Anna Saprykina, Ph.D., currently serves as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the "European Literature" project at the University of Siegen in Germany foto: Courtesy of Anna Syprykina imagofeminae spring 2025 XLIV. image: Anna Saprykina.

Ingeborg Bachmann

and the Metaphysics of Postwar Female Isolation

Anna Saprykina Ph.D.

Ingeborg Bachmann’s name is not so much a voice as a cry that doesn’t pierce silence, but amplifies it. Her literature is not the result of aesthetic play or intellectual display – it is an existential testimony. A record of loneliness not as a passing emotion, but as an ontological state. Her protagonists – always women – are suspended between history and trauma, between speech and muteness, between memory and the impossibility of recognition. Of the many themes running through Bachmann’s work, solitude remains among the most central and the most tragic. Not banal isolation, but a profound rupture – between the self and the other, between language and meaning, between surviving and being heard.

I. Loneliness as Historical and Gendered Inevitability

Bachmann came of age in postwar Austria – a country that, in the 1950s, responded to the trauma of its complicity with National Socialism through collective amnesia. In this climate, loneliness was not chosen; it was imposed. Her protagonists are not just alone – they are excludedfrom communication itself, speaking in a language saturated with lies, violence, and historical falsification. Bachmann distrusts words. Her prose cracks under the weight of this mistrust – full of ellipses, deferrals, abrupt silences. For her, loneliness begins not in the world but in language: as the impossibility of speaking truthfully.

Even her early poetry, beginning with Die gestundete Zeit(The Deferred Time), testifies to this crisis. This is a poetry without assertions. It speaks in full knowledge of its own fragility. Even love – often seen as the last refuge of intimacy – becomes for Bachmann another echo of failure: “Love that cannot be shared between two is not love at all, but the silence into which each slips alone.” The woman in Bachmann’s work does not simply “enter” discourse; she has to reinvent it, word by word, in a constant struggle with a language not made for her.

II. Trauma and the Body: Loneliness as the Trace of Violence

In Bachmann’s prose, particularly in her Todesartencycle (Ways of Death), loneliness is not merely emotional absence. It is trauma made somatic. Her most devastating novel, Malina, stages this condition with merciless clarity. Here, the unnamed female narrator does not just experience violence — she becomes its vessel. Her body, her voice, her mind all become sites of historical and personal wound. Loneliness does not follow trauma; it is how trauma appears.

The female body is not a metaphor – it is the scene of devastation. What remains of subjectivity after trauma is not identity, but aftermath. In this, Bachmann’s fiction anticipates and resonates with the work of trauma theorists such as Judith Herman or Cathy Caruth. Her protagonists resemble Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer– survivors stripped of agency, reduced to “bare life.”

The narrator of Malinaspeaks in fragments that veer more toward post-traumatic hallucination than coherent narrative: «Es ist finster, es knistert um mich herum, ich bin auf einem See, in dem das Eis zu tauen anfängt, es war der tief – tief gefrorene See, und ich hänge jetzt mit der Telefonschnur im Wasser, nur an diesen Kabel noch, das mich verbindet. Hallo! Ich weiß schon, dass es mein Vater ist… (Bachmann 1971: 187) – “It is dark, there’s a crackling sound all around me, I’m on a lake, it used to be a deeply frozen lake, and now I’m suspended in the water by a telephone cable, only this cable still connects me. Hello! I already know it’s my father...”

This image – a daughter dangling in freezing water, tethered only by the telephone wire that binds her to the paternal voice – is a kind of waking nightmare. The father is not just a memory but an active force of domination. Language (the phone line) becomes the instrument of both attachment and suffocation. This is not just a symbolic flashback – it is the narrator’s lived present, a state of arrested experience where language can no longer deliver the self into the world.

This rift between body and self, between pain and narrative, is the structural condition of post-traumatic femininity in Bachmann’s fiction.

Language and the Inaccessibility of Witness

For Bachmann, the most radical solitude is not physical but linguistic. The narrator in Malinadoes not command language; she exists withinit, but cannot use it to assert herself. Her sentences break, repeat, drift into dream logic. Testimony becomes impossible. What she has suffered cannot be translated into the available codes of speech.

Language, then, is not a means of healing – it is a second wound. It reiterates the impossibility of being heard, of being recognized. The text itself begins to mirror this breakdown: syntax collapses, narrative loops, and the "I" disintegrates into the very medium that should give it form. The reader becomes not a listener, but a witness to unraveling.

Loneliness as Aesthetic and Survival Strategy

What does Bachmann do with this condition? She doesn’t resolve it. She writesit. In Malina, loneliness is not a problem to be solved, but a formal device, an aesthetic principle. The novel’s structure is fractured: built from absences, distortions, repetitions. In Bachmann, female narration is not a flow but a rupture. A wound with grammar.

Writing does not save the narrator – it sustains her. It keeps her tethered to the world even as everything else abandons her. In this sense, writing is not expression but endurance. It is not testimony but survival.

The Body as Archive, Loneliness as Form

Loneliness in Bachmann’s work is not only a symptom of violence – it is a resistance to it. Her female figures are archivesof pain. Their language is not a tool, but a trace – a residue of what cannot be said but must nonetheless be borne. Through the fragment, through silence, through failed utterance, Bachmann offers a new model of subjectivity: one that speaks not on behalfof the feminine, but from withinthe ruins of what it once meant.

This understanding of loneliness echoes into contemporary women's writing. In a world where healing is impossible, holding on becomes the only remaining gesture. Loneliness, then, is not the end of being – it is the form it takes now.

