The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann

Posted on by Ingeborg Bachmann Peter Filkins
The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann These unfinished novels were intended to follow her widely acclaimed Malina in a Proustian cycle to be entitled Todesarten or Ways of Dying Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria Bachmann

These unfinished novels were intended to follow her widely acclaimed Malina in a Proustian cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted on women by men, and upon the living by history, politics, religion, family, and the self.

  • ☆ The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann ✓ Ingeborg Bachmann Peter Filkins
    494 Ingeborg Bachmann Peter Filkins
The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann

  1. What actually is possible, however, is transformation And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics 1959 60 can also be applied to her own self consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann s uvre had as its goal and effect to draw people into the experiences of the writers, into new experiences of suffering GuI 139 140 But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male dominated society that unleashed a new wave in the reception of her works.Although Bachmann s spectactular early fame derived from her lyric poetry she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954 , she turned and towards prose during the 1950 s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language The stories in the collection Das drei igste Jahr The Thirtieth Year 1961 typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its orders e.g of language, law, politics, or gender roles and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha A Step towards Gomorrah and Undine geht Undine Goes Leaves , are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German language literature Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general You monsters named Hans In her later prose Malina 1971 Simultan 1972 and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem f r Fanny Goldmann Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age I ve reflected about this question already where does fascism begin It doesn t begin with the first bombs that were dropped It begins in relationships between people Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman GuI 144 As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna She wrote her doctoral dissertation 1950 on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as a seduction to German irrationality of thought GuI 137 From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome She rejected marriage as an impossible institution Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself GuI 144.From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome Despite her precarious health she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure she traveled to Poland in 1973 She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire Joey Horsley

103 Reply to “The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann”

  1. There are things in the world that just suck and there is nothing you can do about them I m not talking about important things like awful governments and assholes ruining the world or any of that kind of stuff, but rather things that should exist but never will For example some of mine are that there will never be a completed third novel by David Foster Wallace although I can keep my fingers crossed that someday the full version of Infinite Jest will be published, but I won t be holding my breat [...]

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  2. This isn t really a review so don t like it, folks , just wanted to write a few notes before I forget although these are short unfinished novels, they felt almost finished to me, in that the entire arc is included There are some missing pieces in the middle, but you can pretty much guess it, especially if you read these two along with Malina, which forms a trilogy both in content and in theme I feel like these two are not as deeply complicated as Malina, while still retaining the amazing writing [...]

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  3. Frammenti di un romanzo mai terminato che doveva fare parte di una trilogia mai completata Cause di morte Una sorta di indagine sulle donne uccise se non nel corpo certamente nello spirito, vittime di moderni e sofisticati Barbabl che si aggirano tra corridoi e meandri del castello di un reale, normale, sadico ma apparentemente distinto assassino Che scoprono la porta nascosta quella destinata a celare il proprio cadavere quando ormai troppo tardi La porta in fondo si rivela essere uno specchio [...]

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  4. Der Fragment gebliebene Fall Franza geh rt ebenso wie Malina zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Todesartenprojekt und in diesem Fall erz hlt sie Geschichten von Verbrechen, die Mord sind im Inneren und u eren und schlie lich an der Psyche hin zum K rper Franza wird zum Fall gemacht von ihrem Ehemann und zerf llt an der Psychopathologisierung Durch eine Abtreibung traumatisiert fl chtet sie, l sst sich von ihrem Bruder finden und reist mit ihm in die W ste, wo sie sich immer mehr verliert in ihrer Angst und i [...]

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  5. I had tried to read this book several times but would never persevere and thusly concluded that Bachmann just wasn t for me Part of the initial determent was that the story is partly set in Egypt, and I find all things ancient and beyond, as Martin is a geologist Egypt are not in my field of interest Immature reason to refuse great literature, I know, but that s how it sometimes goes Anyway, I have read it for exam preparation this time around lecture on Female Austrian Writers, University of Vi [...]

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  6. I only read the Book of Franza, and not Requiem for Fanny Goldman The fundamental premise of feminine victimhood was really hard to swallow whenever I could put that aside, I found the book hypnotic and with fruitful things to say about perception, loneliness, squalor, etc Peter Filkins is no longer on my shit list.

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  7. bookcrossing journal 8I have had this book in my posession for a very long time All these years I did not get to read it and for some reason I do not find it very interesting any It has been too long in one of the boxes with books I guess So now I think it is time to release it through BookCrossing.

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  8. Book of Franza made me cry.Really, it did.I have rather personal reasons for it to have made me cry, but really, it was the whole emphasis on the voiceless, and words, andIt s very hard to describe It s a little sad that it s an unfinished book, but it s still extremely powerful.

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  9. Between two and three stars, i only decided to rate it higher, not because of what i felt while reading it, but because of what i felt when i closed the book Fast writing, sometimes incomprehensible, very personal and deep Not for the many, a book worth the try.

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