War Diary

Ingeborg Bachmann

Translated by Mike Mitchell

With Letters from Jack Hamesh, Edited, with an Afterword, by Hans Höller

 

4.5 x 7 inches, 108 pp. February 2018

ISBN : 9780857425324

Rs  399.00 (PB)
$10.00 (PB)
£7.99 (PB)

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Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) is a series of sketches depicting the last months of the Second World War and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria, and revealing the 18-year old’s hatred of both war and Nazism.

 

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. 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.

Ingeborg Bachmann is the author of Darkness Spoken, Malina and Simultan, among others.

 

For many years a lecturer in German with a special interest in Austrian literature, Mike Mitchell has worked as a literary translator since 1995. He was awarded the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Herbert Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China. Mitchell has also translated Peter Handke’s Till Day You do Part or A Question of Light and Max Frisch’s An Answer from the Silence, both published by Seagull Books.

Literary Theory
Literary Criticism