War Diary

Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann 192673 is recognized as one of the most important novelists poets and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer her War Diary is not a daybyday journal but a series of sketches depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entriesall the more remarkable taking into account Bachmanns young age at the timereveal the eighteenyearolds hatred of both war and Nazism as she avoids the fanatics determination to defend Klagenfurt to the last man and the last woman. The British occupation leads to her incredible meeting with a British officer Jack Hamesh a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in 1938. He is astonished to find in Austria a young girl who has read banned authors such as Mann Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. Their relationship is captured here in the emotional and moving letters Hamesh writes to Bachmann when he travels to Israel in 1946. In his correspondence he describes how in his new home of Israel he still suffers from the rootlessness affecting so many of those who lost parents family friends and homes in the war. War Diary provides unusual insight into the formation of Bachmann as a writer and will be cherished by the many fans of her work. But it is also a poignant glimpse into life in Austria in the immediate aftermath of the war and the reflections of both Bachmann and Hamesh speak to a significant and larger story beyond their personal experiences.Praise for the German EditionA minor sensation that will make literary history. Thanks to the excellent critical commentary we gain a sense of a period in history and in Bachmanns life that reached deep into her later work. . . . What makes these diary entries so special is . . . the detail of the resistance described the exhilaration of unexpected peace the joy of freedom.Die Zeit