Complete Stories

Where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….

Ingeborg Bachmann’s short fiction — too long underread in English — arrives here in full force: a feminist masterpiece, razor-sharp and as urgent as a confession. This major collection draws together all the stories Bachmann wrote over her lifetime, many appearing in English for the first time.

These are intensely charged tales of power and submission, obsession and shame, which play out in cliff-side hotels, red-lit bars and court trials in Vienna, Rome and Paris. Bachmann follows lonely lovers through their stifled quarrels and private cruelties, where intimacy becomes a prison, language a weapon, and guilt the very air women breathe. As they struggle to make room for their lives within the narrowing confines of 1950s and 60s society, Bachmann exposes the legacy of fascism, lurking so close to the surface.

An undisputed giant of German-language literature, Bachmann’s ‘vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet’ (Guardian).