Ingeborg Bachmann is one of the most important German-language writers of her time. Her work has had an impact far beyond the borders of the German-speaking world. Between her birth in Carinthia in 1926 and her death in Rome in 1973, she led a life of extraordinary literary creativity. She left behind an extensive oeuvre consisting of poems, stories, essays, correspondence and diary entries. As an artist and intellectual, she was an important figurehead for an entire generation of female authors in the Austrian and international cultural world in her quest for female self-assertion in the second half of the 20th century. Her work is received and translated worldwide, thus contributing to the cultural transfer of German-language literature to the world.
You may search the Ingeborg Bachmann Library and its collections in the online catalog of the Klagenfurt University Library (surf@ubk).
The approach to the writer and the exploration of her work take place on various levels. The Ingeborg Bachmann Research Centre at the Salzburg Literary Archive is producing the first complete edition of the author’s works and letters as a critical study edition. The original estate is held at the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library. The Ingeborg Bachmann House in Klagenfurt is a museum dedicated to the life and work of the author, located in her childhood home in Klagenfurt, where she spent most of her childhood and youth.
The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, awarded annually during the German Literature Days in Klagenfurt, regularly draws attention to the author in the literary and cultural scene of the German-speaking world.
The fascination of an author’s library
Writers are, first and foremost, always readers. Their socialisation in literature and languages is crucial to their own work. Influenced and shaped by everything that comes before it, literature is always a continuation of an extensive textual fabric.
The artistic work of authors is shaped not least by the literary world around them, their contacts with other writers and their own reading experiences.
The Ingeborg Bachmann Library at Klagenfurt University Library shows the author reading and thus represents another crucial building block for understanding Ingeborg Bachmann’s literary work.
