Uwe Johnson: Un viaggio a Klagenfurt – Sulle tracce di Ingeborg Bachmann

In conversation with Frencesco Fiorentino (Università Roma Tre) and Camilla Miglio (La Sapienza). Moderation: Marco Federici Solari (L’orma editore)

June 25, 2026 marks the centenary of the birth of Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most compelling and innovative figures in twentieth-century European literature. A hundred years after her birth, her work continues to challenge and inspire us with remarkable force, addressing themes such as memory, the violence of history, language, and freedom.

On the occasion of this anniversary, and following the exhibition dedicated to her by the Casa di Goethe in Rome in 2025, we are pleased to present a remarkable book recently published by L’orma editore: Un viaggio a Klagenfurt by Uwe Johnson, in the edition edited by Luigi Reitani.

This is not a biography in the conventional sense. A few days after Bachmann’s death in Rome in October 1973, Johnson set out for Klagenfurt, the city of her childhood and adolescence. The result is a singular work poised between reportage, documentary inquiry, literary reflection, and personal tribute.

“I have tried to trace the objective conditions of a person’s history,” Johnson wrote. Following the traces Bachmann left in her writings, letters, and in the memories of those who knew her, the German author reconstructs the historical and human landscape in which one of the major writers of the twentieth century took shape. In the background emerges a Klagenfurt still marked by the legacy of Nazism and the experience of war, elements crucial to understanding Bachmann’s sensibility and literary work.

Rather than simply recounting a life, Johnson explores the profound relationship between an individual and the places that have shaped them: the ways in which history inscribes itself in personal experience, memory continues to act through writing, and a city can become at once origin, wound, and destiny.

During the event, Frencesco Fiorentino, Camilla Miglio, and Marco Federici Solari will discuss this extraordinary book, the friendship between Johnson and Bachmann, Luigi Reitani’s editorial work, and the enduring relevance of a work that continues to speak to our present.

Uwe Johnson (1934–1984) was one of the most important German writers and intellectuals of the postwar period. With novels such as Speculations About Jakob (1959) and The Third Book About Achim (1961), he established himself as one of the most original voices in European literature, earning—though not always willingly—the reputation of being the first true “writer of the two Germanys.”

A tireless interpreter of his time and a central figure in German cultural life, Johnson devoted fifteen years to the writing of his major work, the tetralogy Anniversaries, now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century German-language literature. He was bound to Ingeborg Bachmann by a deep friendship and an intense literary dialogue.

Event in Italian language

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