A Translation of "Literatur als Utopie," a Lecture on Modern Literature by Ingeborg Bachmann

Literature as Utopia

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It has not been all that long since I myself was sitting on a bench in a lecture hall, admittedly not in order to hear any talk about literature [Literatur]¹—and the little that I did happen to hear every now and then only reinforced my antipathy to such talk—this at a stage in life when a young person who writes and wants to do nothing but write has already been regarding writing as the center of all his thoughts and hopes for the longest time.  My aversion to literature as treated by professional scholarship may have been among other things a foolish mistake.  But you can be sure that that the study of literature is unnecessary and superfluous to writers [Schriftsteller]² given that there are plenty of business people and vagabonds, doctors and convicts, engineers, dandies, journalists, indeed even professors, who have gained creditable reputations through writing.  Time and again one encounters this ominous word “literature,” this eagerly all-encompassing term for an ostensibly clear thing, a term that is deployed and employed not only by scholars but also by authors, that is one of their principal nouns; they are quite partial to employing it every now and then in their own wantonly mischievous way.  It is certain that the idea of not figuring in the sphere of literature or someday no longer figuring in that sphere terrifies the writer, who regards such a fate as tantamount to a death sentence.  He competes relentlessly if secretly for membership in the order of the knights of “literature,” and even if he never receives a hint that he will enjoy a long-term membership in it he hopes for it and never relinquishes this hope.

One would think that there ought to be no need for an explicit consensus about what this keyword means, what it unlocks, what realm it discloses to our gaze.  After all, everybody knows what, for example, German literature is, and what European literature and world literature are.  Of course, we must totally disregard the fact that in German-speaking countries the word “literature” tends to be used as a pejorative, depreciative expression, or even as a term of abuse (in the word “Literat” [i.e., literatus or man of letters] it has been devalued with almost complete success!), and that in our linguistic community people say things like “That’s nothing but literature!” and “That is so literary!”  Here people prefer the “poetic” [Dichterische] and “creativity,” “poetry” [Dichtung] and “creating,” but because the use of these words is marked by a history of highly insalubrious outbursts of passion, I would like to set them aside and fall back on the word literature as a descriptive term.  But what is this thing that I am describing?  Is literature the sum total of all written works and beyond that the sum total of all those who have bequeathed written works to posterity?

Which works?  Only the outstanding ones?  By whom have they been deemed outstanding?  Which authorial personages?  Only the ones whose works have survived, and for whom have they survived?  And once someone or something has been admitted into the literary canon, is his or its place therein unshakeable?  Is this treasure, this so-called hoard of eternal poetry which literary history so zealously shelters and maintains, worth this piety and this incessant evocation?  Are these gold ingots of the human mind all genuine; don’t a good many of them turn black; and don’t they often sound as if they are a bit hollow?  And isn’t everything made of gold subject to the most incredible fluctuations in market value?  Your teachers will be better able to tell you how often Goethe and Schiller have been toppled, to tell you what plunges the Romantics, the Naturalists, and the Symbolists have suffered.  To tell you how often a writer has been neglected, feted again, forgotten, and resurrected—to tell you which works of the maestros have been unduly praised or unduly disregarded.  And we ourselves are of course standing in the middle of the process; we disparage, we reappraise; on the one hand, we treat literature like an unshakable object, on the other hand we abuse it at the same time, until it becomes something like an ideal.

Admittedly, a chain of evidence, a chain in which each link is a written work, suggests that there really is such a thing as literature.  Let us just take as an example German literature--but here we are already faltering, even though every beginner’s guide to the subject states that German literature starts with the Merseburg Incantations and ends—just where does it end?  We are faltering because we have also heard that in a precise sense we have never had a literature; our literature is said to be lacking a tradition and to be very poorly suited to the observation and ascertainment of what we understand literature to be—at least by comparison with French or English literature.  And this bit of hearsay has much to recommend it, at least to those who stick to received opinion.  But once one has shifted oneself to a different vantage-point, it is no longer possible to see why French or any other sort of literature should qualify as what we understand literature to be.  For what do we understand it to be?  It is an ideal that we are constantly correcting into a more proper state, an ideal in which we abandon certain facts and eradicate certain others.

But today let us just take a quick survey of the various opinions, the various definitions.  Because we can have strange experiences each and every day, in conversations with our friends, for example.  In a conversation about, say, painting, you may hear the names Giotto, Kandinsky, and Pollock, but in that same conversation everybody will take care not to mention Raphael’s name in the same cadence.  When you’re a guest at somebody’s house and looking for a record to put on, you may find Bach, a bit of baroque music, Schoenberg, and Webern prominently on display, but you’ll have a very hard time finding any Tchaikovsky at all in your host’s collection.  In conversations about literature with people you’re staying with, you may hear calm pronouncements about Joyce and Faulkner, Homer and Cicero, but names like Eichendorff or Stifter will possibly set off alarm bells.  These are by no means fictional scenarios; we come across such scenarios every day, and we ourselves are contributing participants in them.  For whereas on the one hand literature and every other art are benefiting from an official historical preservation industry that gives everyone his due; on the other hand, this industry is counterpoised by an unofficial reign of terror that subjects entire sectors of literature and every other art to excommunication and exile.  This reign of terror has always been in force, and it will hardly do us any good to get clear in our minds about it; we act as its agents out of sheer necessity; our delight in one sector of literature is conditioned by our aversion to the other, and by means of this unjust state of affairs we keep literature alive and orient it towards an ideal.  And it is entirely conceivable that in the not too distant future our idols both ancient and modern will be toppled again and be obliged to step down, that our questing and quarreling on behalf of the modern as we understand it will provoke another quarrel.  As long as we are here, and everybody is always here in good faith, we don’t care.  

Thus, even though and even because it is always an omnium gatherum of the happened and the happened-upon, literature is always the hoped-for and wished-for space that we furnish out of the hoard in accordance with our desire--thus it is an anteriorly open-ended realm whose borders are unknown.  Our desire ensures that everything that has already been shaped in the medium of language simultaneously partakes of that which has not yet been uttered, and our enthusiasm for certain magnificent texts is actually an enthusiasm for the white, blank page on which that which has yet to be gained seems to be already inscribed.  In our eyes, every great work, be it Don Quixote or the Divine Comedy, has a certain withered, weathered quality; in our eyes, there is always a defect that we ourselves repair as a result of giving the work a chance today, of reading it and wanting to read it tomorrow—a defect that is so massive that it impels us to proceed with literature as with a utopia. 

