In Memoriam Ingeborg Bachmann

17. October 1973: Ingeborg Bachmann dies in Rome as a result of severe burn injuries.

In Memoriam: conversation, text, film

Ingeborg Bachmann was the first of three children of elementary school teacher Matthias Bachmann (1895-1973) and his wife Olga (born Haas, 1901-1998). The father came from a farming family in the Carinthian Gailtal, where Bachmann spent important parts of her childhood. However, she graduated from primary school and the Ursulinengymnasium in Klagenfurt, where her parents had moved shortly before her birth.

ORF-ZITAT

As a child, Bachmann spent his summers in the Carinthian Gailtal, in Slovenian Ziljska dolina, in the border triangle of Austria, Slovenia and Italy. The paternal grandparents were rooted in Obervellach, they had a farm there. Bachmann returned there again and again, including with the Swiss writer Max Frisch, with whom she had a difficult relationship for several years.

After the war, Bachmann left for Vienna to study philosophy – and to become a writer. Vienna was to become her most important literary setting, not least in her first novel “Malina”, which was the prelude to her unfinished novel cycle “Todesarten”.

When asked what claim she had to her own writing, Bachmann said in an ORF interview in 1969: “Intellectual honesty. Trying not to say more than you can say. And: don’t take on yourself with pseudo-problems that you have acquired externally.”

Bachmann was not only a writer, she was above all a thinker. She studied philosophy, dissertationed on Martin Heidegger and was the epitome of a public intellectual, although she rarely expressed herself on daily politics. In 1965, however, she was actively involved in the German election campaign for Willy Brandt and the SPD, alongside Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, among others, with whom she maintained intensive correspondence, as with many other great minds of her time.