Protected: I Cannot Make My Son Purer Than This Sickening World

Diving into Ingeborg Bachmann’s writing requires the literary equivalent of a bathysphere to fully appreciate its layers and depths—so much is lurking beneath the flotsam of political jargon, commercial advertising, and clichéd pronouncements. Born in the Austrian provincial capital of Klagenfurt in 1926, Bachmann dissected social and political discourses while probing the psychological wreckage of World War II, and the abiding legacy of fascism. Yet, even as her characters search for meaning, they crash against the limits of language—appropriate words and phrases seem just out of reach. “Everything” is no exception.

As though to highlight this elusive quality of language, this short story first “appeared” in a 1959 broadcast: a print version came out a year later and, in 1961, formed part of the collection The Thirtieth Year. That was also Bachmann’s only book published in English during the author’s lifetime, in Michael Bullock’s translation.

Bachmann’s dexterity in conjuring words that show where words fall short is part of her genius. So too is the crafted linguistic beauty that defined her earlier poetry and which finds its echo in her prose. In the story, an unnamed narrator looks back on his marriage to Hanna, her pregnancy, the birth—and brief life—of their son, and reflects on his own attitude to fatherhood, how it evolved from a utopian calling to a demoralized defeat. “It’s all a question of language,” he realizes, “a question of whether I could protect the child from our language until he had established a new one and could usher in a new age.” But as the child inevitably becomes socialized to this clearly not-best-of-all-possible worlds, the father withdraws, much to his later regret. “I was trapped, together with my child, and condemned in advance to take part in the old world. And so I gave up on him. I gave up loving him. This child was capable of everything—everything except escaping and break­ing this vicious cycle.”

In this and other stories, Bachmann reveals structures of oppression that are encoded in language, enabled by silence, and enforced by patriarchal social institutions—thereby giving voice to that whereof one dared not speak in post-war Austria. “No new world without a new language” is a recurring theme throughout her work.

Tess Lewis and I have attempted to capture both the electricity as well as the musicality of this story, and very much hope you will feel inspired to immerse yourself in the entire collection.

– Philip Boehm
Co-Translator of Ingeborg Bachmann: The Complete Stories