1 - The Gender of Good and Evil: Guilt and Repression in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina (1971)

Summary

INGEBORG BACHMANN's Malina is a classic text of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming-to-terms with the past). The bestselling novel relates one woman's anxious struggle to survive in a world that suppresses all knowledge of violence past and present. The history of National Socialism suffuses the novel as a nightmare not yet over. In her dreams, the narrator is tormented by a brutal father figure whose Nazi appurtenances signal the political and historical dimensions of her suffering. In one of her most quoted statements, Bachmann explains that the dreams reveal the interpersonal origins of fascism. In her view, “der Faschismus ist das erste in der Beziehung zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau” (fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman). It would be hard to find a more fitting quotation to open the first section of this book, which examines assumptions about the links between masculinity, patriarchy, and fascism that became entrenched in the 1960s.

As part of the nominal Todesarten (Ways of Dying) cycle on which the Austrian author worked from 1962 until her death in 1973, the genesis of Malina ran parallel to events such as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65) and the student protests in 1968 that brought previously suppressed questions of historical continuity and individual guilt to the forefront of the public consciousness. Elke Schlinsog has shown that the Todesarten-project entered a new phase when Bachmann moved to Berlin in April 1963 to take up a scholarship from the American Ford Foundation. The author's time in Berlin refined and radicalized her perception of postwar society's failure to confront openly the horror and legacy of war. Since the publication of Sigrid Weigel's intellectual biography, Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses (Legacies under the Protection of the Secrecy of Correspondence, 1999), critics have especially emphasized the significance of Bachmann's contact with members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory for her understanding of society. In his influential lecture “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (“What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?,” 1959), Theodor Adorno famously warned, “dass der Faschismus nachlebt; dass die vielzitierte Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit bis heute nicht gelang und zu ihrem Zerrbild, dem leeren und kalten Vergessen, ausartete” (that fascism survives; that the oft-cited process of working through the past has not occurred yet and has degenerated into its caricature, empty and cold oblivion).