Ingeborg Bachmanns "Malina"

The Complexities of Androgyny in Ingeborg Bachmann's Novel Malina

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

Ingeborg Bachmann's only completed novel Malina (1971) is a work of puzzling complexity, which critics have approached from very different angles[1]. In my paper today I intend to read it as the story of a woman's phantasies of men and the masculine. These phantasies converge on three different figures: the lover Ivan, the flatmate and companion Malina, and the father. Each of these figures is to a greater or less extent real, imaginary and symbolical at one and the same time, so any attempt to read the novel consistently on one level is inevitably thwarted. All three characters clearly have their real life equivalents; in each case the imagination of the narrator embellishes, enhances and to some extent distorts the factual; each figure is also the symbolic representative of a cultural phenomenon, a specific reading of gender, namely romantic love (Ivan), androgyny (Malina) and patriarchy (the father). But a novel is also a dynamic structure. In Malina phantasies of men and the masculine ultimately lead to the loss of the lover, a precarious victory over the threat of the father, followed by a tragic loss of the spontaneous feminine self.

In the first section of the novel "Happy with Ivan" the first-person narrator, who is nameless and whom I shall call Ich, is preoccupied with her love of Ivan. She has caught sight of him in front of a florist in Vienna and immediately insists on accompanying him home. Ivan's name, a version of John, Hans, links him to the fascinating but faithless lovers of the water-nymph Undine in Bachmann's earlier story Undine Goes, who were all called Hans. Ich associates him with the brilliant red Turk's Cap Lilies in the florist shop, red being the colour of passion; he is from Hungary, a country long occupied by the Turks, who are traditionally associated with polygamous practices, and he stands for the ethnic diversity of Austria, the overcoming of difference. Ivan has a high-powered job in the banking industry which necessitates constant travel; he is separated from his wife and assists his mother in looking after his two unruly sons. He is concentrated on the practicalities of making a busy life work, fixes a telephone cord while he talks to his lover, rings to borrow her car and relaxes by playing chess, which he loves for its competetiveness. Even when he takes his sons for an outing he is loath to waste time. He likes stories with happy outcomes and tries to persuade the narrator to write such a story. Ivan lives in a house opposite to her, with an odd rather than even number, a detail that is not surprising considering that he is in every way different from Ich, the childless poet who does not venture beyond her local environs, seems to have all the time in the world, and has no competitive streak in her. When they talk, usually on the telephone, only the barest amount of communication takes place.

What is it that attracts Ich to this apparently incompatible man? Surprisingly, the reasons are much the same as those that traditionally attract men to women: Ivan is beautiful, an object of aesthetic pleasure (321); due to his different lifestyle and mentality he is also a riddle to her, he promises change, excitement and novelty, everything about him seems unpredictable; furthermore, he does not appear to be particularly interested in her, he plays hard to get, it is a challenge to win him; and lastly, he is "ordinary" (321), well adjusted, completely at home in the everyday world, efficient. In this courtship, Ich is the active partner, a role traditionally reserved for the man; all the same, she must attract Ivan's attention by being feminine in the traditional sense (144): irrational, incompetent, childlike, useless opposite his common sense, purposefulness and effective use of time. But ultimately, like Undine's lovers by the name of Hans, Ivan presumably also needs somebody who can control his children and cook a meal, a useful woman not an attractive water-nymph, someone like his mother who presently looks after his children[2]. Austrian-German culture, which has always distinguished between the mother and the whore, would have it that these roles are mutally exclusive. All the while Ich, ecstatically in love with Ivan, has also become very attached to Ivan's children. She would like to feel useful and needed too (263-4,266), but the roles of nymph and housewife seem incompatible ( 78, 127). Ivan appears irritated whenever Ich shows an interest in his sons. In A Step towards Gomorrah, Bachmann's heroine speaks of the gulf between a love that aims at ecstasy and the institution of marriage, as it has come down to us. The chapter Happy with Ivan is about a misunderstanding between one partner who wants a fabled lover and the other who wants someone much more down to earth. The reader is aware of it from the start[3]; for Ivan, Ich is a "gentle lunatic" (294) with whom he can play in his scarce moments of leisure. Ich has no talent for playing; she is totally serious about her love. Ich turns Ivan into a figure of fantasy, a mysterious stranger, a dark knight, who will rescue the persecuted princess from the dangerously rising waters of the river[4], or if one wants to make the link with the earlier story, who will save the water nymph Undine from her native element and turn her into a human. The fairy-tale with its "happily ever after" is European culture's phantasy of eternal love. Ich has exaggerated hopes for the healing power of their love; it will be like a virus that will infect and redeem the whole of society (33). It is interesting to note the paradoxical image which associates love-sickness with healing. Because her hopes are so excessive and unfounded, Ich can be happy only to the extent that she creates for herself a phantasy world, that must be protected from all contact with reality. It takes her a long time to realise that Ivan has left her.  

