If you look at the correspondence of the friends from the end, there is an inherent tragedy.

Because around 1959 at the latest, Ingeborg Bachmann and Ilse Aichinger began to become estranged, which ultimately led to a speechlessness that was all the more disturbing since one read beforehand in the well over a hundred letters with what intimate affection and spiritual closeness the two authors wrote each other since the winter of 1949.

Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the features section.

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Literary scholars can only speculate about the reasons for the silence, as Irene Fußl and Roland Berbig, the editors of the letter volume "Let's hold on to each other and hold on to everything!" Of the Salzburg Bachmann Edition, write in their instructive epilogue.

Nothing is documented on this.

Looking back, it seems to be a miracle for her, above all, that the two most important German-speaking women writers of the post-war period maintained their friendship for more than twelve years across the spatial distance, but also across the various lifestyles and the literary business that made them competitors could.

Separated from the twin

When Ingeborg Bachmann, born in 1926, met Ilse Aichinger, five years her senior, in post-war Vienna, presumably through the mediation of the critic Hans Weigel, their worlds of experience could hardly be more different. Aichinger, whose grandmother and uncle and aunt were murdered in the Holocaust, had survived the Nazi terror with her mother, a doctor who converted to Catholicism at an early age, whose apartment and work permit had been withdrawn in a room directly across from the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna. Ilse's twin sister Helga was able to flee to London on a Kindertransport in 1939, while Ilse stayed in Vienna to protect her mother. It would be a decade before the twins met again.

Ingeborg Bachmann, on the other hand, spent her youth in Klagenfurt in family security, with house music and literature. But while the father joined the NSDAP at an early age, his daughter wrote in 1943 at the age of seventeen in the story “Das Honditschkreuz” against the Nazi ideology. In her war diary, Bachmann describes the liberation in 1945 as “the most beautiful summer” of her life, “and when I will be one hundred years old”.

When she met Aichinger in the autumn of 1947, she was just finishing her first novel, “The Greater Hope”. The new friend looks up admiringly at her, the "leading figure", as Hans Weigel notes. The correspondence begins with a short Christmas greeting two years later, after they left Vienna, where they lived together, and later seen ambivalently for life. From then on, the women have to rely on letters to overcome the spatial distance. While Aichinger went to Ulm and worked for a short time at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, joined Group 47 in 1951 and met her future husband, the writer Günter Eich, who later also took part in the correspondence, Ingeborg Bachmann was initially on mediation in Vienna the friend Elisabeth Liebl works for the station Rot-Weiß-Rot,works on texts and radio plays.

Originally planned as a double portrait

It too will join Group 47 and will attract a great deal of attention with the Group Award 1953 at the latest.

The fact that the legendary Spiegel title was originally planned as a double portrait with Ilse Aichinger the following year with the author on the cover, as evidenced by a letter from the author, is an interesting hint from the editors, who can no longer reconstruct the reasons for Aichinger's loss.

What defines the correspondence between the first two and then three writers with Eich is the closeness of the writers to one another, evoked through words and writing. Ingeborg is chosen as the “third twin” of the Aichingers, Eich calls her her little sister and Berta Aichinger, the mother, draws letters to Bachmann with “Your, Mutti”. The great importance of family cohesion for her and her daughter, the Holocaust survivors, becomes manifest in these letters. The written caresses, "Ingelein" and "Ilselein", the women call each other time and again, are not least marks of the ability to live and love in view of the traumas of the past for one and the loneliness of the present for the other.

While Ilse Aichinger opts for a seemingly conventional life and lives secluded in the provinces with her husband and two children Clemens and Mirjam, Ingeborg Bachmann is driven out into the world.

In the years to come, she sent letters from Rome, where she lived for a while, later from Paris and then from Uetikon near Zurich, where she followed Max Frisch.

The unhappiness of the relationship becomes within one's grasp when, on September 24, 1959, Ingeborg Bachmann and Virginia Woolf complained bitterly that they “lacked this one room to work” in their shared apartment.

She leads a life without role models

In his friend's mirror, Bachmann longs for a family and at the same time admitted in a letter that she was afraid of remaining childless.

As a woman, as an intellectual of her time, self-employed and independent, she leads a life for which there are no role models.

But she fights her way in the male domain, while also making some concessions to the literary business, which Ilse Aichinger displeases.

In any case, she considers the business of writing to be detrimental.

Ingeborg Bachmann wrote the last lines of this readable volume.

In it, she confesses to her friend that “she said far too little.

To have thanked you too little, to have seen you too little - ".

The letter was never sent.