Feeling Implicated: Affective Entanglements in Ingeborg Bachmann's ‘Das Dreißigste Jahr’

Ingeborg Bachmann's narrative ‘Das dreißigste Jahr’, published in the eponymous 1961 short story collection, famously marks Bachmann's turn from poetry to prose. What is perhaps best described as the radical hybridity of the text's affective stylistic registers has continued to puzzle readers. If, however, the narrative is read through the prism both of Michael Rothberg's concept of the implicated subject and the concept of feeling implicated, then this radical affective hybridity becomes legible as the necessary outcome of a narrative technique that highlights the protagonist's emotional investments in and struggles against historical and present structures of injustice in which he is complexly implicated. Simultaneously, the text's generic and formal hybridity reveals the narrative's implication in the exclusionary structures of European literature and intellectual history. At the same time — and especially to the extent that the readership of Bachmann's texts recruits itself from the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ — we as readers are likewise implicated in the systemic injustices embedded in and carried forward by the Western canon. Through its promiscuous intercourse with Western intellectual history and its radical intertextuality, Bachmann's ‘Das dreißigste Jahr’ prompts us to recognise our implication in historical and systemic injustices, to grapple with the feelings that attend this implication, and to critique it.