"Bearing the Unbearable- Trauma and testimony in the Poetry of Akhmadova and Bachmann" By Dr. Anna Saprykina. imagofeminae LITERATURE summer 2025 XLV. image: ©imagofeminae.

Published: September 6, 2025 Berlin

Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma and Testimony in the Poetry of Akhmatova and Bachmann

By Dr. Anna Saprykina

The shadow of prison lines and the ruins of European cities — it was from this material that twentieth-century poetry was built. For Anna Akhmatova and Ingeborg Bachmann, trauma was not just a theme: it penetrated language, form, and the very conception of literature. Their voices, arising from different cultural contexts, are now read as two powerful testimonies of a century that left behind unhealed wounds.

Anna Akhmatova: Fate and Testimony

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) entered literature as the “queen of the Silver Age,” but her true place was defined by the tragedies of Soviet history. Political repression struck her family directly: her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed in 1921, and her son Lev Gumilyov was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned.

In Requiem(1935–1940), a cycle that for decades circulated only in handwritten copies or memorized by friends, Akhmatova transforms her private suffering into a choral monument of collective pain:

«Нет, и не под чуждым небосводом,
И не под защитой чуждых крыл, —
Я была тогда с моим народом,
Там, где мой народ, к несчастью, был.»

(“No, not under an alien sky,
Not under the protection of alien wings —
I was then with my people,
There, where my people, unhappily, were.”)

Here the “I” dissolves into a collective “we.” Akhmatova speaks not as an individual but as the bearer of a shared historical wound. Her restrained, almost documentary poetics conveys what cannot be forgotten, yet can hardly be spoken.

In Poem without a Hero(1940–1960s), trauma takes a different form: the memory of revolution and the “perished generation” of the Silver Age. The text becomes a mosaic of masks and shadows, where cultural and personal memory intertwine.

Ingeborg Bachmann: Fractures of Language

A very different experience of trauma emerges in the works of Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). She grew up in Klagenfurt, where even in the Austrian provinces the rise of Hitler’s regime left a lasting mark. The totalitarian past scarred not only memory but also language itself: German, poisoned by propaganda, became for Bachmann an object of profound distrust.

In her debut volume Die gestundete Zeit(1953), she formulated a philosophy of postwar unease:

“Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar.” (“Truth is bearable for human beings.”)

But in Bachmann’s world, truth always comes with pain. In the poem Alle Tageshe diagnoses the endlessness of war:

“Der Krieg wird nicht mehr erklärt,
sondern fortgesetzt.”
(“War is no longer declared,
but simply continued.”)

Here trauma is not an event but the very structure of time: war has become background, everyday reality.

In the novel Malina(1971), trauma turns autobiographical. The unnamed female protagonist conducts dialogues with inner voices until she literally disappears into the wall of her apartment. This haunting final image has been read as a metaphor for the impossibility of female subjectivity in a culture shaped by violence. The fragmented, elliptical language of the novel itself becomes a form of trauma.

Trauma Theory: Destruction and Possibility

Since the late twentieth century, the humanities have developed a sophisticated “theory of trauma.” Scholars such as Cathy Caruth (Unclaimed Experience), Dominick LaCapra (Writing History, Writing Trauma), and Shoshana Felman (Testimony) argue that literature often provides the only space where trauma can find a voice.

In the German-speaking context, Aleida and Jan Assmann have shown how personal trauma becomes cultural memory, shaping collective identity.

Yet contemporary thought also points to possibilities within trauma. In Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma(1997), psychotherapist Peter Levine suggests that trauma contains not only injury but also potential — a blocked energy that, if worked through, can become a source of strength and transformation.

From this perspective, Akhmatova and Bachmann exemplify two distinct modes of “working through” trauma in literature:

• In Akhmatova, trauma is transformed into collective testimony, keeping memory alive.
• In Bachmann, trauma erupts as a rupture of language, out of which new poetic forms are born.

Thus trauma ceases to be only destruction: in literature, it opens a path toward new languages and new ways of understanding the self and the world.

Two Strategies of Pain

Comparing Akhmatova and Bachmann reveals two poles. Akhmatova builds a monument of memory, her voice becoming communal and oriented toward future generations. Bachmann shows the impossibility of speech, the corrosive effect of trauma on language and subjectivity.

Yet in both strategies lies a shared gesture: they preserve the presence of pain within culture. And precisely because of this, literature becomes the space where the past does not vanish without trace, but is transformed into the energy of memory — and perhaps into the source of cultural renewal.

References

Primary Texts

• Anna Akhmatova. Requiem(1935–1940).
• Anna Akhmatova. Poem without a Hero(1940–1960s).
• Ingeborg Bachmann. Die gestundete Zeit(1953).
• Ingeborg Bachmann. Alle Tage(1953).
• Ingeborg Bachmann. Malina(1971).

        Criticism and Scholarship

• Aleida Assmann. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik.München: C.H. Beck, 2006.
• Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
• Dominick LaCapra. Writing History, Writing Trauma.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
• Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.Routledge, 1992.
• Sigrid Weigel. Ingeborg Bachmann und die Literarische Moderne.München: Fink, 1999.
• Susan Suleiman. Crises of Memory and the Second World War.Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Yuri Lotman. “Akhmatova and the Poetics of the Tragic.” In: Selected Articles.St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1992.
• Lev Losev. Anna Akhmatova: Her Life and Her Poetry.Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1995.
• Peter Levine. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma.Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1997.

image: Anna Saprykina 2025. foto: Courtesy of Anna Saprykina imagofeminae XLV.©imagofeminae.

Author

Anna Saprykina PhD is a literary scholar, translator and educator. Born in Uzbekistan, she has studied and worked in Russia, France, Germany, and the United States. She holds a PhD in literature and researches cultural and literary exchanges between Germany, France, and Russia. She is the author of scholarly publications and monographs on Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Anatole France, as well as a textbook on German grammar. She has also worked as a translator, journalist, and teacher, leading courses in German and French literature and language coaching. 

IMPRESSUM

imagofeminae WOMEN IMAGE LIFESTYLE ISSN 2195-2000  German National Library

LITERATURE ESSAY ANNA SAPRYKINA Ph.D. Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma and Testimony in the Poetry of Akhmatova and Bachmann EDITORS:  Alicja Wawryniuk, Dipl.-Psych. Paiman Maria Davarifard. imagofeminae summer  2025 # XLV ©Berlin 2025 by imagofeminae.com Mail: editors(at)imagofeminae.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED