War Diary – With Letters from Jack Hamesh to Ingeborg Bachmann (The German List) - Hardcover

Bachmann, Ingeborg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857420089 ISBN 13: 9780857420084

Publisher: Seagull Books, 2011

Synopsis

Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer, her "War Diary" is not a day-by-day journal but a series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entries - all the more remarkable given Bachmann's young age at the time - reveal the eighteen-year-old's hatred of both war and Nazism. The British occupation leads to her incredible meeting with a British officer, Jack Hamesh, a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in 1938. He is astonished to find in Austria a young girl who has read banned authors such as Mann, Schnitzler, and Hofmannsthal. Their relationship is captured here in the emotional and moving letters Hamesh writes to Bachmann when he travels to Israel in 1946. In his correspondence, he describes how in his new home of Israel, he still suffers from the rootlessness affecting so many of those who lost parents, family, friends, and homes in the war. "War Diary" provides unusual insight into the formation of Bachmann as a writer and will be cherished by the many fans of her work. But it is also a poignant glimpse into life in Austria in the immediate aftermath of the war.

About this title

About the Author

Ingeborg Bachmann is the author of Darkness Spoken, Malina, and Simultan, among others. Hans Holler is professor of modern German literature at Salzburg University and has edited several works of Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann. Mike Mitchell has also translated Peter Handke's Till Day You do Part or A Question of Light and Max Frisch's An Answer from the Silence.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857420089
• ISBN 13: 9780857420084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 112