Scholarship, too, ought to find itself in this quandary, for there is no such thing as an objective opinion about literature; there is only a living one, and this living opinion entails such consequences.  In the course of our life we frequently change our opinion of a writer several times.  At twenty we dismiss him with a joke or call him a plaster statue who is of absolutely no concern to us; at thirty we discover his greatness, and then ten years later still our interest in him is defunct or we have developed new misgivings and a new inability to tolerate him.

Or vice-versa, at first we regard him as a genius, subsequently discover platitudes that disappoint us, and cast him aside.  We are merciless and ruthless, but if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be engaged at all.  There is always this or that thing about a writer or an age that strikes us as exemplarily correct, and something else about it that stands in our way, that must be disputed away.  We quote in a triumphant or damnatory tone, as though the works existed only for the sake of allowing us to prove something to ourselves. 

The alternating successes of the works or their failures tell us less about themselves than about our own constitution and the constitution of our age, but nobody has yet written the history of these constitutions, and more is being written about the history of literature, and this historiography is being organized using the terminology of criticism and aesthetics, as if it were a fait accompli that is subject to the unanimous verdict of the sworn members of the jury—namely the reader, the critic, and the scholar.

But literature both old and new is unclosed; it is more unclosed than every other domain—than the sciences, in which every new form of knowledge outstrips the old one—it is unclosed because its entire past pushes into the present.  With the force of all the ages it presses into us, into the temporal threshold at which we stop, and its onrush with robust old and robust new forms of knowledge makes us realize that not one of its constituent works had any wish to be rendered dated and innocuous, that rather they all contain the prerequisites for eluding every peremptory arrangement and system of classification.

I would like to try to dub these prerequisites, which inhere in the works themselves, the “utopian” prerequisites.

Were it not for these utopian prerequisites on the part of the works, despite our commiserating participation, literature would be a cemetery.  Were it not for them, we would merely be officiators at wreath-laying ceremonies.  Were it not for them, each work would be superseded and rectified by another one, each of them would be buried by a subsequent one.

But literature needs no pantheon; its forte is not dying, heaven, or any sort of salvation, but rather the realization of the strongest design in every present, in this one or the next one.

But literature, always “literature”…

Nor is any of this changed by, for example, the very recent publication of a French book that is titled Alittérature contemporaine (Albin Michel, Paris 1958) and attempts to prove that literature is being shunned by writers [Dichtern], that literature or being-in-literature is being disowned by writers.  These are nuances that obviously must be negotiated in a different way than the sentimental German aspiration to separate literature and Dichtung; for it is easy enough to understand what this book’s author, Claude Mauriac, means by the former, and yet it is irrelevant whether a work becomes a work of literature because it wanted to stay “outside” or to be admitted into literature. 

The ideal of aliterature is itself a part of literature, and it says more about the literary industry of the moment, about the social situation and the ineluctable revolt of artists than about literature itself: an aliterature is taking shape within the confines of literature.  But as for this literature, which itself is incapable of saying what it is, and which is incessantly being told what it is and what it should be—how should one encircle it, approach it?  One might also go looking for it via a detour that simply discloses a dozen blind paths.  There is that nasty Flaubert novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and the book’s two knowledge-craving clerks’ adventure with literature is inextricable from the grotesquery of our own adventure with it.  Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two bonhommes, yearn for certainty, and their discovery of the uncertainty of human knowledge does not make them mere objects of ridicule but rather transforms them into our partners in suffering.  For in the tragicomedy in which Bouvard and Pécuchet are acting the tragicomedy of science is also depicted.  Because they cannot make do with simply reading the works; they seek refuge in science, which they expect to set them on the right path.  Pécuchet had a bright idea:

The reason they were having so much trouble was that they didn’t know the rules. They studied them, in d’Aubignac’s Pratique du Théâtre and in other, less antiquated works.

Important questions are debated here: Is verse permissible in comedy? Does tragedy overstep its fixed limits when it takes its plot from modern history? Must tragic heroes be virtuous?  What is the essence of a tragic villain? To what extent should graphically horrific events be represented on the tragic stage?  To be sure, Aubignac maintains, each particular event must contribute to a single outcome, the dramatic interest must constantly be building, and the conclusion must jibe with the beginning—obviously!

“Devise mainsprings that can hold my attention,” says Boileau.

How does one devise these mainsprings?

“Be sure that in all your speeches genuine passion seeks out the heart, warms it, and moves it.”

How does one warm the heart?

So the rules aren’t enough.  One also needs genius.

And genius isn’t enough.  Corneille understands nothing about the theater, according to the Académie française.  Geoffery denigrated Voltaire.  Racine was ridiculed by Subligny.  La Harpe blushed at the mention of Shakespeare’s name.

They got sick of the old critics.

And later:

...“Let’s busy ourselves with prose first,” said Bouvard.

The authorities formally recommend the careful imitation a specific classical work, but all the classics have certain dangerous shortcomings as models--this on account not only of their stylistic but also of their linguistic sins.

Bouvard and Pécuchet were disconcerted by such an assertion, and they set about studying grammar.   The grammarians, to be sure, are at loggerheads with one another; where some of them behold a beauty, others discover a deformity.  They defer to principles whose consequences they spurn, champion consequences whose underlying principles they scorn, prop themselves up on tradition, reject the old masters, and evince the most bizarre affectations...From this project they conclude that syntax is a fantasy and grammar an illusion.

But perhaps the science known as aesthetics could settle their dispute. 

A friend...a professor of philosophy, sent them a list of monographs on the subject.  They worked separately, then convened to share their reflections.

First of all: what is beauty?

For Schelling it is the infinite expressing itself via the finite, for Reid it is an occult quality, for Jouffroy an unanalyzable feature, for De Maistre it is what pleases virtue; for Father André it is what suits Reason.   There exist several types of beauty…

Then they preoccupied themselves with the sublime.

Certain objects are intrinsically sublime--the roar of a torrent, deep shadows, a tree felled by a storm.  A character is beautiful when triumphant and sublime when engaged in struggle.

