5 - “How much home does a person need?”: Ingeborg Bachmann's “Drei Wege zum See”

Summary

Es gibt kein Land Österreich, das hat es nie gegeben. Und was wir heute so nennen, trägt seinen Namen, weil es in irgendwelchen Verträgen so beschlossen wurde. Aber der wirkliche Name war immer “Haus Österreich.” Ich komme aus dieser Welt, obwohl ich geboren wurde, als Österreich schon nicht mehr existierte. Doch unterirdische Querverbindungen gelten für mich immer noch, und die geistige Formation hat mir dieses Land, das keines ist, gegeben.

— Ingeborg Bachmann, conversation with Veit Mölter, 13 March 1971

“Dieses Land, das keines ist”: The Search for a Home in an Amputated State

JEAN AMÉRY'S QUESTION, which serves as the main title of this chapter, is of great relevance to this study. Roth's concerns with homelessness and exile set against the fall of the monarchy are wholly understandable in the context of his own uprooted life and times. When he wrote an essay on Grillparzer in a hotel room in Paris in 1937, with National Socialism poised to occupy and subsequently destroy the former Habsburg lands, he was not pursuing an academic interest but rather fulfilling an existential need. He had, after all, grown up in the monarchy, as had Heimito von Doderer and Alexander Lernet-Holenia, who were both still writing fiction set in that period more than four decades after its disappearance. Why did Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73), who had never lived under the monarchy, consider the “Haus Österreich” to be her spiritual home?