Ingeborg Bachmann - eine Chronik

Play by Sascha Hawemann

The world is vast, and the roads from country to country,

and there are many places; I have known them all,

I have seen cities from every tower,

the people who are yet to come and those who have already gone.

How does one write poetry in the wake of wars and fascists? What stories should one weave into the fabric of the times—the economic miracle and war crimes trials? How does one come to terms with one’s own family’s involvement in atrocities? Ingeborg Bachmann demanded nothing less of her work. A freelance writer and unmarried in the 1950s and 1960s—that was unusual and sensational: “Keep your distance from me, or I’ll die, or I’ll kill, or I’ll kill myself. Keep your distance, for God’s sake!” she writes in a short story. She held fast to art at all costs. Romantic relationships were also forms of artistic reverence, freedom, and longing. A life in the in-between: between building a persona as a poet and retreating into solitude at her desk, wrestling with language. 

Sascha Hawemann has been studying women poets, their work, and their lives for years. He portrays them amid historical and ideological upheavals and political utopias, examining their emotional worlds and personal relationships. Following Maxi Wander and Christa Wolf, the focus now turns to Ingeborg Bachmann. These women’s voices are the children of war, the Nazi dictatorship, and the awakening and breaking free from the patriarchal cage. Their art is feminist; their poetics are dialectical. In the form of a subjective artistic biography spanning the decades of their lives, chronicles of contemporary history emerge. To honor the memory of those who paved the way and devoted themselves unconditionally to their art and to life.

About I.B.: 

poems, stories, and sixty cigarettes a day are good for screaming

I want to give a powerful voice to the voiceless

To that end, the typewriter clatters—the pain machine (word machine)

I want to go out into life without permission

before you suffocate

you breathe yourself free

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