“I understand,” said Bouvard: “the Beautiful is the Beautiful and the Sublime is the very Beautiful.”

How can one tell them apart?

“By means of tact,” replied Pécuchet.

 “And where does tact come from?”

“From taste!”

“What is taste?”

It is defined as a special form of discernment, rapidity of judgment, superiority at distinguishing certain relations.

“In short, taste is taste, and none of this tells us how to go about acquiring it.”

But in what manner has literature so far been dealt with in earnest, and what methods and vicissitudes have impinged on it during its journey to us?  This is no idle question, for literature always retains some trace of everything that has befallen it.

A literary history has existed only since the beginning of the nineteenth century, since the Romantic period; back then the study of history was undertaken as a patriotic duty.  It amounted to a pernickety chronicling of the historian’s national literature, and often, if not invariably, the national pride of the chroniclers forbade them to perceive that over huge stretches of time this literature runs on empty.  This smug, all-encompassing overview of something that was by no means an integral entity but rather a shoddily underpinned optimistic ideal derived from the blueprint of national pathos, has had a long and abiding influence on our school textbooks.  And this more or less depraved historiography of literature has borne unexpectedly unanticipated fruits yet again in Germany of the twentieth century.  But to be sure, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Goethe had discovered a formulation that had comparably and more felicitously abiding aftereffects:

    

I am seeing ever more clearly that poetry is the common property of humankind and that it manifests itself in hundreds upon hundreds of human beings in all ages and places.  One person writes poetry a little better than the next person and when swimming keeps his head above water a little longer than the next person; that is all.

And later, to Eckermann:

National literature doesn’t mean much now; the epoch of world literature has arrived, and everyone must now do his best to accelerate this epoch.  But in thereby esteeming productions of foreign origin we must not cleave to any particular work and try to regard it as exemplary.  We mustn’t think that the Chinese, or Calderon, or the Nibelungen, got it right; rather, in our need for something exemplary we must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the human individual is invariably depicted in all his beauty.  Everything else we must contemplate in a merely historical light and, to the extent that this is possible, appropriate whatever good it contains.

As excellent as the beginning of this formulation still appears to us today—as laudable as we still find its lively desire for something exemplary and the foundation of exemplarity on the works of the Greeks, as well as its exhortation to contemplate everything in a merely historical light—this prescription for keeping company with literature, like most others we have encountered, has grievously suffered at the hands of time.  Nevertheless, in its desire to relegate something exemplary to a moment of origin still lurks the desire to establish something up ahead, something unstandardized rather than a standard, something that can never be reached no matter how closely it is approached.

In any case, today we do not have what it takes to defer slavishly to such and similar Olympian propositions.  But if they appear to us in a new light, they are likewise shifting to a new place in the horizon.  Goethe’s Greeks can be conceived of as a cipher.  The alternation of outlooks, of standards, that took place so slowly until the end of the nineteenth century that everyone found time to pay due regard to particulars and everything achieved efficacy, is giving way in the twentieth century to a previously unthinkable restless temperature curve of criteria.  One of the reasons for this is what Jacob Burckhardt remarked on the situation in World-Historical Meditations: “The destiny of modern poetry in general is its literary-historically conscious relationship to the poetry of all ages and peoples.”  So this fine mess that could not have failed to materialize and that we have inherited from the nineteenth century has in fact made us richer than the generations that preceded us, but also more labile and more vulnerable, more defenseless against every association.  For today we are not only familiar with the literature of all peoples, including those of Africa, but also conscious of the availability of all grammars, poetics, rhetorics, aesthetics, of all formal and normative possibilities in literature.  For everything factual in literature is either accompanied by theory or is itself theory at the same time, and literature’s have is confronted with a shall that orients it or would like to orient it, or has arisen from it as a stratum of orientation and often overshoots it so far that it injures it or no longer manages to reach it.

But we all want to substantiate literature or to substantiate something with it.  At the same time philosophy, psychiatry, and every possible other discipline pounce on it, and it is straitjacketed into laws and conditions or revelations that it—for the sake of everybody and nobody—fits into satisfactorily today and yet will contradict tomorrow.  The literary historian—and we have almost gotten used to this by now—smashes it into temporal fragments, colors it ancient, medieval, and modern.  Literary criticism and philosophical literary scholarship X-ray metaphysical and ethical problems with it—but literary scholarship has also leaned on other things, on sociology, psychoanalysis, and art history—so vast is its scope for free play.  It inspects literature in search of stylistic periods; an intuition of essences is ventured or an existential yield is expected from it.  And because a writer is too deficient in detailed knowledge to negotiate a path through this labyrinth, allow me to call to my aid one of our greatest scholars.  In his preface to his book European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Robert Curtius writes of modern literary scholarship and a few of its tendencies:

It wants to be “intellectual history.” This tendency, which leans on art history, operates with the extremely questionable principle of ‘the mutual elucidation of the arts’ and thereby engenders an obfuscation of objective states of affairs.  It then proceeds to apply to literature art history’s periodization according to styles that supersede one another.   So we end up with a literary Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, etc., right on down to Impressionism and Expressionism.  Every stylistic period is then endowed by the “intuition of essences” with an “essence” and peopled with a special “individual.”  The “Gothic individual” (to whom Huizinga has assigned a “pre-Gothic” comrade) has become extremely popular, but the “Baroque individual” probably doesn’t lag too far behind him.  There are profound beliefs about the “essence” of the Gothic, the Baroque, etc., that admittedly contradict one another to some extent.  Is Shakespeare Renaissance or Baroque?  Is Baudelaire an Impressionist, George an Expressionist?  Much intellectual energy is devoted to such problems.  The stylistic periods are perambulated by the art historian [Heinrich] Wölfflin’s “foundational principles.”  For him there is an “open” and a “closed form.  Is the end of Goethe’s Faust open, and Valéry’s closed?  Here’s a big question: is there even, as Karl Joël tried to show with great intelligence and abundant historical intuition, a regular succession of “binding” and “loosening” centuries (each one fitted out with its own “secular spirit”)?  In the modern age are the even centuries (the 14^th, 16^th, 18^th, and, to all appearances, the 20^th as well) “binding,” and the odd ones (the 13^th, 15^th, and 17^th) “loosening,” and so forth ad infinitum? 

