Ingeborg Bachmanns 'Ein Ort für Zufälle' - Ein interpretierender Kommentar

Ingeborg Bachmann's Berlin speech Ein Ort für Zufälle ('A Place for Coincidences'), given on the occasion of accepting the Georg Büchner prize in 1964, remains an enigmatic, difficult to classify document of post-war German-language literature, and has been the subject of considerable controversy. The present commentary provides an introduction to the complex aesthetics of the text, taking into consideration its background in time, culture, and historical attitudes, along with its system of intertextual allusions. The commentary provides readers and scholars of Bachmann with a compendium of different interpretations of her work, and should stimulate them to seek new ways of understanding it.


Christian Däufel, Universität Erlangen.