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Walking Through History: Topography and Identity in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard

By (author) Katya Krylova

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This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies. The post-war landscape of Europe is unthinkable without the voices of the Austrian writers Ingeborg Bachmann (1926â€“1973) and Thomas Bernhard (1931â€“1989). Their work, coming after the devastation wrought by the Second World War and the Holocaust, is rooted in a specifically Austrian context of repression of this traumatic historical legacy. In post-war Austria, discourse on the recent past may have been dominated by silence, but the legacy of this past was all too apparent in the countryâ€™s ruined and speedily reconstructed cityscapes. This book investigates Bachmannâ€™s and Bernhardâ€™s treatment of two fundamental aspects of the Austrian historical legacy: the trauma of the war and the desire to return to an ideal homeland, known as â€˜Haus Ã–sterreichâ€™. Following a methodology based on Freud and Benjamin, this comparative study demonstrates that the confrontation with Austriaâ€™s troubled history occurs through the protagonistsâ€™ ambivalent encounter with the landscape or cityscape that they inhabit, travel or return to. The book demonstrates the centrality of topography on both thematic and structural levels in the authorsâ€™ prose works, as a mode of confronting the past and making sense of the present.