Kriukova E. B., Koval O. A. Between Poetry and Truth: Ingeborg Bachmann and Jean Améry on the Meaning of the Homeland, Language, and Morality Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filologiya – Tomsk State University Journal of Philology. 2021. 74. 268–288. DOI: 10.17223 ...

Abstract

The focus of the article is the story of two Austrian intellectuals: the poetess and authoress Ingeborg Bachmann and her older contemporary Jean Améry, a brilliant essayist who was one of the first to try to comprehend the Holocaust phenomenon, relying on his own tragic experience. The article aims to show how Bachmann’s poetic discourse corresponds to the rational-philosophical type of Améry’s writing and complements it in their common efforts to create a legitimate space for moral expression. Despite the fact that they did not meet in person, traces of the presence of the other can be found in the life and work of each of them. Using biographical, comparative, and hermeneutic methods, the article reconstructs the history of the relationship between Bachmann and Améry. This story develops into an invisible dialogue that takes place in the border area of reality and fiction. Language, homeland, memory, crimes of the past, trauma, guilt, and responsibility are the key topics of their conversation: these existential questions set the moral horizon of their thought and outline the main vectors of the ethical quest in post-war Europe. Particular attention in the article is paid to the concept of resentment (the sense of destructive anger). Améry elevates it to a moral category, which makes it possible to reveal the conflict between the individual and society. His social criticism, presented in the book Beyond Guilt and Atonement, is embodied in the literary world of Ingeborg Bachmann. In the short story “Three Paths to the Lake”, she mentions Améry’s essay “On Torture” and integrates her own reflections into the structure of the literary work. In addition, there is a character named Franz Joseph Trotta, who, due to his uncompromising stand and intolerance of falsehood, becomes an outsider. In the features of this most attractive and charismatic male character, you can guess the personality and views of Améry himself. Améry was disappointed in the possibilities of historical, documentary, psychological, confessional discourses to grasp and convey the truth about the anthropological catastrophe that had happened, and Bachmann seemed to offer him another space for witnessing, namely fiction. It is concluded that, for an exiled person who was forcibly deprived of his homeland and under no circumstances wished to make peace with it, literature is almost the only way to regain lost time, place, home, and language. For both Bachmann and Améry, the value of language lies not in its instrumental function, but in its ontological power, which gives the moral dimension of human existence the status of a true being. The article is intended to make up for the lack of studies on a comparative analysis of the philosophical insights of Jean Améry and the poetic intuitions of Ingeborg Bachmann.