Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Volume 31 Issue 1 Austrian Literature: Gender, History, and Article 6 Memory 1-1-2007 Gender, the Cold War, and Ingeborg Bachmann Sara Lennox University of Massachusetts, Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the German Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Lennox, Sara (2007) "Gender, the Cold War, and Ingeborg Bachmann," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 31: Iss. 1, Article 6. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1646 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Gender, the Cold War, and Ingeborg Bachmann Abstract This essay uses the methodology of materialist feminism to situate Ingeborg Bachmann's life and writing in their Cold War context. After outlining the ways in which U.S. Cold War policy affected Austrian cultural life in the nineteen-fifties, I show that Bachmann's own activities during the period of U.S. occupation were steeped in that Cold War atmosphere. I also argue that the Cold War reconfiguration of gender relations left their imprint on Bachmann's writing. Comparing the narrative techniques of the unpublished short story "Sterben für Berlin" (1961) and Bachmann's Büchner Prize Speech "Ein Ort für Zufälle" (1964), I maintain that both texts address the Cold War's impact on Central European subjectivity and that Bachmann's subsequent writing oscillates between those two narrative approaches.