And Curtius continues: “Modern literary scholarship—i.e., that of the last 50 years—is a phantom.”

I don’t know if today, fifteen years later, you still find yourself in the same situation as students; I hope you don’t, but it no longer seems possible to be optimistic when keeping company with literature, for not even its historiography has remained uninjured by pessimism.  A History of the Poetic National Literature of the Germans reads one of its first titles, and the last of which I am aware is Tragic Literary History. But why does literature always flee from literary research in such a disastrous manner; why can we never catch hold of it in the way we would like to catch hold of it; for it can’t only be the fault of the researchers, of the critics?!  They alone can’t be to blame for contradictory definitions.  There must be a reason that is not solely rooted in the variable constitution of time and that we can seek out on our own.

If we were as inexperienced and gullible as those two poor fools Bouvard und Pécuchet—and often enough we are just that—we would be obliged to drop this and every other object amid a great, anonymous burst of laughter, beneath which we ourselves and literature are being buried.

But literature, which itself is incapable of saying what it is, which merely proclaims itself a thousand-fold and multi-millennial offense against a bad language—for life only ever has a bad language—and which therefore confronts life with a utopia of language; so this literature, however tightly it may cling to time and its bad language, is glorious on account of its despair-ridden never-ending journey towards this language, and it is only for this reason that it is one of humankind’s glories and hopes.  Its most vulgar and affected languages still have a share in the linguistic dream; every vocabulary, every syntax, every sentence, every punctuation-mark, metaphor, and every symbol fulfills some portion of our dream of expression, a dream destined never to be totally realized.   

In the dictionary one reads: “Literature is simply the aggregate of written intellectual products.”  But this aggregate is contingent and unfinished, and the intellect contained therein is has not been given to us exclusively in written form.  When we turn off our searchlights and extinguish every other source of illumination, literature, left in the dark and in peace, renders its own light, and its genuine products have their own form of emanation, one that is timely and stimulating.  These are products that shimmer and that have dead patches; pieces of a realized hope for integral language, for integral expression for an ever-changing humanity and an ever-changing world. What we call perfection in art does nothing but activate imperfection afresh.

And because this imperfection is still active, the writer is undaunted by the greatness of what was written before his time--and they could not but find this greatness daunting if it were great in the sense of being unattainable, unsurpassable.  And they likewise could not but feel daunted if in this case, as in all others centering on achievements, they could be overtaken by greater writers; for then tomorrow they would be the sacrificial victims that they are not yet today.  But in literature there are no finishing lines, no achievements of this kind, no such things as overtaking and falling behind. 

Nevertheless, from the point of view of the present, it looks as though literature were merely an overwhelming past being constantly played off against the present, which has been condemned to lose from the outset.  The writer himself is afflicted by the past and at the same time by the present, in which he privately feels that he and his contemporaries are nonentities.

In Robert Musil’s diary there is a passage of great candor, in which he confesses that he has only ever opened up to a handful of writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, and others, but that not a single one of his contemporaries figures among them, that they all wrote between twenty and a hundred years earlier.  If we subtract the small dose of vanity and resentment that is also saying its piece here, we are still left beholding the astonishingly authentic and in impartial terms impossible residue of appreciation of his contemporaries.  In another passage one finds the following note: “‘Who’s around who counts nowadays?!’  That pessimistic appraisal of the value of contemporary literature—myself included.”  Further: “And yet the average level is definitely high.  The reason: akin to longing for the ‘Savior’.”  But this figure who is the object of longing is also merely an ideal figure, and when he casts his mind back, the following occurs to him:

Virgil, Dante, Homer…set them aside.  In any case, loving them requires an illusion and a love of the world that surrounded them…But Balzac, Stendhal, etc.; picture them to yourself; they lived and were ‘colleagues.’  How much aversion to those scribblers and that fop!  Their imaginary worlds would be insufferable if one didn’t suppose them to be sited in sundry places and ages.  Are they combinable or mutually exclusive?  How does one account for the fact that the effect is attenuated when one accepts an author with all the baggage of his bygone age?

And this note is superscribed by the words On the Utopia of Literature.  Here and there in Musil’s work one can encounter these words utopia and utopian being used in connection with literature, with the authorial [schriftstellerischen] existence; he has not elaborated these ideas but merely given me the keyword that I have tried to come to grips with here today. But if those who write [die Schreibenden] now had the courage to declare themselves in favor of utopian existences, they would no longer need to adopt that country, that dubious utopia—that something which tends to be called culture, nation, and so forth, and in which they have hitherto carved out their place.  This was their former situation, and I believe that for Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann it had already long since ceased to be a natural one and had become, rather, a situation that could be maintained only in an attitude of utter despair.  But was it ever thus naturally?  Did not this utopia of culture fortunately contain a much purer element of utopia as a vector that will remain open to pursuit when our culture no longer keeps up appearances on High Holy Days, when literature [Dichtung] is no longer conceivable “as the spiritual region of the nation”—today this is basically already an impossibility—but rather is obliged to recoil from the exile of Here and Now into the unspiritual region of our doleful countries?  For this at least remains true: we must labor with the bad language that we happen to discover, labor at this language towards a language that has never yet ruled, but that rules our intuition and that we imitate.  There is such a thing as imitation in its bad sense, in the conventional sense; I am not referring to that; and there is such a thing as the kind of imitation about which Jacob Burckhardt spoke and from which conservative criticism profits nowadays, either contentedly or reprovingly, imitation, reverberation as a destiny; and I am not referring to that either.  I am referring, rather, to an imitation of this very language surmised by us, a language that we cannot bring into our possession.  We possess it as a fragment in literature [Dichtung], concretized in a line or a scene, and we conceive ourselves as breathing freely within it in having attained our voices through language.

It is vital to continue writing.

We shall undoubtedly be obliged to continue toiling away with this word, literature, and with literature itself, with what it is and what we think it is, and we shall still often be greatly vexed by the unreliability of our critical instruments, by the net out of which literature will always slip.  But let us be glad that it ultimately eludes us, glad for our own sakes, so that it remains vital and our life coalesces with it in hours when we swap our breath with it.  Literature as a utopia—the writer as a utopian existence, the utopian preconditions of the work-----

If one fine day the questions that crave to follow those dashes could be properly formulated, we could perhaps write the history of literature and our history with it again and afresh.  But the individual who writes, who has been residing in this unwritten history from time immemorial, seldom has words for it and lives in the hope of the unbroken secret pact.  Such being the case, allow me to close with the words of a writer [Dichter] that seem almost to have been written with what I have been trying to say in mind.  They are the words of the French poet [Dichter] René Char:

“With each collapse of proofs the poet responds with a salvo of futurity.”

