Bachmann: "We didn't do well

Spring 1958: Ingeborg Bachmann is a celebrated poet, a prizewinner of Group 47, and the cover star of Der Spiegel. Her radio play "The Good God of Manhattan" is now being broadcast. Max Frisch, at this time busy with productions of "Biedermann and the Arsonists," writes to the young poetess expressing his enthusiasm for the radio play and the importance of the woman's perspective, illuminating "the other side." With Bachmann's response in June 1958, a correspondence begins that – from their initial acquaintance to long after their separation – documents the life, love, and suffering of one of the most famous couples in German literature through nearly 300 preserved letters: intimacy and distance, admiration and rivalry, jealousy, impulses to flee, and fear of loss, as well as the challenges of working in a shared apartment and the tension between the life of a writer and togetherness – the themes of these autobiographical testimonies are timeless. The letters once again show that life and work are inseparable; they are intimate communications and at the same time world literature. Commented on by the editors Barbara Wiedemann and Renate Langer, this correspondence offers a new and surprising perspective on the relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch.