Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926—1973) launched her career as a poet and fiction writer by winning a prize at age twenty-seven from the Gruppe 47, a collective of writers that included Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll. She became one of the best-known and most acclaimed German-language poets of the post-war generation. Of Paul Celan, whom she had a long affair with and later introduced (disastrously) to the Gruppe 47, she wrote, “I loved him more than my own life.” Their poetry remained in dialogue long after their relationship ended.