Waking the Dead: Correspondences Between Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Remembrance and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Ways of Dying

Ingeborg Bachmann’s late prose has often been read as a representation of female experience in postwar Austria or as a commentary on the process of writing. ‘Waking the Dead’ offers a new reading that examines the relationship between historical experience and the structures of remembrance in the context of Walter Benjamin’s approach to memory — his notion of ‘insightful remembering’ offers a conceptualization of remembrance that exposes the political, social, and psychological consequences of obscuring the ways in which public memory both shapes and is shaped by conflicting individual memories of the past.