Malina (novel)

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Edition by Malina from Suhrkamp Verlag

Malina is a novel by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann , published in 1971 .

content

At the center of the novel is the (nameless) first-person narrator , who explores her existential situation as a woman and writer into the extreme zones, both through personal reflection and in dialogue form. She is an intellectual and lives on Ungargasse in Vienna ; The time of the narration is the second half of the 20th century. The structure of the novel is tripartite:

In the first chapter, "Happy with Ivan", she tells of her relationship with Ivan, a native of Hungary who also lives in Ungargasse and works in the financial sector. The narrator wants to feel happy and secure around him. Ivan does reciprocate her love, but often has little time (trips abroad) and does not go too much into her pronounced emotionality and the increasingly frequent psychological problems. When Ivan is not around, she talks to her roommate Malina, a decent, always calm military historian. When the protagonist is looking for Malina, he is always there.

In the second chapter "The Third Man" one learns about the origin of their problems and their excessive sensitivity; it is the climax of the story. In dreams and trance-like states, she recalls the horrors of World War II , gas chambers and rape . The "father" appears as a personified horror, whereby, as she herself recognizes, not only her biological father is meant, who had been a member of the NSDAP and Wehrmacht officer as a teacher since 1932 , but also the men-dominated horror world of National Socialism per se. Another possible interpretation of the father's motif is suggested by Malina herself; it is about the inner war of the first-person narrator.

In the third chapter, “Of the Last Things”, she tries to overcome her problems in a dialogue with the always decent, but not very close Malina - where it quickly becomes clear that a life “according to the secret”, that is, after discovering the reason for her despair second chapter could uncover is actually impossible; this is indicated, for example, by her reflections on the secrecy of letters at the beginning of the chapter. So the third chapter deals with the inevitable escalation of their existence. The first-person narrator realizes that a relationship with Ivan is not possible, yes, that no relationship at all is possible for her anymore. She has nothing to counter the language and norms of a world dominated by men. "I lived in Ivan and I'm dying in Malina," she states soberly. The death of the first-person narrator is indicated by her symbolic disappearance in a crack in the wall of the house. "It was murder." This last sentence of the novel also relates to the process of writing, which she, soberly, considers to be an inadequate substitute for her unfulfilled love and unsuitable for healing the wounds caused by society (writing as the most painful of all forms of death) .

interpretation

Bachmann himself called her novel “expressly [as] an autobiography, but not in the conventional sense. A mental, imaginary autobiography. This monological or night existence has nothing to do with the usual autobiography with which a resume and stories are told by anybody. ” Marcel Reich-Ranicki understands the novel in a very similar way ; he reads it as a "poetic report of illness, as the psychogram of severe suffering".

The novel was often understood as a reappraisal of Ingeborg Bachmann's relationship with Max Frisch and viewed as an answer to his novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein . It was also read as a roman clef in this regard . Konstanze Fliedl contradicted this reading in that Bachmann and Frisch, as postmodern writers, always deconstructed literary identities and life stories , that every self in their works is always a result of the stories told.

reception

Ingeborg Bachmann conjured up Paul Celan in a nightmare sequence in the character of the stranger in the black coat . In doing so, she linked her own love fate with the Jewish fate of Celan. In the volume Herzzeit , which contains the letters of both of them between 1948 and 1967, she finally revealed “the diverse traces that this love has left in the work of both poets”. The composer Hans Werner Henze , who was also associated with her at an early stage in life, praised Malina in a telegram to her as "THE ELFTE (Symphony) VON MAHLER ".

The novel was filmed in 1991 by Werner Schroeter (director) and Elfriede Jelinek (screenplay) with Isabelle Huppert , Mathieu Carrière and Can Togay in the leading roles under the title Malina .

output

  • Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina. Novel. (= Library Suhrkamp. Volume 534). Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971, ISBN 3-518-01534-6 .

Others

Malina's typescript , which Bachmann sent to Suhrkamp Verlag , can be seen in the permanent exhibition of the Modern Literature Museum in Marbach.

literature

  • Ellen Summerfield: Ingeborg Bachmann, The resolution of the characters in her novel »Malina«. (= Studies in German, English and Komaparatistik; Volume 40). Bouvier, Bonn 1976, ISBN 3-416-01206-2 .
  • Annette Klaubert: Symbolic structures in Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina in the context of the short stories. Lang, Bern / Frankfurt am Main / New York, NY 1983, ISBN 3-261-03265-0 .
  • Monika Albrecht: Ingeborg Bachmann as a critic of Max Frisch in her kind of death project. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Ingeborg Bachmann. 5th edition. New version. edition text + kritik, Munich 1995, pp. 136–153, ISBN 3-88377-505-3 .
  • Sabine Grimkowski: The destroyed self, narrative structure and identity in Ingeborg Bachmann's "The Franza Case" and "Malina". (= Literary Studies series. Volume 76). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1992, ISBN 3-88479-657-7 .
  • Bärbel Lücke: Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina. Interpretation. Oldenbourg, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-88659-2 .
  • Gudrun Kohn-Waechter: The Disappearance in the Wall, Destructive Modernism in Contradiction of a Female I in Ingeborg Bachmann's "Malina". (= Results of Women's Research . Volume 28). JB Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung and Ernst Poeschel Verlag, Stuttgart 1992.
  • Andrea Stoll (Ed.): Ingeborg Bachmann's "Malina". Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-38615-8 (basic, with sources, extensive bibliography, research perspectives and reviews by Karl Krolow , Joachim Kaiser , Gabriele Wohmann , Helmut Heißenbüttel , Hans Mayer , Dieter Lattmann , Rudolf Hartung , Hilde game )
  • Dirk Göttsche, Hubert Ohl: Ingeborg Bachmann, New contributions to your work: international symposium Münster 1991. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-8847-9518-X .
  • Heidi Borau: "Malina", a provocation? (= Literary Studies series. Volume 109). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1994, ISBN 3-88479-791-3 .
  • Sigrid Weigel : Malina. In: M. Mayer (Ed.): Interpretations. Works by Ingeborg Bachmann. Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-017517-8 .
  • Monika Albrecht (Ed.): Malina. (= Suhrkamp Base Library 56). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-18856-9 .
  • Christine Lubkoll: Fragments of a Language of Love. Language utopia and discourse criticism in Ingeborg Bachmann's novel "Malina". University speeches ( Emmy Noether lecture). Erlangen 2007, ISBN 3-518-38086-9 .
  • Jean Firges: Ingeborg Bachmann, “Malina”. The destruction of the female self . Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2008, ISBN 978-3-933264-53-4 . ( Review at literaturkritik.de )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann : Malina. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, pp. 193, 247.
  2. ^ Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 249ff.
  3. ↑ Ria Endres : Tell me, love. Ecstasy of Impossibility - On Ingeborg Bachmann's Poetry . In: The time . 2nd October 1981.
  4. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki : My life. , dtv Stuttgart 2009, p. 416.
  5. ↑ Konstanze Fliedl : Interpretation and Discretion. On the problem of biographism in the Bachmann-Frisch case . In: Revista de Filología Alemana. Vol. 10 (2002), pp. 55-70.
  6. ↑ On Bachmann's affair with Celan: Helmut Böttiger : Love, straitjacket-beautiful. In: The time. undated
  7. ↑ Peter Hamm : Who am I for you? In: The time. August 24, 2008.
  8. ↑ Peter Hamm: "My dear poor little very big one" Document of a strange love: The correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Werner Henze. In: The time. August 24, 2008.