9 - “Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk”: The Appeal to Gaspara Stampa in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten

Summary

[…] ein Konvolut aus Gestammel und Geheul, aus Hilfe- und Racherufen, Wahn- und Todesfantasien, kurz: der ungereinigte Lebensschlamm.

— Peter Hamm, Die Zeit, October 2000

[a bundle of stammers and howls, of calls for help and revenge, fantasies of death and delirium, in short, impure biographical muck.]

PETER HAMM’s RESPONSE SET THE TONE for many reviews of Ich weiß keine bessere Welt (I Know of No Better World). Published as a collection in 2000, these poetic drafts were written by Ingeborg Bachmann during a period of personal crisis that followed the breakdown of her relationship with Max Frisch in 1962 and his publication of the semi-autobiographical Mein Name sei Gantenbein (Gantenbein: A Novel) in 1964. Bachmann identified aspects of her own person in the female protagonist of this novel and felt its appropriation of her intimate experience as a kind of murder. References to death recur throughout Bachmann’s drafts, in which a female speaker evokes the destructiveness of pain, loss, and betrayal. As Hans Höller highlights in his published response to Hamm, such widespread condemnation of the drafts stems from a refusal to acknowledge the significance of their preoccupation with immediate suffering. Höller underlines Bachmann’s late concern with an alternative authorship that sublimates personal crisis through artistic creation. An examination of the poetic drafts reveals many correspondences with Bachmann’s contemporaneous Todesarten (Manners of Death) prose work, the novel cycle that she had begun in the early 1960s, the composition of which took up the last decade of her life. Bachmann intended this cycle to lay bare those intimate abuses and deathly drives repressed and censored in postwar society:

Die Todesarten wollen die Fortsetzung sein, in einer Gesellschaft, die sich die Hände in Unschuld wäscht und nur keine Möglichkeit hat, Blut fließen zu lassen, zu foltern, zu vergasen. Aber die Menschen, die sind nicht so, nicht plötzlich zu Lämmern und Entrüsteten geworden. Unsere Literatur möchte kühn sein, auf Kosten der Vergangenheit, aber ich habe herausgefunden, daß sie unbewußt einer Täuschung unterliegt. Daß sie, ohne es zu wissen, verheimlicht, welche Dramen sich abspielen, welche Arten von Mord.

[Manners of Death are intended as a continuation, in a society that protests its own innocence and merely lacks the opportunity to shed blood, to torture, or to gas.