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Winter 2023. I visited everywhere twice. First, the necropolis of her Vienna; then, Vienna.

            I’ve been translating Malina. [1] The Airbnb I booked was on Münzgasse which was a hundred meters away from “my” apartment on Ungargasse. There was a building on the corner with a pub downstairs, a sign noting it as one of Beethoven’s former homes. Beethoven moved around Vienna often, a waiter told me—which might explain why the address wasn’t listed anywhere online (“after all Beethoven…did compose the Ninth Symphony in the house across the street” [2]). I wrote down the house number.

            I strolled along Ungargasse. This district was “strictly residential and devoid of tourist attractions,” just as Malina described it. Alter Heller has closed (“Small cafes and many old inns and taverns make the street useful; we frequent the Alter Heller” [3]). The building that housed it—said to be one of Vienna’s oldest tenant houses, at Ungargasse 34—now had a dusty window covered in graffiti, much of it expressing nostalgia for Alter Heller. Every ten minutes, an “O” streetcar sped by (“it’s the O-car of today, everything is as always” [4]).

            Same as Ivan in the book, from where I stayed, it was “a mere five minutes on foot” to Stadtpark. [5] I crossed a green bridge and reached the park’s livelier center with its statues of musicians and a pond. I followed a swan to a tributary. Ducks swam towards the bank, making way for the swan. Right outside the opposite gate of the park, there was the Vienna Intercontinental Hotel, “that new stone block.” [6]

            The University of Vienna, where Bachmann earned her doctorate, is in the First District. A few blocks away, one of the oldest Viennese cafés, Café Landtmann (where a “Bulgarian man [waited] for me” [7]) drew long lines day and night. I also visited Café Museum (“I can sit down in the Café Museum and leaf through newspaper and magazine” [8]), the Three Hussars now renamed “Café Conditorei Sluka” (“…he’ll be having dinner with some man at the Three Hussars” [9]), Café Sacher (“I have my small allowance for…. a small coffee in the Cafe Sacher” [10]), Café Bastei [11]…… Regardless of the queues, once inside, I found regulars sitting quietly, unhurriedly reading, stirring their coffee.





In Vienna I suffered from insomnia. I felt a chill whenever the corridor lights of the building across the street turned on, and couldn’t stop thinking, a hundred meters away, there was another “I,” “picking up the phone and want[ing] to ask, are you already asleep? Then it occurred to me just in time that I’d really have to ask, are you already awake?” [12] Winter days in Vienna were short. Sun rose late and set early, a “nocturnal forest of our thoughts.” [13] And in a Vienna like this, “I have smoked and drunk again, counted the glasses and my cigarettes.” [14]

            The “I” I was thinking of lived on Ungargasse. And yet, when I took my walk one night, passing by Beatrixgasse 26, I looked up and saw a plaque with Bachmann’s name, indicating that she had lived here from 1946 to 1949.

…The Third District, beginning at the Beatrixgasse (where I used to live) or the Heumarkt…. For a long time, I used to pass old Number 26—which remained my lucky number for many years—feeling oppressed and guilty, like a dog with a new master when he runs into his old one and doesn’t know who deserves the most affection. [15]

        Briefly brought up in the book, this address turned out to be Bachmann’s real house.

        A city’s geographical features and their neutrality fascinate me. I am struck by the preciseness of Bachmann’s references, her faithfulness to them—even though she was writing from deep emotional turmoil. The next day, I followed a resident and entered Beatrixgasse 26. It was a residential building divided into multiple units and connected by two courtyards. One of them was named Ingeborg Bachmann Park.





“The children had no future,” Bachmann wrote in her short story “Youth in an Austrian Town.”

They are afraid of the whole world. They don’t picture the world; they picture only the geography of a hopscotch square, because its frontiers can be drawn in chalk. On one or two legs they hop the frontiers from one region to another. [16]

Here, a link between future and geography, fear and territory is drawn. After leaving Vienna in 1953, Bachmann rarely returned. Franza, the protagonist in The Book of Franza—part of Bachmann’s “Todesarten” trilogy alongside Malina—also fled Vienna. But have they, truly left?

        A single line stands alone in Bachmann’s poem “The Great Landscape Outside Vienna”:

Asiens Atem ist jenseits.

Jenseits: 1. (prep.) on the other side of… 2. (n.) the world hereafter. 

Asia’s breath is on the other shore.

        I am reminded of Cavafy’s “The City” which begins with, “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one” and ends with, “Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.” What Franza saw at the end of her trip was “the Egyptian darkness, after all.” [17] Asked by Adolf Opel if there was a city she felt at home, Bachmann answered, “Rome. Rome before I was destroyed by the catastrophe.” After the breakup with Max Frisch, she felt betrayed. Both by love and by words. But to keep on living, she could only keep writing. And loving.

        “But since Ivan is beginning to cure me, things can’t be all that bad on earth.” [18]

I'm thinking about Ivan.

I'm thinking about love.

About injections of reality.

About their lasting only a few hours.

About the next, more potent injection.

I’m thinking in silence.

I’m thinking it's late.

It’s incurable. And It's too late.

But I survive and think.

And I’m thinking it will not be Ivan.

Whatever’s ahead, it will be something different.

I live in Ivan.

I will not outlive Ivan. [19]

Malina wanted to be a “beautiful book” [20], but like Bachmann, failed to emerge from its shadow.


Still writing, Bachmann turned away from poetry. In an interview, she said she no longer wished for every sentence to be a work of art; the only thing that mattered was what needed and had to be said. She added, while one cannot change the world with a poem, one can have an effect—an effect achieved only through a new experience of suffering, with the utmost seriousness. [21]

            What are “necessary” words? Words can unfold new consciousness and, as Bachmann pointed out in a Frankfurt lecture, are also rooted in historical conditions. [22] They are, therefore, an architecture.





I bought a slice of pizza at a Christmas market.

        A driver pointed to the light ornaments in the First District and asked me, aren’t they pretty. “You don't have these in where you from, do you?” I thought for a moment and answered, “We do, they’re pretty.” But in fact, I didn’t know which city to think of to answer. He asked me if I liked Vienna, I said I needed more time.

        The young man at the pizza stall didn't like the First District. He had friends who had travelled to Chicago for a Techno party. He wrote down names of Techno clubs in Vienna on a napkin and handed it to me with the fresh pizza.

        I arrived in a café called Camus to shelter from a heavy rain which later turned into that winter’s first snow. The bartender bought me a drink. The café was packed with college students. He set up a canopy, we chatted. He told me that he travelled a lot as a child with his father who was a diplomat.

        It was through small moments like these that, in Vienna, I started to build my own time.


        In the preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Roland Barthes writes that the pleasure of the Text is when we are able to live with the author. [23] This doesn’t mean to reenact the lives of the characters, but rather to “[speak] this text… by allowing it the distance of a citation… it is a matter of receiving from the text a fantasmatic order.” [24] It is to savor with the author a sensation that reorganizes our own internal time.
       
        Five years have passed since I first encountered Malina. By translating, letting Malina take over my Time, I got through a difficult period of life. Now to depart from it, I came to Vienna—to disperse Malina’s Time through my own.





Apart from “Youth in an Austrian Town,” “Three Paths to the Lake” is another story by Bachmann set in her hometown, Klagenfurt.
   
        Opening with a hiking map issued by the local Tourist Office, the writer claims the story is written with “total faith in this hiking map.” [25] As Elisabeth, the protagonist walks, she remembers stories from her past romance, career and family, letting the memories derail her from the trails. “What should upset me about a city, for example, in which I was born without understanding why it had to be exactly there and nowhere else, but do I have to keep reminding myself about that”—this sentiment in Malina recurs throughout Bachmann’s writing. [26] Nonetheless, the memory map she intends to draw also never completes. “I” want a “silent reminiscence” [27] where “nothing can upset me,” but “there is a disturbance in my memory, I shatter against every memory” [28]—the map in the traveler’s mind, utterly exhausted the traveler.


Seven years after Bachmann’s death, her friend, Fleur Jaeggy, published The Water Statues dedicated to her. The press likes to note the cause of Bachmann’s death: at forty-seven, she died from burns sustained in a fire in her Rome apartment, caused by a cigarette. Jaeggy wanted to extinguish the fire Bachmann had carried throughout her life. One of her characters says, “Water is a burnt body.” [29] Another laments, “Ever since then we have always lived together, we have gone from fervent to lukewarm, and finally to something resembling a cautious balance. And, as in fairy tales, we have come back up from the basements, laden with the years, tranquil, unwearied, almost not alive.” [30]
       
        Compared to “my inflammatory letters, my inflammatory appeals, my inflammatory stance, this entire fire I have put on paper with my burned hand” [31], I keep returning to a teardrop of Bachmann’s:

… it doesn’t roll down my cheek; it merely crystallizes in the cold air, it grows and grows into a second giant globe that doesn’t want to orbit with the world—it breaks off from the planet and plunges into infinity. [32]

Vienna is silent.









See here for a complete list of notes and works cited.

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