hätt ich nicht Disteln im Herz
Reading Poetry by: Ingeborg Bachmann

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Ingeborg Bachmann © Renate von Mangoldt

Please note that the event will be held in German.

Ingeborg Bachmann (born 1926 in Klagenfurt, died 1973 in Rome) remains to this day the undisputedly most popular German-language author of the twentieth century. At most, the work of Mascha Kaléko enjoys a comparable level of popularity. Bachmann is known above all as a poet, although her prose — especially her short prose — belongs even more than the novel Malina to the very best that has been written in German since 1945.

In the 1950s she gained wider recognition through two volumes of poetry published in quick succession: Die gestundete Zeit (1953) and Anrufung des Großen Bären (1956). At the meetings of Gruppe 47 she caused quite a sensation during this period, although some touchy members accused her of “queenly airs.” Looking back, it becomes clear that not only her literature but also her personality was repeatedly subjected to a kind of “group criticism.” The question of whom she happened to be sharing a bed with stirred the passions of a gossip-hungry posterity well into the present day. Even supposedly professional assessments occasionally slipped into a misogynistic undertone. Peter Hamm, for example, saw in the posthumous poems nothing more than the expression of an “unpurified sludge of life,” and the poet Thomas Kling spoke, with reference to the famous early work, of the “mainstream kitsch of the prudish Adenauer years,” attributing to Bachmann an “artificial Snow White-ness,” even talking of a “strained wading through mixed-fruit marmalade.” Later, however — albeit with a somewhat patronizing gesture — he included her, with the admittedly rather obscure poem “Gerüche,” in his canon-aspiring Sprachspeicher-Anthologie.

All of this obscures the daring of the work itself. Bachmann came to “speak of dark things” — the title of one of her famous early poems — knew life on the side of death, and played, like Orpheus, with whom she felt a deep kinship, “death on the strings of life.” She knew the “word that sows the dragon,” wanted to write with bile “as long as it is still bitter.” And that is exactly what she did: writing about what a heart bears witness to between yesterday and tomorrow, “soundless and strange.” All her life she was restless; from Durchlaßstraße 5 in Klagenfurt she was driven out into the wide world. “The best thing / is work on the ships / that travel far,” she once wrote in “Ausfahrt,” the opening poem of Die gestundete Zeit. Paraphrasing one of her own lines, one might say she was intoxicated with wanderlust “to the very tips of her flying hair.”

The poet reveals herself in detail. Many unsettling images remain unforgettable, their origins unclear: the rain man in the dark house who fills in the lines of the ledger; the winged fir trees plunging from paradise; the extinguished light of the lupines; the blue of the sky worn raw on the girders; the dance-worn wooden floor and the buckets standing “drum-tight” in the courtyard. And who could ever forget that emblematic salamander that passes through the fire at the end of what may be Bachmann’s most beautiful poem, “Erklär mir, Liebe”: „Kein Schauer jagt ihn und es schmerzt ihn nichts.“

A joint event by Haus für Poesie and Österreichisches Kulturforum Berlin

In reading & conversation: Margret Kreidl, Caca Savic, and Teresa Präauer
Moderation: Insa Wilke