Waking the Dead: Correspondences between Walter Benjamin and Ingeborg Bachmann By Karen Remmler

Ingeborg Bachmann's late prose has often been read either as a representation of female experience in postwar Austria or as a commentary on the process of writing. This book offers a new reading by examining the relationship between historical experience and the structures of remembrance in Bachmann's Todesarten in the context of Walter Benjamin's approach to memory. Benjamin's notion of "insightful remembering" offers a conceptualization of remembrance that exposes the political, social, and psychological consequences of obscuring the ways in which public memory both shapes and is shaped by conflicting individual memories of the past. The differences between public and private forms of memory prevent their critical interchange and affects the ability to collectively mourn the victims of historical atrocities.