But even before she has consciously accepted the betrayal of her wish-fulfilling dream, the nightmares take over. The middle section of the novel is entitled "The Third Man"; it consists of a sequence of nightmares of the father as his daughter's torturer, the extremity of which is in exact proportion to the euphoric vision of love that preceded it. The image of the father, though anchored in real if repressed experiences, points more generally to patriarchy, the generations of forebears, the cultural past, unremembered and therefore subconscious experiences of early childhood, the father's superior strength, and his right to exert authority over his family. Under Roman law the father had the power of life and death over the unmarried, unemancipated daughters placed under his hand, his manus. The father stands for the dominant cultural tradition. It allows him to have both a wife, whom he subjugates, and a number of lovers, such as Melanie, a young woman of similar age to his daughters, to whom he shows off his power. Even his daughter Leonore seems on of them. The role that Ich played opposite Ivan in the first section, that of the irrational, inept, childlike girl lover, is the role of the daughter to the cultural father. The nightmares exaggerate the mocking, contemptuous, silencing, disempowering, if charmingly playful manner of Ivan, and turn it into a brutal, sadistic, incestuous, and fascist attack on the initially quite helpless girl, whose trust in the father makes her an easy prey.[5] It is with immense difficulty, and only with the constant support of Malina,  that Ich as daughter gains the strength to rebel [6]. Malina's question concerning the identity of the father is, however, never answered, though there is a strong suggestion that he is the summation of all the former lovers whom Ich wants to forget.[7]

The Ivan relationship, though idealised by Ich as romantic love, is quintessentially patriarchal. In his relation with the woman, the man is here always in some form the father. But this is not the only form of gender relationship known to the European world. From the end of the eighteenth century and into the twentieth century, androgyny functioned as an alternative view of gender. The underlying myth, as found in Plato's Symposium, gives us a version of the fall of man from divine grace, not as a result of the lustful worldliness of Eve as the representative of women, nor as the result of the ambition, greed and violence of men, as in the story of Tantalus and his house, which is recounted by Goethe in Iphigenie, but as the joint guilt of men and women who, when originally joined together into one being, considered themselves so perfect that they had no need of the gods. For punishment they were split apart and are now forever roaming the world in search of their lost beloved, their other half. In this model of human gender relationships there is no generational discrepancy between the partners nor any implication of inequality. The myth can suggest a variety of things: it can imply that the ideal human being is androgynous, that is with both masculine and feminine characteristics; it can also imply that there are men and women who were intended for each other from the beginning of time, one of the assumptions of romantic love; and it raises human love (in Plato there were also homosexual pairs) to a status that arouses the envy of the gods. Paradise can be restored if man and woman join together in love or, alternately, if the human being combines in himself both masculinity and femininity and thereby becomes fully human.

There are many and very different echoes of this myth in recent European culture. The Romantics believed in the eternal love of the ideal heterosexual pair, also known as romantic love. This was usually conceived as a love in which the partners complemented each other, but at times also as the love of siblings whose compatability was grounded in their similarity, their blood relationship. At the same time, the Romantics also considered the ideal personality to be androgynous [8]. The Romantic motif of the double, whose encounter usually presages death, could link in with the belief that the union with one's other self can only be achieved in a higher state of being. (Bachmann refers to the topos of the Doppelgänger).[9] Freud was convinced of the bisexuality of the child which was, he believed, destroyed in the process of maturation, not without the incurral of guilt and the diminution and disempowerment of the woman in particular. Jung believed that each human psyche contained a soul or animus/anima of the opposite gender. Weininger thought that every human being comprised masculine and feminine characteristcs (of which only the masculine ones were ultimately of value) and couples attracted each other to the extent that they balanced each other out to form the union of a complete man with a complete woman. 