1.       All subsequent occurrences of literature are likewise renditions of Literatur unless otherwise indicated.

2.      All subsequent occurrences of writer(s) are likewise renditions of Schriftsteller unless otherwise indicated.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Ingeborg Bachmann, Frankfurter Vorlesungen.  Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung [Frankfurt Lectures. Problems in Contemporary Literature], Munich and Berlin: Piper, 2016.  This is the last of a series of five lectures that Bachmann delivered at Goethe University Frankfurt during the 1959-1960 winter semester and recorded for Bavarian Radio in April 1960.

A Translation of "Über Gedichte," a Lecture on Modern German Poetry by Ingeborg Bachmann

On Poems

Ladies and Gentlemen,

A beginning has been made, and the foundation-stones of the first misunderstandings have been laid.  At the beginning the beginning seems like the hardest part--but once you have finally started speaking, uttering a thing or two, the continuation proves to be even more difficult.  Such being the case, I would prefer for us to go on a ramble rather than discuss something specific, and as we ramble to and fro to bend over to pick up a word that was dropped at the beginning.

There is nothing more daunting for someone who has written poems himself than to present a survey of contemporary lyric poetry; his knowledge is for the most part slighter than one assumes; moreover, whatever new is being produced in other countries will remain hidden from all of us for a long time; for the most part we become familiar with it after a lag of one or two generations; we know Eliot, Auden, and Dylan Thomas--perhaps simply because he died recently, because he is a legendary drunkard; we know Apollinaire, Eluard, Aragon, René Char almost as the most recent of the French poets; of the Italians we hardly yet know Ungaretti and Montale, of the Russians Blok and Mayakovsky and finally Pasternak, owing to a questionable political dust storm, and this is not merely because poems are rather rarely translated; even if we happen to have another language or several other languages at our command and try hard to keep a watchful eye on the other side of every border, our present view of poems is still very much a blurry one.  When they possess a new power of comprehension, this power is appreciable only within their respective languages and does not manifest itself to the outside world like that of novels and plays.  There is scarcely a single new novel, a single new play, of whose publication or performance in Paris or New York or Rome we would not expect to receive speedy news; there is scarcely any such work that we do not speedily set about reading or are not speedily forced to see.  But poems also happen not to be very marketable, and so their effect even within their own language communities remains extremely minimal even when—as is asserted today in a few countries, including Germany—the most vigorously gifted writers are to be found among the lyric poets. Whether the assertion is accurate or not is anybody’s guess--in any case, there is also another, more disagreeable, side to this, for there is no setting in which dilettantism burgeons more abundantly than in the lyric poem, and there is nothing that gives most readers a poorer idea of whether or not this or that author has really “got something.”  And many people are even so disagreeable as to assume that no volume of poetry in our language could ever have any effect but to encourage twenty more young people to start writing poems themselves.  I am more troubled by the question whether confining ourselves to German poems as representative of modern poetry is simply a mistake.  I do not believe that it is, not in this case, for of course they initially demand to be perceived as what they truly are here and now and by us; their foreign words, their foreign bodies wish first and foremost to be adopted by their own language.  

Admittedly you are not now going to become acquainted with all the modern poets in existence--for that purpose, there are plenty of treatises in which they are ranked and sorted into nature lyricists and lyricists of consciousness and God knows what else, complete with examples; there are anthologies, reprints every month in every magazine, and there are volumes of poetry that can be found in the libraries; with these you can adequately brief yourselves.  For I am incapable of presenting them to you with individualized labels on them and coining some pithy adage about each of them.

So on to our rambles…

CONTEMPLATE YOUR FINGERTIPS

Contemplate your fingertips: is their color already changing?

One fine day it’ll come back, that eradicated plague.

The postman will chuck it like a letter into the rattling mailbox,

put it on your dinner plate like a ration of herring!

the mother will nurse with it like a breast.

What do we do now that no one’s left alive

Who knew well how to keep company with it?

He who is good friends with the horrific

can await its visit equanimously.

We keep on preparing ourselves for happiness

but it doesn’t willingly sit in our chairs.

Contemplate your fingertips!  When they change color to black

it is too late.

This poem is by Günter Eich.  I hope that nobody is inclined--if such a thing were possible--to raise his hand because he has been unsettled by the question, What is the poet trying to say here?  But what observations are we capable of making; what could actually emerge from a preoccupation with this poem?  I for one am inclined to assume that this poet drafted his design in a different way than poets a generation and two generations before him.  It is quite hard to picture him as a prophet or as an artist, as a magician, as [---]; there is not a jot of self-importance, of presumption, in his conception of himself, for throughout the work such a conception is evident; his claim, his position, is constantly being asserted.  Here there is already a change in which one can observe that something has taken place here, namely an alteration in the position of the producer himself.  And yet despite the resignation on so many [---] no abdication, no retreat is available to the speaker even though the place from which he is speaking has been shifted into a fatal solitude, shifted not voluntarily, not arrogantly, but rather as a punishment imposed by a society in the midst of society, a place in which he does not feel at home, and staying awake becomes difficult for a person who must, can, will, be watchful.  A watchful man is speaking; he is a sleepless quarry of exposure dwelling in our midst...  

When the window is wide open

And the earth’s ghastliness is blowing in

The infant with two heads

--one of them slumbering, the other screaming—

screams at us from the world’s length

and suffuses the ears of my beloved with horror.

