"über Grenzen sprechen,
und gehn auch Grenzen noch durch jedes Wort"
[speak across borders, even if borders pass through every word]
―
from Ingeborg Bachmann, "Von einem Land, einem Fluß und den Seen"
[Land, River, and Lakes] (1956)
There are plenty of reasons to be interested in
Ingeborg Bachmann. She's generally regarded as one of the foremost post-war German poets. Her semi-autobiographical novel
Malina was filmed in 1991, and has even recently been turned into an opera:
Malina. Libretto by Tina Hartmann. Music by Peter Gilbert & Karola Obermueller (1986)
Since her tragic, untimely death in a fire in 1973, her progress from the disaffected daughter of a fanatical Austrian Nazi to one of the major voices of twentieth century European literature has increasingly been seen as a kind of parable for our times.
The gradual publication of further major works in German (and in English translation) - her collected poems
Darkness Spoken; her harrowing
War Diary; and her ambitious (albeit unfinished) fictional "Todesarten" [Death-arts] project - is finally revealing the full extent of her achievement.
"What is the point of all this fighting against races and nations if people don't even know each other ..." - Nelly Sachs to Paul Celan (12/5/1960)
The other poet included in this post, Nelly Sachs, earned wider recognition during her lifetime. She even shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with
S. Y. Agnon in 1966. The
committee attributed this to: "her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel's destiny with touching strength":
The fate of the Jewish people casts a dark shadow over the 20th century. It is also the basis for Nelly Sachs' literary works. Sachs borrows subjects for her poetry from the Jewish beliefs and mysticism, but her authorship is also strongly colored by Nazi persecution of the Jews, with the horrors of the death camps as its ultimate expression. Sachs' poetry combines echoes from the poetry of ancient religious texts with modernist language.
The citation goes on to explain that Nelly Sachs and her mother fled from Nazi Germany to Sweden in 1940:
Several members of Sachs' immediate family ultimately became victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi persecution left deep scars in Sachs' psyche and also influenced her writing.
Despite all these undoubtedly impressive achievements, the most obvious connection between these two poets remains their respective relationships with Romanian poet
Paul Celan.
Should it be so? Probably not. But as our culture becomes increasingly fragmented, we tend to contextualise more and more things in terms of their associations with celebrity.
Celan is a major, unignorable poet. His work has become a kind of impassable roadblock to any attempts to celebrate blindly the pinchbeck achievements of mankind: "Yes, but - there's still the little matter of those six million dead in the camps." Far more people know his name than have ever read any of his poems.
However, American poet
Charles Bernstein has pointed out that:
Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time is that we have venerated him … crippling exceptionalism has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.
Veneration isn't really good for anyone, especially a creative artist - and in the case of someone as damaged and difficult as Celan undoubtedly was, it can lead to unfair judgements and undue emphases.
Bachmann had a brief (but intense) affair with Celan in Vienna in 1948, shortly before his departure for Paris, where he lived - on and off - for the rest of his life. They remained in contact, however, and even revived their intimacy for a short time in the late 1950s.
Their collected correspondence makes difficult reading. Bachmann's honesty and openness contrast painfully with Celan's increasingly paranoid suspicions of anyone who wouldn't unquestioningly endorse his condemnations of the (allegedly) ex-Nazi-riddled German literary establishment.
No matter how often Bachmann backed him and supported him in these ongoing controversies, it was never quite enough.
However, while some of his accusations may have been unfounded, there's little doubt that there
was a good deal of residual anti-semitism among German critics and publishers at the time. Nor was he wrong in thinking that the so-called "Goll affair" - where the widow of a German-French poet claimed (falsely) that Celan had plagiarised her husband's work - was used as an excuse for denying him certain forms of advancement.
Bachmann's own great turmoils and difficulties through the years always had to take a back seat to Celan's difficulties, though. There was, finally, little she could do to help, but she certainly tried her best.
The correspondence between Celan and Nelly Sachs is rather different. For a start, she was thirty years older than him, and the two only managed to meet on a couple of occasions. They exchanged greetings, and poems, and attempted to comfort each other in the midst of their various psychological traumas and hospitalisations.
Sachs's fragile mental health meant that she was in and out of such institutions for much of the 1960s, and her strongly held belief that Nazis were spying on her through the walls of her apartment in Stockholm occasionally leaks over into her otherwise upbeat telegrams and postcards.
