Dhe fiftieth anniversary of Ingeborg Bachmann’s death is October 17, 2023, but the race for memorial day attention has already begun. The Austrian National Library (ÖNB) has owned the author’s estate since 1978, which has been on the UNESCO list of the world’s documentary heritage for seven years. Now the ÖNB has set up “an homage” to the poet in its literature museum, also like Kerstin Putz, who curated the show together with Martin Hansel, because the homage genre plays a role in Bachmann’s work, for example in the story “Hommage to Maria Callas”. It begins with the sentence “One day I became aware of what great art is, what an artist is, when I heard the singer Maria Callas”.
So the bar is set high. A character is negotiated in whose entourage the words “myth” and “fascination” always appear. The superlative grandmaster Thomas Bernhard raised Bachmann to the highest heaven. He praised her 1964 poem “Bohemia is by the Sea” as the “most beautiful and best” ever written in that language. If you follow Elfriede Jelinek’s remarks in the film “Der Fall Bachmann” (1990), the poet had a “horror of West Germans”, precisely because of their language (“Raus!”). “You couldn’t be more Austrian than Bachmann,” says Jelinek, who only met her once and didn’t dare speak to her. Bachmann knew “that she could write perfect poems,” says Jelinek, and that’s why she stopped doing it.
Exploited as literary material
She was famous early on, at the age of twenty-eight her portrait was on the front page of Der Spiegel, two years later she sat as a model for a bust. Austria became too small for her, so she moved to Rome, to Via Bocca Leone, just a few steps from the Spanish Steps. And yet her homeland played a major role, as her brother Heinz Bachmann says in the film interview. She often returned to Carinthia to take a deep breath, literally, because the air in Rome was so bad.
Also on display is Bachmann’s hiking map of the Kreuzbergl, the local mountain of the people of Klagenfurt, with which the story “Three Ways to the Lake” from the volume “Simultan” (1972) begins. According to Heinz Bachmann, the family had always hesitated for a long time before releasing the rights to the editions of letters in order to protect the privacy of the correspondents. It’s true: whenever a volume of letters is published, waves run high. In the current case, towering high, because it is about the correspondence with the Swiss Max Frisch, fifteen years his senior, with whom Bachmann entered into an exhausting liaison. A single letter from Frisch dated June 11, 1959 is shown, in which he describes a dream to “dear Inge” that he will later use in “Mein Name sei Gantenbein”. Just as he will cannibalize what he has experienced together, as Bachmann realizes in horror, who from then on speaks of Frisch’s novel as her “blood book” and notes down every page on which she sees herself mentioned. She didn’t want to be literary material.
