Das dreißigste Jahr; The Thirtieth Year

Das dreißigste Jahr; The Thirtieth Year (1961)

Das dreißigste Jahr; The Thirtieth Year, a collection of seven short stories published in 1961, was Bachmann’s prose debut following the poetry collections with which she rose to fame in the 1950s. The majority of the short stories in the collection focus on turning points in the protagonists’ lives, which briefly allow the central protagonists to glimpse another world, or attain insight that was previously denied to them. Bachmann’s Das dreißigste Jahr collection is primarily concerned with language (in particular, the utopian hope of refashioning the world through a new language), the persisting legacy of the Second World War, transgression (of boundaries and social norms), and issues of memory and identity.

The opening story of the collection, ‘Jugend in einer österreichischen Stadt’; ‘Youth in an Austrian Town’ describes a childhood in a southern Austrian town that is quite obviously Klagenfurt, before, during and after the Nazi era, narrated from the perspective of the protagonist looking back on her early life. The story is narrated for the most part from a third-person perspective, lending the story an exemplary quality, before shifting into first-person perspective right at the end. The reminiscences of the protagonist, who has long since left her hometown, about her wartime childhood, narrated without any kind of sublimation or rose-tinting situate the story in opposition to the nostalgic explorations of Heimat [home] prevalent in German-speaking culture in the post-war era.

The title story of the collection, ‘The Thirtieth Year’, is a coming-of-age story where the onset of the protagonist’s thirtieth year prompts a series of journeys and returns to the places that have shaped his life, notably Rome and Vienna, as well as reflections on his prior life-choices and hopes for the future. The story is predominantly concerned with issues of trauma, memory and identity formation, and ends with the protagonist achieving a renewed appreciation of life following a traumatic car accident.

‘Alles’; ‘Everything’ sees a thirty-year-old father who wishes to refashion the world through his son having to face the reality that his son cannot live up to his impossible expectations. The abandonment of his faith in his son is followed by the son’s death during a school trip. The short story offers a critique of contemporary pedagogical theories, while not condemning the protagonist’s utopian hopes for the world.

‘Unter Mördern und Irren’; ‘Among Murderers and Madmen’ has as its focus the legacy of the Second World War and the uneasy coexistence of victims and perpetrators following the war. The story focuses on a weekly Stammtisch [regular pub meeting] in Vienna of a group of acquaintances and the underlying tensions between the group’s Jewish and non-Jewish members. One evening, the meeting is further complicated by the entry of a stranger, who sits himself down amongst the group, and tells them how he served in the Wehrmacht but was court-martialled for cowardice due to being unable to shoot at an ‘abstraction’ such as the Poles or Americans, and was subsequently put in prison, a psychiatric clinic and then a camp. Thereafter, the man goes downstairs into the cellar of the bar where a group of Nazi war veterans are celebrating a reunion, and where he is subsequently murdered. Bachmann presents an ambivalent picture of guilt and victimhood in this story, offering no solution out of the ‘madness’ of post-war Austrian society where victims and perpetrators had somehow to coexist and refashion the country anew.

In ‘Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha’; ‘A Step Towards Gomorrah’ Charlotte, a woman in a conventional marriage, briefly considers the possibility of a relationship with a woman who approaches her at a party that she hosts. She abandons the idea, having come to the view that the relationship with Mara would be no solution for her, but in her consideration of the possibility of this relationship and her reflections upon her marriage she realises that her relationship with her husband is over. The story offers a strong critique of conventional bourgeois marriage, yet Charlotte’s envisaging of her lesbian relationship with Mara, where she imagines that she would be the dominant partner, is presented as no less liberating. Yet in Charlotte’s striving for a new language and a new form of communication between the sexes, the utopian hope for a new kind of interpersonal relationship, for which no models exist, is upheld.

‘Ein Wildermuth’; ‘A Wildermuth’ focuses on a judge, Anton Wildermuth, who suffers a nervous breakdown following a case that he has to decide, regarding the farm worker Josef Wildermuth, who shares his surname with the judge and is accused of having murdered his own father. The judge’s breakdown comes following his realisation that the truth cannot be known, and the subsequent section of the story traces how the judge had been instilled with a very absolute concept of truth by his father. In the course of the narrative, the judge distances himself from his father’s absolute conceptions, and finds his way out of his crisis by arriving at a more nuanced, relativist conception of truth.

The classic mythological story of Undine, whereby the beautiful water nymph can only acquire a soul if she marries a man and bears him a child, forms the basis of Bachmann’s ‘Undine geht’; ‘Undine goes’. In Bachmann’s version of the story the water nymph decides to abandon the inhumanity of the human world, following the crimes of the Second World War, her disappointment with the unequal relationships of men and women and the societal structures that humans have created, retreating to her underwater world. The short story affords many interpretative possibilities, among these that Undine represents art, which retreats out of the world, in order to reflect upon and offer greater insight into it. ‘Undine geht’ has similarly been interpreted in feminist terms, with Undine withdrawing from the world of men (who are all grouped under the name of ‘Hans’) and from conventional gender roles. However, the representation of femininity in the story as fluid and connected with the natural world has also been criticised as essentialist.

Further Reading in English

Karen R. Achberger, Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), Chapter 4 on ‘The Thirtieth Year’

Lisa de Serbine Bahrawy, The Voice of History. An Exegesis of Selected Short Stories from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Das dreissigste Jahr and Simultan from the Perspective of Austrian History (New York: Peter Lang, 1989)

Jo Ritta Horsley, ‘Re-reading “Undine geht”: Bachmann and Feminist Theory’, Modern Austrian Literature 18:3-4 (1985), 223-38

Further Reading in German

Sigrid Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1999), pp. 364-73