Celan was more reserved with her, but his letters make it clear that he did try to help her at such moments of stress, despite his not dissimilar travails. There is, however, a very revealing passage in his correspondence with his wife Gisèle, where he concludes a long rambling verse lament about his various troubles as follows:
from im Jänner 65
Ehemalige Hitlerjungen
halfen ihm aus seinen Erlebnissen heraus
und hängten sie derjenigen über,
die sie nich gehabt hatte
and sich willig ins neue Konzept
der Ehemaligen fügte.
Von der Ehemaligen gnaden
wurde sie zur
schlechthinnigen Jüdin.
Man nannte sie königlich - wovon
war ihr Purpur rot?
"Mag sein", verkündete sie,
"daß das Schicksal meines Volkes
an mir leuchtet."
Mag sein.
Doch wie?
Aber das
aus ihr selber Leuchtende
töteten sie.
Wer und was
trieb Nelly Sachs in den Wahnsinn?
Wer
brachte ihr
Verrat und Vermessenheit bei?
In Stockholm hört ich sie sagen:
"Die in Auschwitz
litten nicht das, was ich leide."
Das hörten auch andre, darunter
Lenke Rothamnn.
Wer förderte das? Und welche Schuld
tobte dahinter?
...
- Paul Celan (1965)
•
from in January '65
... Veterans of the Hitler Youth
helped strip him of his history
and pin it on one
who had never experienced it
and who, complacently,
acquiesced in the plans
of these old enemies.
Under their auspices she became
the paragon of Jewishness.
They christened her Queen – whence
the red in her purple?
It’s possible, she proclaimed
That the destiny of my people
shines out from me.
Possible, yes.
But does it?
As for the light
that shone from her already
they put it out.
Who and what
drove Nelly Sachs to madness?
Who
pushed her
to such megalomaniac delusions?
In Stockholm, I heard her say
The people in Auschwitz
Didn’t suffer what I do.
Others heard that, too
(Lenke Rohmann among them).
Who was guilty of that?
What shame
must hang around that head?
...
[from
Celanie (2012)]
- Trans. JR (27/1-12/8/11)
It's hard not to hear in Celan's verse letter a certain resentment of one who, despite never having seen - let alone lived in - one of the camps, had somehow been dubbed "the paragon of Jewishness", and had received the Nobel Prize on that basis.
•
So what's my point? Certainly I have no desire to relitigate any of these ancient literary spats and private jealousies. What I'd prefer would be to try to consider Nelly Sachs and Ingeborg Bachmann in their own right, without reference to this one friendship amongst all the other significant connections in their lives.
We may be obsessed with Paul Celan - I would certainly have to plead guilty to that - but it's doubtful that
they were. Bachmann also had relationships with
Max Frisch and the German composer
Hans Werner Henze, both of whom were at least as important to her as Celan. The vitality and the continuing importance of her work lies in her own painful personal journey through post-war Austria, Germany and Italy.
Nelly Sachs published her first book of
Legends and Stories in 1921, a few months after Paul Celan's birth. She first wrote to him in 1954, presumably in response to the gift of a copy of his 1952 book
Mohn und Gedächtnis [Poppies and Memory], and thereafter sent him poems and greetings on a semi-regular basis. She stayed with the Celans in Paris for a few days on one occasion, but beyond that her life in Stockholm seldom intersected with his. Her verse is softer, less linguistically challenging than his - as befits her antecedents in pre-war Germany - but she too attempted to "modernise" in response to the overwhelming pressures of the Second World War.
With that in mind, let's start our discussion with perhaps her most famous poem, from the crucial 1947 collection
In den Wohnungen des Todes [In the Death-Houses]:
O die Schornsteine
Und wenn diese meine Haut zerschlagen sein wird,
so werde ich ohne mein Fleisch Gott schauen.
- Hiob [Kap. 19, V. 26]
O die Schornsteine
Auf den sinnreich erdachten Wohnungen des Todes,
Als Israels Leib zog aufgelöst in Rauch
Durch die Luft –
Als Essenkehrer ihn ein Stern empfing
Der schwarz wurde
Oder war es ein Sonnenstrahl?
O die Schornsteine
Freiheitswege für Jeremias und Hiobs Staub –
Wer erdachte euch und baute Stein auf Stein
Den Weg für Flüchtlinge aus Rauch?
O die Wohnungen des Todes,
Einladend hergerichtet
Für den Wirt des Hauses, der sonst Gast war –
O ihr Finger,
Die Eingangsschwelle legend
Wie ein Messer zwischen Leben und Tod –
O ihr Schornsteine,
O ihr Finger
Und Israels Leib im Rauch durch die Luft!