III. A Space Without the Other: The Novel as Monologue

In Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann stages a formal and ethical rupture with the tradition of the dialogic novel. This is not a work that invites readerly exchange, models social interaction, or constructs the illusion of mutuality. Instead, it presents a monological universe in which communication is not simply hindered – it is ontologically foreclosed. The novel does not unfold as speech tosomeone, but as a report into the void: a record of inner combustion, a sustained flow of pain with no expectation of reply.

The male figures surrounding the narrator do not possess autonomous subjectivity. Ivan is less a character than a phantom of love, an empty youin whom longing and loss are fused. His presence is fragmentary, flickering; he comes and goes, and the narrator can never stabilize her speech through him – he never answers. Malina, even more abstract, functions as a discursive administrator, an agent of rational, normative language. He imposes structure but offers no empathy. He observes, classifies, "writes reports," but he does not listen.

Caught between these poles is the narrator, whose Idissolves gradually into the text. She is neither author nor traditional storyteller but a vessel of suffering with no recipient. Her speech is not directed toward understanding – it is an act of endurance. This is no longer narrative but a psychic effort to survive by recording, when outward address has become impossible.

Malina, in this sense, is not a “novel” in the classical sense. Bachmann dismantles the genre’s foundational premise of dialogue – between characters, between author and reader. What remains is a record of dialogue’s absence. The sealed, inward quality of the narration is not a stylistic flourish but the consequence of radical distrust in communicability. Sentences trail off, shift abruptly, become disoriented. Syntax shudders as if there were no interlocutor to anchor it.

The final scene – where the narrator vanishes "into the wall, behind which there is no scream" – embodies the extremity of this structure. It is not silence as deliberate refusal, but disappearance in the act of speaking: language severed from the other, echoing into nothing. Not a metaphor for death, but a model of absolute solitude – where the Other is fundamentally inaccessible.

Malinathus becomes a space in which writing exists without relation. Writing without response. Bachmann’s world is one where monologue is not a choice, but the only viable form of articulation. Female speech here is not communication, but the residue of presence – the last trace of someone still clinging to the edge of disappearance. Bachmann does not write to be heard, but to withstand the unspeakable. This is speech in place of a scream, not in place of dialogue.

IV. Solitude as Ethics: To Be Alone Is Not to Lie

For Bachmann, solitude is not merely the aftermath of trauma or the structural asymmetry between woman and power. It is also an active, conscious stance. In her prose, loneliness often emerges as an ethical position – a way of remaining in truth when language has been corrupted and public discourse contaminated by authority. The female subject refuses to participate in communicative systems that demand violence, falsehood, or submission. This refusal itself becomes an act of resistance.

In Malina, language is typically felt as a force of destruction – either inaccessible or overtly hostile. In response, the narrator chooses silence, withdrawal, disappearance – not as surrender, but as a refusal to lie. Solitude, in this context, is not isolation, but a radical non-participation in what Jacques Rancière has called “the distribution of the sensible”: denied the right to speak publicly, the female subject does not fight for inclusion, but exits entirely. Thus emerges the ethical dimension of solitude – it becomes a means of preserving authenticity, unwarped by a system that demands its distortion.

In writing, this solitude appears as silence, pause, narrative void. The writer does not state truth; she constructs a form in which truth can survive unviolated. This brings Bachmann close to Paul Celan, for whom poetry was “speech on the side,” addressed neither to power nor to the masses. Also to Virginia Woolf, for whom female subjectivity was only possible in solitude, in inward listening, in exclusion from male discourse. In A Room of One’s Own, solitude is the ground of female writing. For Bachmann, this space is not spatial but existential – wrested violently into being.

The narrator of Malinainhabits this ethical terrain. She does not confront the system head-on. She slips out of it. Her final disappearance – melting into the wall – can be read not only as vanishing, but as refusal: if existence is possible only through complicity, then non-existence becomes a form of dissent.

Bachmann’s silence is not emptiness, but a full, saturated stillness – charged with resistance. Her solitude is not a renunciation of the world, but a radical honesty. She creates a new figure of the poet – not a prophet proclaiming truth, but a witness who guards it from a world unworthy of receiving it. A witness without a platform.

In this light, solitude is not withdrawal but a strategy for preserving wholeness. To write in solitude is not to betray. It is not to transmit truth, but to keep it alive without distorting it through the forms demanded by culture. This is why solitude becomes not only the content of Bachmann’s writing, but its very structure. Fragmentation, silence, shifting registers – all refuse the “coherent” utterance, the digestible story, the lie.

V. Post-Language and Post-Solitude

In Bachmann’s late work, solitude becomes the ontological condition of life after catastrophe. It cannot be cured by love, transcended through speech, or softened by culture. And yet, within it, a paradoxical strength emerges – the possibility of being truly alone, not in isolation, but in authenticity. This is solitude not as absence, but as the cleared space left in the wake of destruction – as language after the fall of language.

Here lies her legacy: Bachmann offers no comfort, but she restores solitude to its dignity. In an age where noise displaces silence and language is mostly stream, she speaks for those who have lost the right to speak.

Anna Saprykina, Ph.D., currently serves as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the "European Literature" project at the University of Siegen in Germany foto: Courtesy of Anna Syprykina imagofeminae spring 2025 XLIV. image: Anna Saprykina.

IMPRESSUM

imagofeminae WOMEN IMAGE LIFESTYLE ISSN 2195-2000 

Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

LITERATURE ESSY ANNA SAPRYKINA Ph.D. "INGEBORG BACHMANN AND THE METHAPHYSICS OF THE POSTWAR FEMALE ISOLATION"

EDITORS: Dr. Sandra Boihmane,  Alicja Wawryniuk, Dipl.-Psych. Paiman Maria Davarifard. imagofeminae SPRING 2025 # XLIV © Berlin 2025 by imagofeminae.com  Mail: editors(at)imagofeminae.com