The vocables of reality simply are what they are [in Günter Eich’s poems]; their stage is populated by window, garbage dumps, rubbish, freight train, rain-, rust-, and oil-stains, thermos, bakery, factory, subway; the world is questioned but not left at a loss for answers.  The only entity left at a loss for answers is this I, which is pursued, warned, and asked to issue warnings of its own.  What this specifically means, ladies and gentlemen, is that nowadays there can no longer be any talk whatsoever about a sacred song, about a mission, about a chosen community of artists.  By way of deliberately drawing your attention to an extreme version of this tendency, I shall quote a profession of faith made by a member of Stefan George’s circle during its heyday:

We are of the proud belief that for these years we have not merely gathered the best that a plenary assemblage of tribes in a specific domain of human ability was capable of producing; rather, we hope that we have also paved the way in pursuing which those who are to come and become after us will discover an ever-purer artistic firmament. ¹     

But for all the weightiness of this “pure artistic firmament”’s foundations, it proved unsustainable, and these spirits, who at that time quite understandably rose up against a trite, insipid school of naturalism and whose achievements we shall not forget, have somehow managed to survive the collapse of their artistic firmament.  Expressionism soon dealt the first counterblow, and under the impact of the First World War isolated human voices asserted themselves, sometimes in execration, sometimes in exhaustion.  And new aesthetic revolts followed, revolts that must also be talked about, specifically because they led to never-endingly influential linguistic discoveries and discoveries about reality, although in one respect they have been disavowed for exemplifying what we now regard as the worst tendencies.

I am thinking here even of surrealism with its idea of beauty:  the surrealists insisted that beauty had to be terroristic, breathtaking, and demonically bewildering, that surrealism was going to lead us to our deaths, and in the second surrealist manifesto, André Breton, the spokesman for the new literary movement, wrote that surrealism was by no means an artistic school, that, rather, it was striving for total insubordination, for outright sabotage, that everything must conspire to annihilate the ideas of the family, the fatherland, and religion--so far, so good; this was quite impressive--but then came the apodosis: that surrealism was striving for nothing other than power. “The most simple surrealist act consists of picking up a revolver, going down into the street, and shooting randomly into the crowd as long as one can.”

This prescription was of course never subsequently put into practice by the surrealists; oh, no; and yet you probably also know that all writers and painters were discredited, ostracized, threatened with death under the German dictatorship, and yet there remains an unexplained residue, a suspicion that without realizing what they were doing, its victims allowed their language to converge at its limits with the language of power.  Naturally surrealism had intellectual weight, an anti-bourgeois animus; it was serious about wishing to shock; it had nothing in common with the factitious praxis of murder that was carried out later on by a completely different party.

Much more questionable still were the beauty-proclamations of the futurists, for they called--understandably, to be sure, in a thrust, a violent burst of desire--for the embracing of the technical world in its beauty and, to be sure, for recognizing it as nothing but beauty.  It was Marinetti who with a young man’s flair for fanaticism cried:

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

(from an unattributed translation)

In the later futurist manifesto, which coincided with the outbreak of the Ethiopian colonial war, one reads:

For twenty–seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic.. . . Accordingly we state: ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the ceasefire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others. . . . Poets and artists of Futurism! . . . remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!²

This is the way the apotheosis of l’art pour l’art can sometimes look.   Here the flashover was formulated distinctly enough.

Please do not suppose that I am so narrow-minded as to dwell insistently on questions of guilt in artistic matters and to push such questions into the foreground.  Let us calmly take yet another step forward.  I by no means regard it as a matter of pure chance that Gottfried Benn and Ezra Pound---a writer whom a few of our young poets must discover for themselves at this moment of all moments, an American who had the most convoluted ideas about revitalization and a renaissance of the Renaissance--that in the case of both of these poets (and they are both poets; of this there can be no doubt), it was only a step from the pure artistic firmament to currying favor with barbarism.

But there is a maxim from which Karl Kraus can never be dissociated and which one hopes never to tire of emphasizing: “Everything of any merit in a language is rooted in morality.”  And morality here does not signify anything that can be popularized or liquidated, like bourgeois or Christian morality--not a codex--but rather that airstrip on which the standard of truth and lies must be established ever anew by every new writer.  Just now we were hit by a maxim: “War is beautiful because by means of gas masks, flame throwers…” and so forth...

And here is a poem of our time in which a gas mask also makes an appearance; this poem has been included in an anthology of love poems from recent years, and you can see the different sort of light into which its objects have been thrust; a light that signalizes the shattering of an entire aesthetics of delirium: “Frog Prince the Bridegroom” by Marie Luise Kaschnitz:

How hideous

Your bridegroom is

You virgin Life

His countenance a gas mask

His girdle an ammunition pouch

His hand

A flamethrower

Your bridegroom the frog prince

Rides with you

(A bike flies hither, once thither)

Over the houses of the dead

Between two

Apocalypses

He presses himself

Into your lap

Only in the darkness

Do you touch

His wettish hair

Only at daybreak

Only at

Daybreak

Only at

Do you behold his

Mournful

Lovely

Eyes

The only things that are still called beautiful here are the bridegroom’s eyes, his mournful eyes.  “Mournful” precedes the word “beautiful.”  And at the beginning this man with a flamethrower, with an ammunition pouch, this man with a claim to power, is referred to in a line that reads “How hideous your bridegroom is...”

There are such things as new specifications that are met, new definitions, even in poems.

At this same moment, in Sweden, the oldest living German female poet is writing something that applies to young people and likewise describes what they are doing and what they have to do: this poet is Nelly Sachs.

Here she is writing about a young man who lacks a sense of direction, a young man who is in conflict with all the lights of heaven:

From the races

acclimatized to rocking chairs

he divests himself

having strayed outside himself

in his fiery helmet

he vulnerates the night.

(Reminding us “who are building the new house,” of the foundation on which we are building, of how many graves, how many sites of sins, this foundation consists; and at the same time imploring us not to sigh, not to waste our minutes on weeping, but rather to insure that our walls and equipment are as receptive as Aeolian harps.)

But here the prophetic and psalmodizing mode is not be confused with artistic prophesying; this is no gesture, but rather a movement arising from the experience of suffering. And could it be accepted in any other spirit? Have we not become both quite sensitive and quite sober and excessively dismissive of intoxication with language on the one hand and conservative verbal Biedermeiers on the other; now affectedly ill and now affectedly healthy; are we not on the point of being permanently impervious to fascination by any word at all?  Do we not perhaps desire nothing more than to establish a legal relationship between language and humankind?

And shall we not make use of this legality or of no legality whatsoever, and do we wish to forge a path through the errors and the yielded truths, or no path whatsoever?