- Nelly Sachs (1946)
•
Though this my skin has been destroyed
yet in my flesh shall I see God
- Job 19: 26.
The chimneys
on the cunningly planned death-houses
when Israel’s body drifted off
as smoke
when the stars turned black
brushing it up like a chimney sweep
or sunstroke
chimneys
paths of liberty for the dust of Jeremiah and Job
who plotted you and built stone upon stone
this way of escape for fugitives made of smoke?
the death-houses
invitingly prepared
for the master of the house a guest once
your fingers
laying the threshold
like a knife between life and death
your chimneys
your fingers
and Israel’s body in the drifting smoke
- Trans. JR (11-19/10/2026)
•
If it weren't for the fact that this poem was written in 1946 and published in 1947, you'd almost certainly posit in it the influence of Paul Celan's "
Todesfuge", first printed in Rumanian translation in 1947, and then in its original German in 1948.
No, Nelly Sachs's "Chimneys" are all her own. And the apparent simplicity of her words is belied by the complex patterns of imagery within the poem. The death-houses are "cunningly planned", but also (paradoxically) paths of liberty.
In Celan's poem, "
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland" [Death is a Master from Germany]. In Sachs's poem, the "
Wirt des Hauses, der sonst Gast war" [Master of the house, who was once a guest] is the inhabitant rather than the designer of these death-houses. It is (presumably) that
designer's fingers which laid the threshold "like a knife between life and death."
Dust, ashes, smoke - this imagery drifts inexorably through her poems as it once did through the skies of Europe. In his introduction to her
Selected Poems (1967), Hans Magnus Enzenberger emphasises the "terrible exactness and concreteness" with which she uses them to signal "the crematory ovens of the German concentration camps":
This is the beginning that is asserted throughout all transformations of dust, which is never forgotten and is always part of the thought ... Dust is also the sand in the hourglass; it becomes the image of transitoriness as such. Not human kind alone, the whole earth is dust, and all creatures with it; dust in which life leaves its impression, its sign, its incription as a trace ...
The variations on this image culminate in the late sequence
Fahrt ins Staublose [Journey into the Dustless Realm], which she also used as the title of the first collected edition of her poems in 1961.
Die Ertrunkene [A. N.]
Immer suchtest du die Perle, am Tage deiner Geburt verloren.
Das Beseßne suchtest du, Musik der Nacht in den Ohren.
Meerumspülte Seele, Taucherin du, bis zum Grunde.
Fische, die Engel der Tiefe, leuchten im Licht deiner Wunde.
- Nelly Sachs (c.1943-46)
•
you always looked for that pearl lost on your birthday
looked for the talisman night-music in your ears
soul washed by the sea diver in the depths
fish like angels shine in the light of your wound
- Trans. JR (11-12/10/2026)
•
Nelly Sachs's poem-cycle
Grabschriften in die Luft geschrieben [Epitaphs Written in the Air] was written in the last half of the war, when news of the camps was beginning to circulate even in neutral Sweden.
The composer
Stefano Gervasoni, who composed a song-cyle based around them in 2017-2018, explains that they consist of:
thirty-three epitaphs written by Nelly Sachs, from 1943 to 1946, dedicated to real people who went missing as a result of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Fifteen of these poetic works were discovered only after [the poet’s] death, and were published posthumously in 2010.
The subjects of the poems are identifed only by their initials - "A. N." in the case of the poem translated above - perhaps to avoid complications with their surviving families, but no doubt also to emphasise the collective nature of each of these records of individual suffering.
The poems have certainly lost none of their resonance over the years, in fact they might be said to be closer to finding their true audience now, in our present century of genocidal massacres and disappearances.
Nur im Schlaf
Nur im Schlaf haben Sterne Herzen
und Münder.
Ebbe- und Flut-Atem
üben mit den Seelen
die letzte Vorbereitung.
Und die Felsen, die aus dem Nassen steigen,
die schweren Albgesichter,
sind doch
vom Stemmeisen der Sehnsucht durchbohrte
brennende Walfische −
Wie aber wird Liebe sein
am Ende der Nächte,
bei den durchsichtig gewordenen Gestirnen?
Denn Erz kann nicht mehr Erz sein,
wo Selige sind −
- Nelly Sachs (1959)
•
Only in sleep do stars have hearts
and mouths
breathing their ebb and flow
practicing the last rites
for souls
and the rocks that rise from the water
those heavy nightmare faces
are after all
leviathans
scorched by longing
but what will love be like
at the end of the night
under transparent stars?
gold cannot still be gold
where the blessed dwell
Trans. JR (11/10/2026)
•
Das war der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk
[That was the wonderful mine of souls]
Again, the apparent simplicity of Sachs' poem masks a complicated web of imagery ostensibly describing the next world, but actually (as usual) talking about ours. Are these sentient stars, with their literal "hearts and mouths", acting as guides for our souls; or is it their own, stellar souls they're preparing for this
Flucht und Verwandlung [Flight and Metamorphosis]? That is, after all, the title of the collection this piece appears in.
The
Babel Web translation, by "Sommer, Catterel and Catherine", equates the stars themselves with the souls that are being prepared, but that isn't entirely clear in the German text. It seems equally possible that the stars and the rock-leviathans are - respectively - helpers and obstacles to the progress of these souls, which presumably belong to the sleepers: ourselves.
More to the point, we're able to conceptualise stars, and rocks, and whales, but how can we visualise a realm where stars are transparent and gold is no longer golden? How, in effect, can we imagine a heaven which isn't a mirror-image of earth? Certainly not in this waking world.
Nelly Sachs' mysticism is always reined in by her sense of the concreteness of the world around us. She may not have wished it so: transcendence may well have been her desire, but - like Rainer Maria Rilke - her speculations are bounded by the miraculous "Bergwerk" [mine, quarry, underground?] of the earth we're condemned (or blessed) to live on.
It's worth remembering, too, in this connection, that it was she who first used the vital term "meridian" in a letter to Paul Celan:
"Lieber Paul Celan wir wollen uns weiter einander die Wahrheit hinüberreichen. Zwischen Paris und Stockholm läuft der Meridian des Schmerzes und des Trostes."
[Dear Paul Celan, let us continue to pass truth over to each other. Between Paris and Stockholm runs the meridian of pain and consolation.]
- Nelly Sachs to Paul Celan (28/10/1959)
This geographical term became the central metaphor in the speech Celan wrote for his 1960 acceptance of the Georg Büchner Prize for Literature, subsequently published as "Der Meridian" and - in a fuller version - as
The Meridian: Final Version - Drafts - Materials in 1999. It's been described (by the publishers of the 2011 English translation) as:
one of, if not the most important poetological statement of the second half of the twentieth century. Much more than a personal statement or occasional piece, it is a meditation on the state of poetry and art in general and a rigorous attempt to account for what poetry is, can, and must be after the Holocaust.
Ingeborg Bachmann was born in the Austrian state of Carinthia in 1926. Her father:
Matthias Bachmann, a schoolteacher ... was an early member of the Austrian National Socialist Party ...
She studied philosophy, psychology, German philology, and law at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. In 1949, she received her PhD from the University of Vienna with her dissertation titled "The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy of Martin Heidegger" ... [expressing] her growing disillusionment with Heidegger ...
After graduating, Bachmann worked as a scriptwriter and editor at the Allied radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot [Red-White-Red]... Her literary career was enhanced by contact with ... the literary circle known as Gruppe 47, whose members also included Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Günter Grass.
In 1953, she moved to ... Italy, where she spent the large part of the following years working on poems, essays and short stories as well as opera libretti in collaboration with Hans Werner Henze, which soon brought with them international fame and numerous awards.
During her lifetime, Bachmann was known mostly for her two collections of poetry, Die gestundete Zeit [Time Deferred - or Borrowed Time] (1953) and Anrufung des Grossen Bären [Invocation of the Great Bear - or Ursa Major] (1956).
During her later years she suffered from alcoholism and from an addiction to [prescription] medication ...
On the night of 25 September 1973, her nightgown caught fire and she was taken to the Sant'Eugenio Hospital at 7:05 A.M. the following morning for treatment of second and third degree burns. Local police concluded that the fire was caused by a cigarette. During her stay, she experienced withdrawal symptoms from barbiturate substance abuse, though the doctors treating her were not aware of the cause. This may have contributed to her subsequent death on 17 October 1973.
Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina (1971)
Was Bachmann trying to commit suicide, like her friend Paul Celan? There's no real reason to suppose so, but clearly she was in a desperate state at the time of her death. A friend described it as follows:
I was deeply shocked by the magnitude of her tablet addiction. It must have been 100 per day, the bin was full of empty boxes. She looked bad, she was waxlike and pale. And her whole body was covered in bruises. I wondered what could have caused them. Then, when I saw how she slipped her Gauloise that she smoked and let it burn off on her arm, I realized: burns caused by falling cigarettes. The numerous tablets had made her body insensible to pain.