Historically, the achievement of androgyny has been fraught with dangers for women in particular. Initially the eternal beloved, they often had to die so that their male partners could absorb their femininity into themselves and become androgynous. (Novalis, Musil's Ulrich). Men who might be seen to incorporate the feminine ideal were often absurdly hostile to real women, who had now become rivals (Schopenhauer). Worse still, the pursuit of androgyny brought with it the necessity of defining and thereby stereotyping masculinity and femininity. It helped to entrench a dualistic habit of thought. Where gender characterisations were attempted, the woman would unfailingly be apportioned the less desirable qualities.

As his name suggests, which can be read both as a surname (Malina) (men were often called by their surnames) or as a woman's name (Malina), the figure of Malina belongs into the context of androgyny. Malina is introduced to us at the very beginning of the novel. Ich was living with him when she met Ivan and continues to do so, though she has little time for him during the period of her infatuation. Malina is on one level a real person, the kind of flat-mate one might choose in a situation of communal living because one has a good deal in common. Like the narrator, he comes from Klagenfurt (17); like her he is a writer (he has published a little known book) (16), they meet at a philosophical lecture in Munich (15), and like her he has many friends in the closed circle of Viennese polite society with its artist proteges (18). But unlike the narrator, Malina also has a regular job;  just like Hofmannsthal and Musil before him, he works in the Viennese Museum of Military History(7). Film crews, in particular,  who are preparing historical reenactments, draw on his expertise. Though the narrator and Malina occasionally eat out together and visit friends, they are surprised and amused that people could ever see them as a couple (262). There is no erotic attraction between them, rather a brotherly relationship of caring on the part of Malina that does, however, not shy away from physical contact. Malina looks after the distressed Ich much like Martin, the brother in Der Fall Franza, looks after his sister in her distress. Ich first hears of Malina in connection with the death of his older sister, Maria Malina, a famous actress whose funeral attracts great crowds. Even before she has met him, Ich is attracted by the fact that Malina is a younger brother. On a later occasion she tells him that it is important to her that he is younger, otherwise she would not be subjugating herself to him of her own free will (259). Malina is calm, efficient and observant. He remembers to feed the cats Ich should be looking after, even though he dislikes cats (121), but he does expect Ich to make the breakfast and make it properly without letting the eggs boil hard. He sends her the telegram she needs to return home from her holiday early, but can't pick her up because he is on duty at work. He supports her through her nightmares and on one occasion confiscates her sleeping tablets. He never pries into Ich's relationship with Ivan, though he does feel neglected and somewhat annoyed about the mess she has got herself into. Only once does he become angry enough to slap her; his masculine pride is hurt when she presumes to know things about himself, more particularly about his weaknesses and fears, that he has never told her (304-5).

This is Malina the friend and flat-mate. It is clearly on him that the Malina of her own psyche, her animus so to speak, is based. (The Jungian concept is alluded to, for in the dream sequence the narrator has a child called Animus that is then killed by the father's girl-friend [237].)  While Ich needs to have her masculine nature demonstrated to her by a living person,. we are told that Malina's place was already taken up by Malina long before Ich had actually met him. She searched for him for many years, occasionally catching a glimpse of the man she wanted at a bus-stop or a lecture, or through the comments of friends who knew him. He existed in her before he ever materialised for her. Though she perceives this animus to be younger than she is, to have evolved in the course of her development to maturity,  she also sees it as a super-ego standing above her (14), the superego which according to Freud women have such difficulties in forming.

All the same, Ich's androgyny is not the harmonious union of  two parts of a whole, a completion of character structure. A clairvoyant who examines Ich's horoscope tells her it does not appear to be that of a single person but of two that stand in extreme contrast to one another; she must constantly feel torn - that is if the dates are right. Ich asks politely: The torn woman, the torn man, is it not so?  Separately, is the answer, this could be endured, but as it stands hardly, the masculine and the feminine too, reason and emotion, productivity and self-destructiveness manifested themselves in a strange way. The astrologer surmises once again that the dates must be wrong ( 260-1). What emerges here is something more akin to a schizophrenic character structure. Androgyny is not a haven. And the confusion goes deeper still, for it is also a confusion between Malina the friend and Malina the animus.

What is the narrator's phantasy of Malina? It is complex and contradictory. On the one hand he is her “other”, everything that she is not (19). He is rational, controlled, reliable, thoughtful, sensible and reserved. These are qualities that tend to be associated with masculinity, the strong silent type. Ich, who is happy to be the stereotypical woman in her relationship with Ivan (144), needs a more balanced nature to cope with life independently.

