From Milan to West Berlin: Spatial Alienation and the Post‐1945 Anxiogenic Cityscape in Anna Maria Ortese's Silenzio a Milano and Ingeborg Bachmann's ‘Ein Ort Für Zufälle’

This article examines Anna Maria Ortese's collection of journalistic reportages and short stories, Silenzio a Milano (Silence in Milan, 1958), and Ingeborg Bachmann's speech ‘Ein Ort für Zufälle’ (17 October 1964). It focuses on their topophobic images of Milan and West Berlin, the anxious representations of these post‐1945 urban landscapes. Their pathographies of 1950s Milan and 1960s West Berlin are explored by linking contemporary studies on alienation with the polarity of affective responses to space. The analysis especially resorts to Gaston Bachelard's and Yi‐Fu Tuan's discourses of topoaffective polarities, that is topophobia and topophilia, as a starting point to highlight Ortese's and Bachmann's shared focus on the material, psychic and social character of peacetime Italian and West German societies. While recognising the texts’ differences in genre and degree of negativity, the article reads the complex representations of the ‘pathological’ relationality between the self and the socially constructed world in Silenzio a Milano and ‘Ein Ort für Zufälle’ as topical metaphors for alienation in urban capitalism. It positions Ortese and Bachmann as critics not only of the haunted histories of Nazi‐fascism but also of post‐1945 European models of growth.