"Insensible to pain" - that's an interesting phrase to apply to Bachmann. The story of her life, from her childhood onwards, was a succession of disillusionments by apparently authoritative male figures. First, there was her father, the enthusiastic Nazi; after him, there was Heidegger, an early supporter and unrepentant collaborator with the Third Reich; then her two difficult lovers, Paul Celan and Max Frisch.
Probably her only really successful relationship was with the openly gay composer Hans Werner Henze. They only lived together briefly, in Italy in the early 1950s, but their artistic parnership was probably the most fulfilling of her life.
•
Ingeborg Bachmann: War Diary (2010)
Every Day
Alle Tage
Der Krieg wird nicht mehr erklärt,
sondern fortgesetzt. Das Unerhörte
ist alltäglich geworden. Der Held
bleibt den Kämpfen fern. Der Schwache
ist in die Feuerzonen gerückt.
Die Uniform des Tages ist die Geduld,
die Auszeichnung der armselige Stern
der Hoffnung über dem Herzen.
Er wird verliehen,
wenn nichts mehr geschieht,
wenn das Trommelfeuer verstummt,
wenn der Feind unsichtbar geworden ist
und der Schatten ewiger Rüstung
den Himmel bedeckt.
Er wird verliehen
für die Flucht von den Fahnen,
für die Tapferkeit vor dem Freund,
für den Verrat unwürdiger Geheimnisse
und die Nichtachtung
jeglichen Befehls.
- Ingeborg Bachmann (1953)
•
War is no longer declared
just marches on the unheard-of
is the everyday heroes
hang back from the fighting the weak
prop up the firing line
today’s uniform is patience
our medal a star of hope
in the heart
it’s awarded
when nothing is happening
when the guns fall silent
when the enemy’s invisible
and the shadows of bombers
block out the whole sky
it’s awarded
for deserting the colours
for courage in the face of a friend
for the betrayal of fake secrets
and disobedience
to every command
- trans. JR (10-15/10/2026)
•
This is probably Bachmann's best-known poem. You can see at once how it must have appealed to the post-war generation, sick of the unquestioning obedience of their deluded elders. There was a straightforward shift in orientation from belief in officialdom to instinctive distrust of any and every position they held.
This process is documented even more powerfully in her recently published
War Diary:
... not a day-by-day journal but a series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entries ... reveal the eighteen-year-old’s hatred of both war and Nazism as she avoids the fanatics’ determination to “defend Klagenfurt to the last man and the last woman.”
The diary also records her relationship with Jack Hamesh, "a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in 1938", and who had now returned with the Allied occupying forces. An instinctive rebel, Bachmann reveals here the disenchantedly analytical nature of her intelligence - the signature note of her creative (and critical) work early and late.
Die gestundete Zeit
Es kommen härtere Tage.
Die auf Widerruf gestundete Zeit
wird sichtbar am Horizont.
Bald mußt du den Schuh schnüren
und die Hunde zurückjagen in die Marschhöfe.
Denn die Eingeweide der Fische
sind kalt geworden im Wind.
Ärmlich brennt das Licht der Lupinen.
Dein Blick spurt im Nebel:
die auf Widerruf gestundete Zeit
wird sichtbar am Horizont.
Drüben versinkt dir die Geliebte im Sand,
er steigt um ihr wehendes Haar,
er fällt ihr ins Wort,
er befiehlt ihr zu schweigen,
er findet sie sterblich
und willig dem Abschied
nach jeder Umarmung.
Sieh dich nicht um.
Schnür deinen Schuh.
Jag die Hunde zurück.
Wirf die Fische ins Meer.
Lösch die Lupinen!
Es kommen härtere Tage.
- Ingeborg Bachmann (1953)
•
Harder days are coming
our borrowed time up for review
looms on the horizon
soon you must lace your boots
and whip the dogs back to their cages
the fish-guts have cooled down
in the bitter wind
the bright blooms are fading
you can see a faint path through the mist
time granted a stay of execution
looms on the horizon
look over there at your beloved
caught in quicksand
it’s rising above her head
cutting her off mid-sentence
choking her voice
it shows she's mortal
ready to be discarded
after each hug
don’t look back
lace your boots
chain up the dogs
toss out the fish
trample those flowers
harder days are coming
- trans. JR (10-15/10/2026)
•
This poem, the title piece from her first collection, sounds an even darker note of impending doom. There's something incantatory about her early style: reminiscent as much of Auden as of Brecht.