But paradoxically Malina is also her close relation. As said earlier, he also comes from Klagenfurt. He seems to have the same circle of friends, independently of her. They share tastes and a life-style. They are both writers, and have similar intellectual interests. They are both deeply committed to Austria and Vienna. Malina is a brother figure, the masculine version of herself, her double or Doppelgänger. He is someone with whom she is completely familiar, with whom she can feel completely at home. She knows his mind just as he knows hers. There is an incestuous element in their relationship (19).

 Then again Malina is her ideal, someone whose judgement can be trusted implicitly. He has a way of seeing through people that does not expose or diminish them but lets them gain in dimension and become complete, unique, enriched and distinct. This, she thinks, is incomparably more than her own feminine imagination can achieve (263).

Malina is also the conscious mind who understands her mysterious unconscious, the patient analyst who forces her to come to terms with herself. Malina provides support when it is needed, but he will not let her slump into helplessness either. He insists that she do her share of the chores without being too hard on her when she is incompetent. He protects her from her own suicidal urges (343). It is Malina who keeps her going.

Furthermore, Malina is her sparring partner, the person on whom she can test her ideas, with whom she can talk things out. In contrast to Ivan, Malina listens to what she says and reacts intelligently. He takes her seriously even when she pretends to be fooling. But he also prevents her from telling her stories in the disorganised babbling, or to put it differently, in the emotive musical way that comes natural to her (279). He insists that what she says must have a point and a meaning. He can be the censor who silences her, for while creativity is essentially not a controlled and conscious process, successful creativeness cannot dispense with control and consciousness.

In spite of his helpfulness, consideration and politeness, Malina also has an aggressive side to his nature. He can get angry, to the point of slapping Ich. It is not for nothing that he works in the Museum of Military History. He tries to make her realise that there is no such thing as war and peace; we are always in a state of war, and need to be on constant alert, ready to fight back (193, 246). He is suspicious of her utopian phantasies and her gullibleness when it comes to hard luck stories (114). He brings her back to earth. In this role Malina has moments where he resembles the patriarchal father.

The complexity of the Malina phantasy is borne out by the fact that his name links him to a variety of real and unreal characters in the novel. Lina, the resolute and competent cleaning lady is one; Ich's apparently lost sister, Lili, another; Melanie, the young girl-friend of the brutal dream father, equivalent in age to a daughter, also echoes his name; the dream daughter's child, Animus, has a share in his name, which can alternatively be read as an anagramm of "animal".

It is not merely that Malina is a complex and contradictory character - though on the realistic level he is that too - but that Ich's needs are complex and contradictory. Becoming an androgynous personality is fraught with difficulties.

Malina helps her to extricate herself from the pretentious and shallow world of rich and aristocratic Viennese art patrons, by calling her home when she requests this. His support throughout her episode of traumatic nightmares helps her to stand up to the dream father in her final dreams. Malina keeps the household going for her when she is up in the clouds, and eventually forces her to take account of reality. But in the end, Malina also imprisons or destroys her (she makes the accusation of murder [354]).

There are a number of factors which could have contributed to the disappearance of Ich. Foremost among them is probably the loss of Ivan (342). As a result of this loss, Ich as the nymph or siren has lost her purpose; the nymph is in any case a personality that needs to be complemented, that cannot exist without help: Undine needs the union with a man to become human. It is Malina who keeps on whispering to Ich that she must kill Ivan (321) and his sons (332); in relinquishng Ivan, Ich makes herself redundant, kills herself.

Within the androgynous whole, Ich is the ecstatic, spontaneous and emotional side (264), the side that is mortally wounded by the loss of Ivan, the side that would be capable of taking an overdose of sleeping tablets, or dropping her face on the hot-plate and destroying herself in conjunction with the Malina to whom she is coupled. In the logic of Malina it is better to imprison the errant part than destroy the entire person. While it is Ich herself who goes into the crack in the wall, Malina refuses to stop her, which she sees as a kind of murder.

In the course of her nightmares of the father, Ich had, with the support of Malina, eventually gained the courage to stand up to patriarchal domination. But this means that she can also detect the patriarchal voice in Malina himself, that there are moments when she loses her respect for him and questions his authority.