What does the literature that lies behind us really amount to?: words hewn from the endocardium and a tragic silence, and fallow fields full of talked-to-death words and sloughs of fetid, rotten silence; everything, language and silence, has already been imparted, and in a twofold fashion. And we are constantly being beckoned and tempted by both of them; our sympathetic participation in error is of course fully secured, but where does our sympathetic participation in a new truth begin?       

How does a poem--because we are trying to talk about new poems--how does a poem begin to participate sympathetically in such a truth?

[Hans Magnus] Enzensberger’s

THE WOLVES’ PLEA TO THE LAMBS:

must the vulture feed on forget-me-nots?

what do you want the jackal to do,

skin himself?—and the wolf? must

he pull out his own teeth?

what don’t you like

about politruks and popes

what on the lying TV are you

dumbly peeping at from the laundry basket?

who sews the stripe of blood

on the general’s trousers? who

carves the capon before the usurer

who proudly hangs the tin cross

before his snarling navel? who

takes the gratuity, the silverling

the hush-penny? there is

much stolen, few thieves; who

rewards them with applause, who

pins on their insignias, who

pants after their lies?

look in the mirror: timid,

shrinking from the labor of truth,

averse to learning, consigning

all thinking to the wolves

your nose-ring your costliest jewel

no hoax too unsubtle, no solace

too feeble, extortion itself

is always too kind to you.

you lambkins are sisters,

interchangeable ones, who bleat:

you blend into one another.

brotherliness rules

among the wolves:

they roam in packs.

all hail the predators: you

enticements to rapine throw

yourselves on the fetid bed

of obedience. lying even

as you whimper. you long

to be torn to bits. you

aren’t changing the world.

“You aren’t changing the world.” Indeed.  And what about poetry itself?  What effect does it have?  Is it not perhaps the case that because a poem like this makes us unhappy, because it manages to do this, and because there are new poets who can make us unhappy, there is also a jolt within us, a jolt instinct with insight, a jolt under whose influence we comprehend the larger one that is taking place?  There is a really wonderful letter by Kafka about what he demands from a book:

"If the book we’re reading isn’t waking us up with a punch to the skull, why are we bothering to read the book?  So that it will make us happy…?  Good Lord, we would be happy already if we didn’t have any books at all, and if push came to shove we could always write the kinds of books that make us happy ourselves...A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.  I believe this."

Perhaps it has been bothering you for I while now that I have said nothing about the new forms in the new poems, and hardly anything about the new language in them.  But in connection with this poem I would like to say something on these topics in a roundabout way.  There were recently published two books by a man who was not really a literary historian but rather something of an outsider; I am referring to the pair of studies entitled Die Welt als Labyrinth [The World as a Labyrinth] and Manieirismus in der Literatur [Mannerism in Literature] by Gustav René Hocke.  These books deal with the authors I have mentioned, along with many others, complete with illustrative quotations; and the thesis propounded in them is basically as follows: the provocative formal and thematic phenomena that we have been observing not only in literature but also in the other arts since about 1850 are not new, and this is not the first time that they have come upon the scene; rather, the modern artists themselves have been adhering to a hidden tradition; their audacious linguistic sallies and their “intellectual vices,” as he terms them, are ultimately of Greco-Oriental origin. The second revolution took place in the middle of the sixteenth century and faded away in the middle of the seventeenth.  In the domain of literature, the last such revolution dates from Baudelaire’s debut.  These three epochs have been subsumed under the generic heading of “Mannerism” for the sake of more firmly defining the anti-classical constant in European intellectual history.  The poets of these periods are trying to be “modern.”  They are characterized as such: they eschew immediacy, love obscurity, grant admittance to sensuous imagery only in abstruse, highly camouflaged metaphors; an intellectual system of signs is utilized towards the end of apprehending the real or super-real; their works are enigmatic, hieroglyphic, and this is why they evade aesthetic scrutiny with the help of classical standards.  I have no intention of going beyond this outline and can only urge you to read both studies, even at the risk of your temporarily smelling a whiff of “mannerism” everywhere and in everything and forgetting your judgment thanks to your astonishment.  But this highly stimulating book with its important findings has triggered an extremely remarkable reaction.  For it admittedly cannot exit the stage without first letting a few drops of wormwood fall on the new linguistic drilling-grounds, on the metaphor laboratories and the fission of verbal nuclei.  Because somebody has always stolen a march on this sort of thing, whether in 1600 or in 1900.  I hear tell that a couple of hundred years ago a man by the name of Athanasius Kirchner constructed a metaphor machine that could generate a complete poetic image out of nothing. We are now witnessing at least the third occurrence of abstract orthography: letterism, which Isidor Isou inaugurated as a last resort a couple of years ago in Paris in order to slit open the alphabet in order to conjure up Being with the aid of a few new supplementary characters, has a precursor in the third century, and another one is Hugo Ball, who in the first year of Dadaism in Zurich wrote letterist poems, admittedly with a different intention; namely, a polemical one.  This state of affairs seems a bit sad to many people who believe that revolutions and reclamations of land in literature must be primarily sought in formal experimentation and sometimes overlook the fact that the latter can only take place in the aftermath of a new idea.

On the other hand the discovery of “mannerism” was honey to many critics because they were now at last being handed a couple of solid criteria for the judgment of modern literature, criteria as applicable to verbal salad-mixing as to true verbal might.  Thank goodness, we’ve always already been here before; none of it is actually new; we don’t need to be intimidated anymore when we run into metaphors like “black milk”; of course the exact same thing can be found in Marino’s “red sea” (of the sixteenth century); we’ve always already been here before; ultimately we understand it, and understanding everything means pardoning everything.  Or else, if the critic is a member of a different, barbed armor-clad species, it means this is all passé, and so it’s not interesting anymore; this has already been done better, it’s a shoddy imitation, a carbon copy; the Surrealists did this too, and did it better, the Poètes maudits also did it better, and naturally the ancients did it better still: remember Marino, remember Góngora, remember, remember.  