Peter Filkins has pointed out in the notes to his own translation that "der Sand" is masculine in German - underlying the nature of the "quicksand" swallowing up the protagonist's "Geliebte" [Beloved] as they prepare to set off.
Betrayal is everywhere in these first poems of Bachmann's. Betrayal why, and by whom, seems less important than the accompanying atmosphere of disaster. Once again, this would have been an immediately comprehensible stance to her younger readers.
Herbstmanöver
Ich sage nicht: das war gestern. Mit wertlosem
Sommergeld in den Taschen liegen wir wieder
auf der Spreu des Hohns, im Herbstmanöver der Zeit.
Und der Fluchtweg nach Süden kommt uns nicht,
wie den Vögeln, zustatten. Vorüber, am Abend,
ziehen Fischkutter und Gondeln, und manchmal
trifft mich ein Splitter traumsatten Marmors,
wo ich verwundbar bin, durch Schönheit, im Aug.
In den Zeitungen lese ich viel von der Kälte
und ihren Folgen, von Törichten und Toten,
von Vertriebenen, Mördern und Myriaden
von Eisschollen, aber wenig, was mir behagt.
Warum auch? Vor dem Bettler, der mittags kommt,
schlag ich die Tür zu, denn es ist Frieden
und man kann sich den Anblick ersparen, aber nicht
im Regen das freudlose Sterben der Blätter.
Laßt uns eine Reise tun! Laßt uns unter Zypressen
oder auch unter Palmen oder in den Orangenhainen
zu verbilligten Preisen Sonnenuntergänge sehen,
die nicht ihresgleichen haben! Laßt uns die
unbeantworteten Briefe an das Gestern vergessen!
Die Zeit tut Wunder. Kommt sie uns aber unrecht,
mit dem Pochen der Schuld: wir sind nicht zu Hause.
Im Keller des Herzens, schlaflos, finde ich mich wieder
auf der Spreu des Hohns, im Herbstmanöver der Zeit.
- Ingeborg Bachmann (1953)
•
I can’t say that was yesterday we lie
summer scrip in our pockets life’s
laughing stocks in the autumn manoeuvres of time
migrating south like the birds
won’t help us fishing smacks and gondolas
drift past all evening sometimes
a splinter of marble strikes me
where I’m most vulnerable in my blind eye
in the newspaper I read about the cold
and its consequences of fools and corpses
of displaced persons murderers and
ice floes little to please me
why should it? I slam the door
on the beggar who comes daily there’s peace
once more and we can spare ourselves
though not when it rains those dying leaves
let’s go on a trip let’s watch a sunset
under cypresses or palms or orange trees
at a super-bargain prices
unequalled sunsets let’s forget
those unanswered letters written
yesterday time works wonders and if
it sneaks in to guilt us we’re not at home
in the cellar of the heart insomniac
laughing stocks in the autumn manoeuvres of time
- trans. JR (10-13/10/2026)
•
I'd like to complete this hat-trick of pieces selected from Bachmann's first book with this, one of her most ambitious (and allusive) poems.
The escape to Italy from Germany which she embarked on in that year, 1953, is seen here as essentially futile even before it's begun. No matter how many package tours you book, or sunsets you marvel at, the truths of the past cannot be evaded so easily. These "autumn manoeuvres" lead not to forgetfulness but to endless reminders of the horrors which keep on coming to light.
It's hard not to see in this "
Herbstmanöver" a conscious echo of Rilke's famous lyric "
Herbsttag" [Autumn Day] (1902):
Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.
Command the lingering fruits to ripen:
Grant them two southerly days yet
Then drive them to fulfilment and compel
The final sweetness in the heavy wine.
Those "lingering fruits" match up quite nicely with Bachmann's "cypresses or palms or orange trees", in
Goethe's "land where the citrus trees bloom". But even more to the point is the poem's ending:
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Whoso no house has, will not build it now.
Whoso’s alone, long will remain that way:
walk, read a little, tap-tap every day
long letters – wander listlessly
fall alleys, where the dead leaves stray.
- trans.
J. R. (15/10/97)
The aimlessness of these last lines may have helped to inspire the "unanswered letters" in Bachmann's final stanza - not to mention the "dying leaves" which threaten to disrail any sense of relief in the fact that "there’s peace / once more and we can spare ourselves / though not when it rains".