The most violent moment in their relationship occurs when Ich confronts Malina with his own vulnerability. She mentions an incident when Malina was on a steep road in a car behind a truck on which the load of logs had started to slip, another when he had swum out into the lake at night and been overtaken by cramps so that he was in danger of drowning, and then a period where he had developed a neurotic fear of electricity so that he would sit in the dark at night (304). Though Malina claims she cannot know such things, he will not deny that they occurred. The last he explains by saying that she had the limelight then and he was left in the dark. What is revealed here is that the separation between Ich and Malina, the unconscious and the conscious, the emotional and the rational, the private and the public is not as neat as philosophies of androgyny would like to have it. There is a dynamic between the masculine and feminine halves of the self that can threaten the autonomy of the masculine. Malina here loses his temper and slaps Ich. The solution that he suggests is to confine the feminine (326ff.): "You have to stay put. It has to be your place. You are not to move forwards or backwards. Then you will be victorious on this spot, the only one where you belong.... There you will be so completely yourself that you can relinquish your I. It will be the first place where the world is cured of somebody" (330).

But is this really a solution? In the night before her disappearance, Ich makes repeated frantic attempts to write to a lawyer, asking him for help in making a valid last will, in which she wishes to bequeath her papers to Malina (all but Ivan's letters for which she found a precarious hiding-place at the last moment) but the objects that she loved to someone else, who can only be Ivan (346). When she has gone into the wall, she sees how Malina treats these treasured objects. He breaks her glasses, her way of seeing, and throws them away, discards her blue crystal cube, that has for her the magical dream meaning of "writing in wonderment", hides her candle-stick and her favorite coffee cup, breaks her record, presumably the utopian song from Schönberg's Pierre Lunaire,  throws out her sleeping pills, tears up a few of her letters and, all in all, as she puts it, throws away her bequest (355). When Ivan rings, Malina pretends that Ich has never existed. All the components of Ich's inspiration are discarded in an often brutal and dishonest fashion. Though in various interviews Bachmann herself gave the impression that the take-over of Malina, who would from now on be the narrator of the "Todesarten" stories originally experienced by Ich, was a triumph, the novel itself ends with the words "it was murder". Earlier the eternal murderer had been identified as the father, and Ich makes an effort to absolve both Malina and Ivan from blame (347), but Malina's role in her demise remains ambiguous. In anticipation of what would happen, Ich had earlier talked of a time "when only the dry, pleasant, good voice of Malina" would be heard, and no longer any "beautiful words spoken by her in great excitement" (344). According to Bachmann, the novel Malina was to have served as an "overture" to her planned novel cycle Todesarten[10]. Malina is still determined by the chaotic and highly emotional style of Ich. The later novels in the voice of Malina were to be told in a more orderly and detached narrative style. Perhaps the short stories of the Simultan cycle (1972) can give us an indication of Malina's way of writing.

But Malina is not simply a book about narrative voice. It is, in a far wider sense, a book about the possibilities of living a fulfilled and harmonious life within a society that polarises gender in a manner that always leaves the feminine more vulnerable, be it to the indifference of the lover, the brutality of the patriarchal father, or the rationality of her masculine self. Not romantic love,  not the repression of patriarchal domination into unconscious realms of the psyche, and not an androgynous personality structure can, it seems, ultimately solve the problem. One way or another, the feminine is killed off, locked away, silenced, annihilated by means of a great variety of Todesarten. While Bachmann's novel seems to prove that polarising perceptions of gender do not lead to a better society,  paradoxically, her utopian hopes are still focussed on the ecstatic experience of romantic love, the defiance of the patriarchal father and a harmoniously androgynous personality structure. The Malina she praises in various interviews, who takes the endowment of his feminine self seriously without being at the mercy of its whims, seems to her the ideal persona of the writer. Bachmann is, in the end, a child of her culture and her times. Similarity or equality of genders, Enlightenment values, and separateness or incomparability of genders, an approach experimented with more recently, have no experiential reality for her. But after a trip to Poland in May 1973, just before her death, she makes a statement that suggests that her attitude to gender could have changed: "Most women need a hope, something they have never been told. I don't need it, I have known it for a long time, namely that they are capable of thinking in the same way, that they can think just as sharply as men. That they are just as capable, that they are less vain, that they are able to perform greater feats than men. That they do not need pity and are prepared to make any sacrifice to do something. That was the lesson that Poland gave me."[11]

