Ingeborg Bachmann's Telling Stories: Fairy Tale Beginnings and Holocaust Endings By Kirsten Krick-Aigner

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), an Austrian postwar author whose name and work have become widely recognized in German-speaking countries, is still relatively unknown in the United States, even though her writings deal with important contemporary and universal concerns such as war, xenophobia, and gender relations. Ingeborg Bachmann's Telling Stories explores Bachmann's prose in a socio-cultural and historical context by demonstrating how she applies elements from traditional German and Austrian fairy tales to come to terms with events of the Third Reich and her reactions to the Holocaust. Krick-Aigner examines intertextual references to the fairy tale in German Romanticism and explores the role of the writer in Bachmann's literary tale in the novel Malina. Bachmann's revision of the Bluebeard tale in the novel fragment Der Fall Franza (Franza's Case) and the short story "Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha" ("A Step towards Gomorrah") raises significant questions about xenophobia, fascism, and the Holocaust, as well as women's mental health and gender roles. Ingeborg Bachmann's Telling Stories offers English-speaking readers an interdisciplinary reading of the author's work, which affirms the historical relevance of Bachmann's writing within twentieth-century literature.