It's fascinating to watch these two poets communicating over the half century dividing their poems. Rilke's
fin-de-siècle Weltschmerz metamorphoses easily into the existential despair of those who grew up during the Second World War, impotent witnesses to W. G. Sebald's
Natural History of Destruction:
Hôtel de la Paix
Die Rosenlast stürzt lautlos von den Wänden,
und durch den Teppich scheinen Grund und Boden.
Das Lichtherz bricht der Lampe.
Dunkel. Schritte.
Der Riegel hat sich vor den Tod geschoben.
- Ingeborg Bachmann (c. 1956)
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The weight of roses muffles the walls
bare earth breaks through the carpet
the lightbulb shatters in the lamp
darkness footsteps
bolt the door to shut out death
- trans. JR (10-13/10/2026)
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Bachmann continued to write poetry all her life, but she didn't publish any further books after
Invocation of the Great Bear in 1956. This poem, "Hôtel de la Paix", was probably written shortly after that date. Peter Filkins informs us that:
This is the name of a hotel in Paris where Bachmann lived in the fall of 1956 during an extended illness.
It seems like an appropriate coda to this brief sampling from her work. She's certainly a poet who needs to be read in depth, but I think it's also fair to say that the character of her work is evident even in these few short pieces.
It's not that Bachmann is a poet of despair, but she's certainly a writer who's always conscious of her responsiblity to her readers to tell the truth - as she sees it. We might dispute certain of her emphases and hobby-horses, but there's no doubt of her basic honesty as a witness.
I think that's why she seems so particularly relevant to our times. Any illusions that we may have had about the advancement of mankind - the impossiblity of further, casual genocides taking place right in front of our eyes, for instance - have long since gone by the board.
Bachmann would have expected little else. The joy in her work always needs to be earned. There's no point, as she sees it, in bolting the door "to shut out death" when death is already lying there in bed beside us.
Books I own are marked in bold:
Poetry:
- Die gestundete Zeit [Borrowed Time] (1953)
- Anrufung des Grossen Bären [Invocation of the Great Bear] (1956)
- In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems. Trans. Mark Anderson (1986)
- Ich weiß keine bessere Welt: Unveröffentlichte Gedichte [I know no better world: Unpublished Poems](2000)
- Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. Trans. Peter Filkins (2006)
- Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems. 1953, 1956, 1978 & 2000. Trans. Peter Filkins. Foreword by Charles Simic. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2006.
Radio plays:
- Ein Geschäft mit Träumen [A business built on dreams] (1952)
- Die Zikaden [The Cicadas] (1955)
- Der gute Gott von Manhattan [The Good God of Manhattan] (1958)
- Die Radiofamilie (2011)
- The Radio Family. Trans. Mike Mitchell (2014)
Libretti:
- Der Prinz von Homburg [The Prince of Homburg]. Music by Hans Werner Henze (1960)
- Der junge Lord [The Young Lord]. Music by Hans Werner Henze (1965)
Fiction:
Novels
- Das Honditschkreuz (1944)
- The Honditsch Cross. Trans. Tess Lewis (2025)
- Malina (1971)
- Malina. Trans. Philip Boehm (1990 / rev. 2019)
- Der Fall Franza / Requiem für Fanny Goldmann (1979)
- The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. Trans. Peter Filkins (2010)
- "Todesarten"-Projekt. Ed. Monika Albrecht & Dirk Göttsche (1995)
- Todesarten, Ein Ort für Zufalle, Wüstenbuch, Requiem für Fanny Goldmann, Goldmann/Rottwitz-Roman und andere Texte
- Das Buch Franza
- Malina (2 vols)
- Der "Simultan"-Band und andere späte Erzählungen
- Das Buch Goldmann. Ed. Marie Luise Wandruszka (2022)
Short stories
- Das dreißigste Jahr (1961)
- The Thirtieth Year. Trans. Michael Bullock (1964)
- Simultan [Simultaneously] (1972)
- Three Paths to the Lake. Trans. Mary Fran Gilbert (1989)
- The Complete Stories. Trans. Philip Boehm & Tess Lewis (2026)
Prose:
- Ein Ort für Zufälle [A Place for Coincidences]. Illustrated by Günter Grass (1965)
- Frankfurter Vorlesungen: Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung. 1959-60 [Frankfurt Lectures: Problems of Contemporary Poetry] (1980)
- Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar: Essays, Reden, Kleinere Schriften [Truth is Bearable for Mankind] (1981)
- Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden. Gespräche und Interviews: 1953-1973. [We Need to Find True Things]. Ed. Christine Koschel & Inge von Weidenbaum (1983)
- Die kritische Aufnahme der Existentialphilosophie Martin Heideggers [Doctoral Dissertation]. 1949. [The Critical Reception of Martin Heidegger's Existential Philosophy]. Ed. Robert Pichl & Friedrich Wallner (1985)
- The Critical Writings of Ingeborg Bachmann. Ed. & trans. Karen R. Achberger & Karl Ivan Solibakke (2021)
Works:
- Gedichte, Erzählungen, Hörspiel, Essays (1964)
- Werke. 4 vols. Ed. Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, & Clemens Münster (1978)
Letters:
- Briefe an Felician. Ed. Peter Bischof (1991)
- Letters to Felician. Trans. Damion Searls (2004)
- [with Hans Werner Henze] Briefe einer Freundschaft. Ed. Hans Höller (2004)
- [with Paul Celan, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, & Max Frisch] Herzzeit : Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, der Briefwechsel : mit den Briefwechseln zwischen Paul Celan und Max Frisch sowie zwischen Ingeborg Bachmann und Gisele Celan-Lestrange. Ed. Bertrand Badiou (2008)
- [with Paul Celan, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, & Max Frisch]. Correspondence: With the Correspondence between Paul Celan and Max Frisch, and between Ingeborg Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Ed. Bertrand Badiou, Hans Höller, Andrea Stoll & Barbara Weidemann. 2008. Trans. Wieland Hoban. The German List. London: Seagull Books, 2010.
- [with Jack Hamesh] Kriegstagebuch : mit Briefen von Jack Hamesh an Ingeborg Bachmann. Ed. Hans Höller (2010)
- [with Jack Hamesh] War diary : with letters from Jack Hamesh. Ed. Hans Höller. Trans. Mike Mitchell (2011)
- "Male oscuro" : Aufzeichnungen aus der Zeit der Krankheit : Traumnotate, Briefe, Brief- und Redeentwürfe. Ed. Isolde Schiffermüller & Gabriella Pelloni (2017)
- [with Max Frisch] »Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht.« der Briefwechsel : mit Briefen von Verwandten, Freunden und Bekannten. Ed. Hans Höller, Renate Langer, Thomas Strässle, Thomas, & Barbara Wiedemann (2022)
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Nelly Sachs (1891-1970)
Leonie [Nelly] Sachs
(1891-1970)
Books I own are marked in bold:
Poetry:
- In den Wohnungen des Todes [In the Houses of Death] (1947)
- Sternverdunkelung [Eclipse of Stars] (1949)
- Und niemand weiss weiter [And No One Knows Where to Go] (1957)
- Flucht und Verwandlung [Flight and Metamorphosis] (1959)
- Flight and Metamorphosis. Trans. Joshua Weiner with Linda B. Parshall (2022)
- Fahrt ins Staublose: Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs 1 [Journey into the Dustless Realm] (1961)
- Zeichen im Sand [Signs in the Sand] (1962)
- O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli. Trans. Michael Hamburger et al. (1967)
- Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli. Trans. Michael Hamburger, Christopher Holme, Ruth & Matthew Mead, and Michael Roloff. Introduction by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. 1967. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
- The Seeker and Other Poems. Trans. Ruth Mead, Matthew Mead, & Michael Hamburger (1970)
- Suche nach Lebenden: Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs 2 [Search for the Living] (1971)
- Collected Poems I, 1944–1949: Bilingual Edition. Trans. Michael Hamburger, Ruth & Matthew Mead, & Michael Roloff. Introduction by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (2007)
- Glowing Enigmas. Trans. Michael Hamburger (2013)
Stories:
- Legenden und Erzählungen [Legends and Tales] (1921)
Drama:
- Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels [Eli: A Mystery Play of the Suffering of Israel] (1950)
- Included in: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli. Trans. Michael Hamburger, Christopher Holme, Ruth & Matthew Mead, & Michael Roloff. Introduction by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. 1967. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
Letters:
- Briefe der Nelly Sachs. Ed. Ruth Dinesen & Helmut Müssener (1984)
- [with Paul Celan] Briefwechsel. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann (1993)
- [with Paul Celan] Correspondence. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann. 1993. Trans. Christopher Clark. Introduction by John Felstiner. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995.
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