,
Via Giulia, Rome After graduating, Bachmann worked as a scriptwriter and editor at the
Allied radio station
Rot-Weiss-Rot, a job that enabled her to obtain an overview of contemporary literature and also supplied her with a decent income, making possible proper literary work. Her first
radio dramas were published by the station. Her literary career was enhanced by contact with
Hans Weigel (littérateur and sponsor of young post-war literature) and 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
Rome, 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.
Writings Bachmann's doctoral dissertation expresses her growing disillusionment with
Heideggerian existentialism, which was in part resolved through her growing interest in
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus significantly influenced her relationship to language. During her lifetime, Bachmann was known mostly for her two collections of poetry,
Die gestundete Zeit ("Time Deferred") and
Anrufung des Grossen Bären ("Invocation of Ursa Major"). Bachmann's literary work focuses on themes like
personal boundaries, establishment of the truth, and
philosophy of language, the latter in the tradition of Wittgenstein. Many of her prose works represent the struggles of women to survive and to find a voice in post-war society. She also addresses the histories of
imperialism and
fascism, in particular, the persistence of imperialist ideas in the present. Fascism was a recurring theme in her writings. In her novel
Der Fall Franza (
The Case of Franza) Bachmann argued that fascism had not died in 1945 but had survived in the German speaking world of the 1960s in human relations and particularly in men's oppression of women. In Germany the achievements of the
women's rights campaign at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century had been systematically undone by the fascist
Nazi regime in the 1930s. Bachmann's engagement with fascism followed that of other women writers who in the immediate post-war period dealt with fascism from a woman's perspective, such as
Anna Seghers,
Ilse Aichinger,
Ingeborg Drewitz and
Christa Wolf. A crisis of
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, along with the fear of the continued existence of
National Socialism within democracy, suffuses Bachmann's oeuvre. In her work for radio, this takes the form of a self-conscious pivoting between the possibility of freedom and the inevitability of imprisonment. Her first radio play
Ein Geschäft mit Träumen (
A Shop for Dreams) is concerned with the inhumanity of violence and oppression.
Der gute Gott von Manhattan (
The Good God of Manhattan) consciously echoes
Bertolt Brecht's
The Good Person of Szechwan, as it tackles the impossibility of Good and Love surviving in capitalist, consumerist societies. In her analysis of Bachmann's radio drama
Die Zikaden (
The Cicadas), which was written in
Ischia and then
Naples towards the end of 1954, and first broadcast on
Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) on 25 March 1955, Lucy Jeffery states thatThe transitory existence of the exiled or marginalised writer who escapes prejudice, conflict, and dominance is paralleled by the experience of the refugee. The feeling of unsettledness is measured against the desire to find that utopian land away (both geographically and temporally) from suffering. Yet, as Bachmann knows too well, escapism is a temporary
heterotopia where guilt and longing cannot be kept at bay. Similar themes can also be found throughout Bachmann's writings in works such as
Ein Wildermuth (
A Wildermuth), included in
Das dreißigste Jahr (
The Thirtieth Year: Stories, published in 1961),
Malina (published in 1971), and
Kriegstagebuch (
War Diary, published posthumously in 2010). Bachmann was also in the vanguard of Austrian women writers who discovered in their private lives the political realities from which they attempted to achieve emancipation. Bachmann's writings and those of
Barbara Frischmuth,
Brigitte Schwaiger and
Anna Mitgutsch were widely published in Germany. Male Austrian authors such as
Franz Innerhofer,
Josef Winkler and
Peter Turrini wrote equally popular works on traumatic experiences of socialisation. Often these authors produced their works for major German publishing houses. After Bachmann's death in 1973, Austrian writers such as
Thomas Bernhard,
Peter Handke and
Elfriede Jelinek continued the tradition of Austrian literature in Germany.
Lectures Between November 1959 and February 1960 Bachmann gave five lectures on poetics at the
Goethe University Frankfurt. Known as the
Frankfurter Vorlesungen: Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung (
Frankfurt Lectures: Problems of Contemporary Writings) they are historically and substantively Bachmann's central work. In it she explained recurring themes in her early literary publications and she discussed the function of literature in society. Bachmann insisted that literature had to be viewed in its historic context, thus foreshadowing a rising interest in studying the connection between literary discourse and the contemporary understanding of history. In the third lecture, on
Das schreibende Ich (The writing
I), Bachmann addressed the question of the
first-person narrator. She was concerned with the "accountability and authority, the authenticity and reliability, of the person in the position of narrating the work" (Achberger). She distinguished between the unproblematic "I" in letters and diaries, which conceals the person from the author, and the unproblematic "I" in memoirs, in which a "'naive' handling of the first person is requested (Achberger). She argued that
Henry Miller and
Céline placed "themselves and their personal experience directly at the centre of their novels" (Achberger). She referenced
Tolstoy's
The Kreutzer Sonata and
Dostoyevsky's
The House of Dead as first-person narrators of the inner story. She also argued that narrators could provide a new treatment of time (for example
Italo Svevo), of material (for example
Proust) or of space (for example
Hans Henny Jahnn). According to Bachmann, in the modern novel the "I" had "shifted: the narrator no longer lives in the story, but rather, the story lives inside the narrator" (Achberger). Museum in
Klagenfurt. In the fifth lecture on
Literatur als Utopie (Literature as Utopia), she turned to the question of what makes literature
utopian. She argued that it was the process that was set in motion in the writer and reader, as a result of their interaction with literature, which made a work utopian. She argued that literature could make us aware of a lack, both in the work and in our own world. Readers could remove this lack by giving the work a chance in our time. Thus she argued that each work of literature is "a realm which reaches forward and has unknown limits". Bachmann's understanding of utopia as a direction rather than a goal, and her argument that it was the function of literature to take an utopian direction, stemmed from
Robert Musil, who had analysed European modernism in his 1908 dissertation on
Ernst Mach,
Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs (Contribution to the assessment of Mach's theories. ==Later life and death==