We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
FROM ALLUSIVE METAPHYSICAL SILENCE TO OVERT SOCIAL CRITIQUE: THE WAR CHILD IN PROSE TEXTS BY INGEBORG BACHMANN.
- Authors
Pizer, John
- Abstract
Ingeborg Bachmann's early story Die Karawane und die Auferstehung (1949) takes place in a desert-like realm of the dead. The characters can perceive each other as they wander aimlessly, but cannot speak. Two figures are children: a girl who died of consumption, and a boy who spent his brief life in an orphanage. Key elements evoke both as war children. At the conclusion, droning bells prompt the boy to attempt telepathically to convey this ringing to the others, who cannot perceive it. Bachmann wrote this story when she was engaged with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Wittgensteinian silence reflects Bachmann's inability directly to articulate war trauma at this time. Such silence can only be transcended metaphysically. In Jugend in einer österreichischen Stadt (1959), greater temporal distance from the war's trauma freed Bachmann to portray war children with more realistic immediacy. Thus, she launched an overt critique of the Austrian patriarchy that victimised young people during the war and in the occupation period. The ironically unmentioned but clearly latent political transition in the country from Austrofascism to Nazism in the early lives of these young people marks them as distinctly Austrian war children. In the novel fragment Der Fall Franza (1966) a suicidal woman evokes her adolescent experience of the occupation period through the distorting lens of nostalgia. The article argues that Bachmann's portrayal of childhood evolved from an early, tentative evocation of redemption through a dead young war orphan enveloped in an empowering silence to a focus on the abandonment of Austrian youth during the fascist period and its immediate aftermath. Finally, in Franza, war brings about a trauma that leads to the manifestation of a woman's masochistic personality in adolescence and adulthood.
- Subjects
CHILDREN &; war in literature; BACHMANN, Ingeborg, 1926-1973; DIE Karawane und die Auferstehung (Short story); JUGEND in einer osterreichischen Stadt (Short story); DER Fall Franza (Book); DEAD in literature; NATIONAL socialism in literature; SOCIAL criticism in literature
- Publication
German Life & Letters, 2016, Vol 69, Issue 4, p537
- ISSN
0016-8777
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1111/glal.12135