Salzburg Bachmann Edition
The first complete edition of the author’s works and letters is currently being produced at the Ingeborg Bachmann Research Center of the Literature Archive Salzburg.
At the end of 2012, copies of Ingeborg Bachmann’s estate (the originals are in the Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library) – including the previously blocked sheets – were made available by the author’s siblings and heirs, Isolde Moser and Dr. Heinz Bachmann, to the Literature Archive Salzburg, where they will serve as the basis for the complete edition of the works long called for in Bachmann-Research and the first edition of Ingeborg Bachmann’s previously blocked letter estate.
The Salzburg Bachmann Edition, edited by Hans Höller (since 2021 by Uta Degner) and Irene Fußl with the collaboration of Silvia Bengesser, is conceptualized as a critical study edition. The already published work and the so far unpublished estate materials are to be provided as a reliable textual basis, offer reader-friendly commentaries, and make editorial decisions comprehensible. The commentary focuses on the writing-biographical context, contexts of the history of works and reception, the intertextual dimensions, the process of the work’s creation, and the transmitted textual geneses.
The first volume, published in 2017, Male oscuro. Aufzeichnungen aus der Zeit der Krankheit, edited by Isolde Schiffermüller and Gabriella Pelloni, brings together previously unknown dream notations, letters, and drafts of letters and speeches by the author from the period of her health crisis beginning in1962.
In the same year, Das Buch Goldmann, edited by Marie Luise Wandruszka, was published, an unfinished novel project of the author that has been preserved in her estate as part of the large „Todesarten“-project.
Ingeborg Bachmann’s Briefwechsel Ingeborg Bachmanns mit Hans Magnus Enzensberger was published in 2018, edited by Hubert Lengauer, under the title „schreib alles was wahr ist auf“. It is characterized by the cheerfulness of the young letter partner, language(es)-games, hidden literary quotations, and secret codes.
The 2020 edition of the author’s first volume of stories, Das dreißigste Jahr (1961), edited by Rita Svandrlik with the collaboration of Silvia Bengesser and Hans Höller, offers not only an extensive, highly informative commentary but also, for the first time, an origin stage of the story Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha under the title Eine lange Nacht.
As the fifth volume of the Salzburg Bachmann Edition, Ingeborg Bachmann’s correspondence with Ilse Aichinger and Günter Eich, edited by Irene Fußl and Roland Berbig, was published in 2021 under the title „halten wir einander fest und halten wir alles fest!“. It documents the friendship of the two important Austrian authors between 1949 and 1962.
Ingeborg Bachmann’s second poetry collection, Anrufung des Großen Bären (1956), was published in 2022, edited by Luigi Reitani (†), as the sixth volume of the Salzburg Bachmann Edition, which for the first time comments on the poems in detail, taking into account the estate, and situates them in the cultural-historical discourse of the time.
