A few years ago, it seemed that everyone – myself included – was reading Malina, the Austrian modernist Ingeborg Bachmann’s masterwork about a young woman in postwar Vienna collapsing under the weight of patriarchy and historical guilt. On the face of it, New Directions’ latest offering for Bachmanniacs is an abrupt change of pace: a historical novella about the Napoleonic Wars, following a young theological student as he returns to his hometown in southern Austria in 1813 to find it transformed by the French occupation.
The local pub has been overrun by soldiers, who harass the local women and extract increasingly heavy levies on the local farmers. Nationalism, directed against enemies within and without, is all the townspeople have left to cling to.
It would be silly to read this too literally as a parable for the war Bachmann was actually living through, but The Honditsch Cross is a quietly furious work, bitterly conscious of the ideological threads that tie the blithe nationalism of the 19th century to its 20th century apotheosis. Bachmann’s father was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, and all her work is astoundingly clear-eyed about ambiguities, ambivalences and nostalgic rationalisations of fascism. It’s juvenilia, but from one of the 20th century’s greatest writers: what a pleasure to see her ideas form.
- The Honditsch Cross by Ingeborg Bachmann (trans. by Tess Lewis) is available now from New Directions, details.