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[1] In an interview with Toni Kienlechner Bachmann herself stated: " Man muß überhaupt ein Buch auf verschiedene Arten lesen können und es heute anders lesen als morgen." ( Christine Koschel and Inge von Weidenbaum (eds.) Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden. Gespräche und Interviews. Piper: Munich/ Zurich, 1983, p.100). The novel has been read among other things for what it says about language and communication (e.g. Andreas Hapkemeyer Die Sprachthematik in der Prosa Ingeborg Bachmanns, Frankfurt am Main/ Bonn, 1982; Dirk Göttsche Die Produktivität der Sprachkrise in der modernen Prosa, Frankfurt am Main, 1987), about art ( e.g. Susanne Thiele "Die Selbstreflexion der Kunst in Ingeborg Bachmanns Roman 'Malina'", in: The Germanic Review. Washington, Vol.66, 1991, S.58-69) as a roman a clef referring to events in Bachmann's life ( e.g. Monika Albrecht " Mein Name sei Gantenbein - mein Name? Malina. Zum intertextuellen Verfahren der 'imaginären Autobiographie'" In: Andrea Stoll (ed.) Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1992, pp.265-287), as a work relying on literary, musical or filmic intertextuality (e.g. Karen Achberger Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann, University of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 1995, pp.99-128; Eva Lindemann "Die Gangart des Geistes. Musikalische Strukturen in der späten Prosa Ingeborg Bachmanns" in Stoll (ed.), 1992, pp.301-320), as an analysis of patriarchy following Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (Sabine Wilke Dialektik und Geschlecht. Feministische Schreibpraxis in der Gegenwartsliteratur, Stauffenberg Verlag: Tübingen, 1996, pp.123-152), as a political statement on modernity, Austria and post-WWII culture ( e.g. Hans Mayer "Malina oder der große Gott von Wien", in Stoll [ed.] 1992, op. cit.; Kurt Bartsch "Frühe Dunkelhaft" und Revolte. Zu geschichtlicher Erfahrung und utopischen Grenzüberschreitungen in erzählender Prosa von Ingeborg Bachmann, masch. Habil., Graz 1982; Gudrun Kohn-Waechter Das Verschwinden in der Wand. Destruktive Moderne und Widerspruch eines weiblichen Ich in Ingeborg Bachmanns "Malina", J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart, 1992), as a novel about love (e.g. Bärbel Lücke Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina, Oldenbourg: Munich, 1993); as a critique of rationality ( e.g. Sigrid Weigel "'Ein Ende mit der Schrift. Ein anderer Anfang.' Zur Entwicklung von Ingeborg Bachmanns Schreibweise" in: Ingeborg Bachmann. Sonderband aus der Reihe 'Text und Kritik', ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Munich 1984).

[2] "Aber da Ivan mich nicht liebt, mich auch nicht braucht, warum sollte er mich eines Tages lieben oder brauchen?" (78) "Denn ich selbst vermag Ivan nicht zu fesseln." (84)

[3] Ich suspects that the reader will have noticed: "Jeder würde sagen, daß Ivan und ich nicht glücklich sind. Oder daß wir noch lange keinen Grund haben, uns glücklich zu nennen. Aber jeder hat nicht recht." (80)

[4] The identity of the dark stranger, though according to Bachmann initially Ivan, a fact which is confirmed by a dream with a later incarnation of Ivan as the mysterious stranger (201ff.),could later also be linked to Malina. Bachmann writes about the Ivan figure: "Wie ich beim Korrigieren das alles wieder hab lesen müssen, habe ich auch gemerkt, daß es mit Ivan gar nicht so einfach ist; daß er vielleicht auch eine Doppel- oder Dreifachfigur ist; denn er taucht ja schon einmal auf, indem sie ihn zurückverlegt in eine Legende, wo sie ihn vor mehr als zwetausend Jahren getroffen hat und weiß, er wird der Mann sein, den sie treffen muß und eines Tages wieder treffen wird; und sie wird ihn sofort wiedererkennen." (Wir müssen wahre Worte finden, p.88)

[5] Bachmann herself draws attention to the fact that Ivan in the dream sequence is a different Ivan: "Er taucht aber noch einmal im zweiten Kapitel auf, in den Träumen, und ist zwar wieder Ivan, aber nicht der Ivan, den wir im ersten Kapitel in dieser - sagen wir - Liebesgeschichte kennengelernt haben. Ich hab' also den Verdacht, daß er auch eine Doppelfigur ist." (Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden, p.88) The ambiguous relationship between the dream father and Ivan is revealed when the dreaming Ich finds a letter she once wrote hanging from the tooth of the father's crocodile lover. It says:"Mein geliebter Vater, du hast mir das Herz gebrochen. Krakkrak gebrochen damdidam meines gebrochen mein Vater krak krak rrrak dadidam Ivan, ich will Ivan, ich meine Ivan, ich liebe Ivan, mein geliebter Vater." (236)

