A Trip to Klagenfurt: In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann

Alongside Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann was THE major postwar German-language poet, as well as the author of prose fiction as feminist and ahead of its time as Virginia Woolf's. Uwe Johhson was Bachmann's close friend, and in this tender commemoration Johnson mourns Bachmann's passing by accumulating information. Quoting extensively from city plans, timetables, guidebooks, newspaper articles, and history books, Johnson presents the reader with material enough to, in Heinrich Boll's words, "secure the evidence of finding out where someone comes from." By factually depicting Klagenfurt, Johnson is successful in his attempt to approach the truth of Ingeborg Bachmann.