5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann

Abstract

In dark times, dreams may be the site of both witness and resistance. Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) employed dreams as a critique of nightmare-producing conditions in patriarchal, amnesic post-war Austria. Her 1971 novel Malina centres around a set of horrific nightmares in which the female protagonist is tortured, silenced and murdered by a father figure. Within the narrative frame, dreams form a site of witness insofar as they register the protagonist’s predicament in waking life, and resistance insofar as she fights back against oppressive forces. Beyond the narrative frame, Bachmann’s use of dreams constituted a potent strategy to circumvent empirical ways of knowing and deliver an indictment of post-war Austrian society. Following the plot into the present, Male Oscuro (2017) published for the first time Bachmann’s dream journals and letters to doctors during a mental health crisis in the 1960s. Whilst bemoaning the violation of her privacy, scholars have avidly explored how many of her dreams made their way with slight modification into Malina. One question that remains open regards the nature and importance of dreams to Bachmann. This chapter argues that dreams were of interest to Bachmann as both a deeply personal phenomenon and as a form of witness that might ultimately be spun into a public, artistic and politically loaded statement. Using Malina and Male Oscuro to inform one another, I show how dreams served Bachmann as a means to process trauma and critique the ills of the society around her.