Literature & Film: Women Empowerment MALINA

Ingeborg Bachmann © Bild: Heinz Bachmann

At the age of eleven, Ingeborg Bachmann experienced the invasion of Hitler’s troops in her hometown of Klagenfurt. She never overcame the trauma of her abruptly lost childhood. Throughout her life, she wrote with powerful poetry for a better society and against the oppression of the individual. She was as uncompromising in love and in the search for happiness as she was in her writing. Two years before her death, she published Malina, a strongly autobiographical book. On the surface, the novel is about a triangular relationship between the unnamed narrator and two men: the beautiful lover Ivan and her partner Malina. Ivan, however, cannot ultimately withstand their love, the narrator despairs, and neither literature nor Malina can save her; the world of men is fatal to her.

“For the men are different from each other, and actually one should see in each one an incurable clinical case (…). The most that could be said of women is that they are more or less marked by the contagions they contract, by a sympathy with the suffering.” (p. 282 f.)

Irmi Horn