But whom should we resolve to remember as we reflect once again on this poem [“the wolves’ plea to the lambs”]?  Is its author a mannerist?  He has written poems in which neologisms like “manitypistin” and “stenoküre” occur, so yes: he certainly is one (but with what intention?: that is the real question!).  And if we were compiling an anthology of younger authors, as long as we stuck to hunting down formal structures, to gaping at metaphors, at similarities, at the authors’ exploitation of an anonymous lexicon, at their canny facility with certain fashionable cocktail recipes, we would certainly have a very easy time figuring out what they were fundamentally all about.  But at the same time we would fail to see the most important thing; namely, when we are dealing merely with affectations, with finger exercises, or merely misbegotten trial runs, and we would fail to see when someone is actually trying to commit a robbery and is being robbed by language and robbed by truth, when the inimitable is devouring the imitable.  Because of course all of them, almost all of them, have, I believe, some tincture of the merely fashionable about them, and we also keenly sense this when we take up older works of long-established stature; we sense that their period lexica and period figures of speech hold their own only thanks to the firm and fairly robust context in which they appear.

But why--and you are perhaps still unsure of the answer to this question--did I happen to select these particular poems, and what am I trying to demonstrate by discussing them?  Perhaps the good “disposition” of these authors.  This conjecture is certainly plausible.  But what is a disposition, and who does not emphatically claim to have one?  To be liberally and amicably disposed, and from there it is no longer any great distance to well disposed, but well-disposed to whom?  And if the radicalness of every form of aestheticism has bequeathed to us a certainty that is binding, it is the certainty that with a good disposition it is no longer possible to produce a good poem.  I do not know whether it was really true, as a few people, including Benn, believed, that it was necessary to remind the Germans of this over and over again because they had still never managed to grasp it and were still highly receptive to “versifying” and “atmospheric images.”  So let us remind ourselves of it one more time, even though, if one thinks of the young people who have published poems in the last ten, fifteen years, one gets the feeling that hardly anybody caters to this plebiscitic desire anymore.  Much more onerous is the desire of a few for art [----] critics with their diagnoses and prognoses; for them everything is always in a crisis, they demand that the crises should be overcome; and recently even mannerism has been expected to be overcome, and then there are the crisis in the novel and the crisis in the theater; everything is expected to be overcome or integrated to some extent.  But when one finally ponders these sentences one begins to get cross, for who after all is expected to be overcome by whom here?

You can overcome an adversary or a pain or a weakness, but as for a crisis in the novel or in culture or in one of those flayed conceptual monsters—nobody can overcome such a thing.  The statements are worthy ones; they are often creditable; they often hit the mark, but the questions that affix themselves to them are poorly framed, of practically no importance, and merely squeeze the former out of the small circle of genuine questions that are posable at all.  Admittedly the sting of these questions can be felt only by the individual, and by those who have been more moved by a couple of apothegms from afar than by an entire assortment of problems, and one of those apothegms, apothegms that do not even ask to be vulnerated, is for example that of Bertolt Brecht: “What kinds of times are these when a conversation about trees is almost a crime because it encloses a silence about so many foul deeds?”  This is why people of later birth are somewhat shy about showcasing their worries about form, about expression, about intellectual capacity, worries that have been agonizing from time immemorial.

In a few passages in Günter Eich’s work there is talk about discomfort caused by beauty, discomfort caused by happiness; that whole tension between horror and beauty, which of course condition each other; the cult of beauty and of horror has given way to another one.  The poems, which are highly heterogeneous, are not savory but rich in insight, as if in an age of extreme linguistic distress they were obliged to make something out of their extreme contactlessness in order to ablate the distress.  From this achievement they derive a dignity, a dignity that they do not even dare to aspire to.

Having strayed outside themselves in their fiery helmet they vulnerate the night. This is also true to a large extent of the poet about whom I will speak in conclusion.  About Paul Celan.  He made his first appearance among us with an epitaph, his “Death Fugue,” and with some highly illuminating dark words that undertook a journey to the end of night.  And this I in these poems also forgoes an oppressive blueprint, an extorted authority, and gains an authority, even as it asks for nothing for itself other than: “Make me bitter, count me with the almonds, count me with…what was bitter and kept you alive…”

But today I have brought along his most recent collection of poems, “Sprachgitter” [“Speech Grille”] because it tours a new and still little-known territory.  The metaphors have completely vanished; the words have cast off every vestment, every veil; not a single word flies towards another one any longer; another one intoxicates.  After a painful figure of speech, an extremely severe inspection of the references of word and world, it arrives at new definitions.  The poems are entitled “Matière de Bretagne” or “Railway Embankments, Waysides, Waste Places, Debris,” or “Blueprint of a Landscape” or “Debris Barge.”

They are uncomfortable, palpating, reliable, so reliable in being called what they are that their titles must go exactly as far as they do and no further.

Poem:³

But suddenly, on account of the severe retrenchment of scope, it is once again possible to say something, to say it quite directly, unencryptedly.   It is possible for somebody who says of himself that he is chafing at reality and questing for reality as he commences to speak with his existence.  At the end of his great poem “Engführung” [“Stretto”], there is a particularly striking passage, and I would like to close with this passage--and before I do, I would also like to mention that for Celan the stars are “the work of man,” that here they are to be understood as a human construct.

………….A

Star

still has some light

Nothing,

nothing is forsaken

1. Blätter für die Kunst. 3 Folgen, 5 Bände, Auslese aus den Jahrgängen 1892–1898. Verlag Georg Bondi, Berlin 1899. Text aus der Einleitung. S. 24. [Art Journals.  Three Series, Five Volumes, Selections from the Years 1892 to 1898.  Georg Bondi Publications, Berlin 1898.  Text from the introduction, p. 24.]
2. As Bachmann’s editors point out, here she is quoting Marinetti indirectly (if at all [for they add that Marinetti’s daughter was unable to find the passage in her archive of her father’s works]) via Walter Benjamin’s essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”), which is also the source of the attribution of the context of the passage to the Ethiopian colonial war.  The translation is Harry Zohn’s from the Hannah Arendt-edited collection entitled Illuminations.
3. According to the editors, in her typescript Bachmann did not indicate what poem was to be read here.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Ingeborg Bachmann, Frankfurter Vorlesungen.  Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung [Frankfurt Lectures. Problems in Contemporary Literature], Munich and Berlin: Piper, 2016.  This is the second of a series of five lectures that Bachmann delivered at Goethe University Frankfurt during the 1959-1960 winter semester and recorded for Bavarian Radio in April 1960.