Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan: The fragility of friendship in the shadow of the Shoah

This article explores the ethical implications and poetic resonances of Ingeborg Bachmann’s friendships with survivors of the Shoah, foremost among them Paul Celan. Departing from the dominant scholarly tendency to read the Bachmann–Celan relationship primarily as a failed love affair, it reframes their bond as a failed friendship — shaped above all by Bachmann’s effort to reconcile her ideal of friendship as a relationship of equals, in which she sought recognition as a writer in her own right, with the irreducible singularity of Celan’s trauma as a survivor of the Shoah. Central to this inquiry is Bachmann’s literary work, which not only reflects on the concept of friendship but also forges a language for a poetic dialogue that both supplements and, at times, counterpoints their correspondence, ultimately carrying the relationship forward even beyond the point at which their lived friendship had come to an end.