Malina

What remains of a life? “She was a happy child,” “he was a hot-tempered guy,” “a good chess player,” “a reliable friend.” Memories from strangers, friends, and lovers; rumors; letters; a few photos, perhaps. Above all, however: fixed descriptions; explanations of what someone was like, of what defined them. The image of a person, the image others have of me, is an abyss of attributions and expectations. Yet it would be difficult to ask the question independently of this: Who am I? Can this question even be answered? We cannot help but try. “Hell is other people,” Sartre put it succinctly. The freezing of the self in the fire of others’ gazes is inescapable. Ingeborg Bachmann writes of this fire in her prose, poems, and letters: the gaze of others, society, is a “scene of murder.” The self burns brightly in the face of the collective “we.” The murderers: the others—and I. I and the others. Bachmann wrote in a 1959 letter to Max Frisch: “There was always a lack of position, always, and I always failed because of it. I was always on the outside, unclassified; in love and through love I always lost my footing and therefore never had one.” There is no better way to summarize the suffering of the nameless first-person narrator in “Malina,” Bachmann’s only novel, than in this attempt to position oneself within a “we” and against a “we” that so vehemently demands that one be oneself, yet at the same time forgives not the slightest deviation.”"Malina" is a novel and yet "expressly an autobiography, but not in the conventional sense. A spiritual, imaginary autobiography. This monological or nocturnal existence has nothing to do with the ordinary autobiography, in which a life story and tales of various people are recounted." (Bachmann). She also shared this identity crisis and distrust of labels with her long-time partner Max Frisch. The constant reinvention of oneself, the search for oneself, was a leitmotif for both of them. But the ease afforded to Frisch—who wanted to understand crisis as a “productive state” from which one must “remove the aftertaste of catastrophe”—was not granted to Bachmann. For there is a gap. Whereas Frisch, though always suffering from the contingency of his own identity, could nevertheless enjoy its fluidity, Bachmann was constantly called into question both as a woman and as a writer—she could never strip the crisis of fixation of its catastrophe. “Malina” was published in 1971, two years before her death. She suffered severe injuries in a fire she had started while falling asleep with a lit cigarette and ultimately succumbed to them. What remained was always: the image. The final arrangements were always made by others. by Johannes Nölting