3 - Challenging Masculine Subjectivity: Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina

Summary

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 1971, the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina has come to be regarded as a classic, perhaps even the classic representation of the problematics of gender identity and gender relations in post-Holocaust German-language literature. This formally highly innovative novel (if it can be called a novel at all) presents the story of a female character Ich, who inhabits the continuous present of heute (today). Ich's existence is played out in the tension between two male characters, her lover, Ivan, and the enigmatic Malina with whom she shares her apartment. Appearing at first to be Ich's husband or partner, Malina emerges as the narrative progresses with ever-greater clarity as her male double or complement. The text is structured in three chapters, preceded by a scene-setting prologue. The first chapter, “Glücklich mit Ivan” (Happy with Ivan), focuses on the relationship between Ich and Ivan, and also gradually constructs a profile of Ich, a renowned writer living in Vienna, in her daily life of letter-writing and magazine interviews and creative composition. The third, “Von letzten Dingen” (Of Last Things), chronicles the changing relationship of the female-male pair Ich and Malina as the love affair with Ivan fades and Ich is gradually eliminated as a character position. In between, and anticipating the trajectory of the third chapter, there is a chapter of nightmares, “Der dritte Mann” (The Third Man), revealing Ich in a symbiotic relationship of violation and victimhood with a figure identified in her dreams as her “father” and at the end of the chapter as her “murderer.”