with two men, Ivan and Malina.

As intricately woven as Joyce’s “Ulysses,” it invites readers to see the importance of every detail. For instance, the woman lives on Ungargasse, opposite Beethoven’s house. She prefers the music of Schonberg because it is a way to oppose the demoralizing power of Vienna itself and the deadening authority of Beethoven and all that he represents in the way of male authority. The narrator (and surely Bachmann herself) does know men: “Men have always fascinated me, but that’s precisely why they don’t have to be liked, in fact I didn’t like most of them, they always only fascinated me, just because of the thought: what’s he going to do once he’s finished biting my shoulder, what does he expect will happen next? Or else someone exposes his back on which, long before you, some woman once took her fingernails, her five claws, and left five stripes, forever visible, so you get completely upset or at least self-conscious, what are you supposed to do with this back, which constantly reminds you of some ecstatic moment or attack of pain, then what pain are you still supposed to feel, what ecstasy?”

Both “The Book of Franza” and “Requiem for Fanny Goldmann” were intended to be volumes in the “Ways of Dying” project but were left unfinished at the time of Bachmann’s death. One must be cautioned not to conclude, then, that these fragments are without importance for they exemplify, in George Steiner’s phrase, “the genius of incompletion.” Originally assembled by editors in Germany from many manuscript versions, the Bachmann texts have been ably translated and introduced by Peter Filkins, who has rearranged the text to make them more accessible.

In “The Book of Franza,” which takes place in the mid-1960s, Franza has fled a forced hospitalization by her psychiatrist husband. She discovered that he was studying her as if she was some sort of bug. She escapes to her childhood village in the Austrian countryside and persuades her brother to take her with him on a research trip to Egypt. The journey to Egypt and the struggle of Franza to regain her sanity is one of the most startling in literature. Even though it is incomplete, the authority of the text is overwhelming. The reader is simultaneously inside and outside of Franza’s mind as it struggles to survive the effects of the long criminal assault upon her.

There is one scene startling in its visionary power to encapsulate the horror of the Nazi camps. In Cairo, Franza has heard of a German doctor who is able to relieve pain but is not licensed to practice. When she actually gets to see him, she realizes he was a Nazi doctor in the camps and, though he admits to being in the camps, he claims not to have experimented on women. His denial causes Franza to recall the court transcripts of Nazi doctors put on trial: Nowhere did the word “forgiveness” appear, except in one instance when a witness, crying during her testimony, said “Forgive me for crying.” Despairing at this, Franza begs him to supply her with the mortal injection she knows he used on his prisoners. The doctor refuses and Franza says, “If you are afraid of trouble, then give it to me and I can do it myself. But give it to me. No one knows, no one will know. . . . But give it to me. I don’t know anyone but you whom I can go to. . . . She broke off once again. She didn’t want him to turn against her. Perhaps, it insulted his honor as a murderer or his honor as a doctor. These kind of people are all so sensitive.” It is that last line which reveals the genius and the necessity of Bachmann’s work as a visionary moralist and underscores the loss one feels at her premature death.

In “Requiem for Fanny Goldmann,” Bachmann shows what happens to an actress who was once thought to be the most beautiful woman in Vienna and whose fading beauty suggests another way of dying. The situation of Fanny Goldmann is delineated in such paragraphs as the following about her character: “She was forty-five years old, had never hurt a fly, not to mention a man, never hurt anyone or done anything, the struggle for existence having been reduced to a couple of graceful taunts and a bright laugh when someone told a story, for she only laughed because she laughed so well and never at someone’s expense,” and “It’s hard to believe, but the most beautiful women often have the most unbelievably bad luck and always with the most idiotic men.” Fanny’s marriage to an American soldier deteriorates and she has an affair with a hack writer who decides to write her story. The boredom and routine of Fanny’s world, her slide into alcoholism and illness, all suggest the truths that writers reveal often lurk behind the banal.

Bachmann’s work has long lived in a limbo on this side of the Atlantic, and it is frustrating to find so brilliant a writer overlooked by American publishers. The publication of these fragments by Northwestern University Press is a cause for celebration among Bachmann’s small community of readers. Some attention is deserved for a writer who considered herself exiled into the world. In a late poem, she wrote:

I still border on a word and on another land

I border, like little else, on everything more and more,

a Bohemian, a wandering minstrel, who has nothing, who

is held by nothing, gifted only at seeing, by a doubtful sea,

the land of my choice. *