University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann January 2006 Part Three: Reading Bachmann Historically, Chapter 10. Bachmann and Materialist Feminism: Gender and the Cold War Sara Lennox Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress_cotmd Lennox, Sara, "Part Three: Reading Bachmann Historically, Chapter 10. Bachmann and Materialist Feminism: Gender and the Cold War" (2006). Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann. 12. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress_cotmd/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CHAPTER 10 Bachmann and Materialist Feminism GENDER AND THE COLD WAR Probably no one believes any more that writing literature takes place outside of the historical situation—that even a single writer exists whose starting point isn’t determined by the conditions of the time. —Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke Two apparently contradictory arguments underwrite this book which I want to address explicitly here. On the one hand, I have maintained that Bachmann’s writings should be read historically, though they often are not; on the other hand, I have asserted that all readings of Bachmann are necessarily historical: that is, informed by the historically specific concerns of readers, whether or not readers are aware of it. Walter Benjamin again helps to reconcile this apparent contradiction. His “Theses on the Philosophy of History” helps us to understand that all readings are necessarily “presentist” in that they take from the text that which “flashes up in a moment of danger” (255); that is, they appro- priate the text in a way that corresponds to the reader’s present needs.