In late May of 1952, a twenty-five-year-old Austrian read her poems in a near whisper at a gathering of prominent post-war (mostly) German writers, critics, artists, and intellectuals known as Gruppe 47. With the room mesmerized by her anguish, she froze and fell silent, and her fellow poet Walter Hilsbecher had to step in to read for her. Afterward, she passed out in her hotel room. Having been invited only ten days before to the meeting in Niendorf/Ostsee, northeast of Hamburg, she must have been done in by the pressure of the moment and the dizzying force of her own ambition.

Though for most writers this would spell embarrassment, even disaster, for Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73), it led to triumph. Ilse Aichinger and Paul Celan (the first her dear friend, the second her secret lover) also attended the conference and made their own marks, Celan with a stirring, somewhat histrionic reading of “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”), which became his best-known poem, and Aichinger by carrying off the coveted Gruppe 47 Prize. But in many ways Bachmann stole the show. Like Celan, she was almost completely unknown in Germany and had just set foot in it for the first time. Aichinger, whose 1948 novel The Greater Hope (Die größere Hoffnung) had already earned her acclaim, was five years older, and she should have overshadowed her fellow Austrian. In exuding, however, a mix of deep shyness, vulnerability, and crackling intelligence, Bachmann—long aware of the power of her physical beauty and magnetism—drew