[6] The first dream that shows signs of rebellion is  the one where the father is a film producer and Ich destroys his ship in retaliation for the humiliations he has subjected her to (208). In a later dream she refuses to bury her dead child in her father's presence. (238) Then she learns to hide her words from her father: "Ich habe die Worte im Satz vom Grunde verborgen, der vor meinem Vater für immer sicher und geheim ist, so sehr halte ich den Atem an." (240) In reward, she is given three magical stones; the first designates "living in wonderment", the second, "writing in wonderment"; the message of the third is still unknown (241).  Then she tells her father that she does not care what he thinks; "ich nehme mir das Recht auf mein Leben" (242), that she can do what he can do (243) Eventually she tells him that she thinks she knows who he is; she throws a heavy object shattering his plate to inform him that she no longer has any feelings for him and could kill him (244-45). Then in the last dream she says: I know who you are. I have understood everything. (246) What she has understood is that in his many guises (as butcher, as executioner, as SS-man) he is her murderer (247).

[7] In an interview with Ilse Heim on 5.5.1971 Bachmann says about Ich "Es wird von ihrer Jugend gesprochen, aber was sich in den entscheidenden Jahren von 18 bis 25 ereignet hat, die Zerstörung ihrer Person, das wird in Träume verlegt." (Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden, Piper: Munich, Zurich, p.108) Incidentally, Ingeborg Bachmann was  32 years old in July 1958 when she entered into a four year relationship with Max Frisch, so it would seem that she did not want Frisch identified with the father.

[8] For a more wide-ranging discussion of androgyny see Achim Aurnhammer Androgynie. Studium zu einem Motiv in der europäischen Literatur, Böhlau:Cologne, Vienna, 1986; Raymond Furness "The Androgynous Ideal: Its Significance in German Literature", in: Modern Language Review, 60, 1965, pp.58-64; and Sara Friedrichsmeyer The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism. Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and the Metaphysics of Love, Peter Lang: Bern, Frankfurt am Main, New York, 1983.

[9]"Das Doppelgängermotiv habe ich ja nicht erfunden. Es ist uralt. Nur meine Variation ist anders: Das Ich, weiblich, hat ein männliches Gegenüber." (Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden, op. cit., p.74) Asked for her main motives in writing the story Bachmann answered: "Vor allem einmal die Ich-Figur, die weiblich ist, und der Doppelgänger, der männlich ist, also eine Zwitterfigur. Der Leser muß am Anfang gar nicht erkennen, daß das eine Person ist." (ibid. p.87)

[10] "Bachmann:....dieses Buch 'Malina' ist für mich ein in sich geschlossener Anfang oder eine Ouvertüre...für dieses noch nicht geschriebene Buch 'Todesarten'... Da das ganze Buch auf die Gewinnung dieser überlegenen Figur, also dieses Malina angelegt ist, gibt es natürlich schon zum ersten Mal diese vielen Todesarten des Ich, die zu seiner Zerstörung führen.... Kienlechner: So daß also das, was nach der 'Ouvertüre' kommt, noch mehr erzählerischen Charakter haben wird? Bachmann: Ja. Malina wird uns erzählen können, was ihm der andere Teil seiner Person, das Ich, hinterlassen hat." (Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden, p.95-6)

[11] Quoted from Andreas Hapkemeyer (ed.) Ingeborg Bachmann. Bilder aus ihrem Leben, R. Piper: Munich, Zurich, 1983, p. 153. ("Die meisten Frauen brauchen eine Hoffnung, etwas, was man ihnen noch nie gesagt hat. Ich brauche es nicht, ich weiß es schon lange, nämlich, daß sie fähig sind, genau so zu denken, genau so scharf zu denken, wie die Männer. Daß sie genau so fähig sind, daß sie sogar weniger eitel sind, daß sie zu größeren Leistungen imstande sind als Männer. Daß sie kein Mitleid brauchen und zu jedem Opfer fähig sind, um etwas zu tun. Das war die Lehre, die mir Polen gegeben hat.")