If We Had the Word

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was one of the most significant post-war women writers in German language literature and remains one of the most important writers of our time. Over thirty years after her death, her work continues to attract the critical attentions of a wide general readership as well as scholars from many different disciplines, not least because her poems, short stories, critical essays, radio plays and novels deal with issues that continue to haunt contemporary culture: history, gender, exile, war, memory and the Holocaust. A poet, writer and trained philosopher, Bachmann relentlessly proved what she believed was the potential of language and writing to raise awareness and effect change in a culture marked by violence against women, individual and collective trauma, the effacement of memory, the forgetting of atrocities, and the silencing of victims. The multifaceted, interdisciplinary approaches to Ingeborg Bachmann's work make this collection appealing and relevant to both critics and scholars of Ingeborg Bachmann and to everyone interested in critical theory and contemporary culture.