Analysis of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Autumn Maneuver

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 8, 2025

I’m not saying that was yesterday. With worthless
Summer money in our pockets we are again
on the chaff of scorn, in the autumn maneuvers of time.
And the escape route to the south does not come to us,
like the birds. past, in the evening,
pull fishing trawlers and gondolas, and sometimes
a splinter of dreamy marble hits me,
where i am vulnerable, by beauty, in aug.

I read a lot about the cold in the newspapers
and its consequences, of the foolish and the dead,
of exiles, murderers and myriads
of ice floes, but little that pleases me.
why? Before the beggar who comes at noon
I slam the door ’cause it’s peace
and you can save yourself the sight, but don’t
the joyless dying of the leaves in the rain.

Let’s take a trip! Let’s go under cypresses
or under the palm trees or in the orange groves
see sunsets at reduced prices,
who have no equal! Let’s
forgotten unanswered letters to yesterday!
Time works wonders. But if she does us wrong,
with the pounding of guilt: we are not at home.
In the basement of my heart, sleepless, I find myself again
on the chaff of scorn, in the autumn maneuvers of time.

In her first collection, Die gestundete Zeit (Mortgaged Time, in In the Storm of Roses), Ingeborg Bachmann grapples with the lingering effects of fascism after World War II. “Autumn Maneuver” (“Herbstmanöver”) is one of the best illustrations of the theme of this volume, as its title suggests military tactics as well as images of movement, particularly that of seasonal progressions. The combination of the image of the natural world’s progression toward winter with that of the human activity of warfare suggests an “apocalyptic final winter” (Boa 272). In such an apocalyptic vision, the urgency of Bachmann’s poem becomes evident. The first line of the poem, “I don’t say: that was before,” clearly expresses the speaker’s inability to separate the atrocities of the recent past from the actions one takes in the present. In the postwar period there is no escaping recent history, and even “flight to the South, / where the birds fly, won’t help us.”

The second stanza continues the poem’s theme of inability to “spare yourself an unpleasant sight,” to forget the destruction that resulted from war. The references to newspapers, refugees, and murderers all evoke specifically human phenomena and elicit emotional responses to the death and dislocation inherent in war. These images, however, are mingled with “myriads / of ice-flows,” a natural image that seems to herald a “new ice-age” (Boa 272). In the apocalyptic vision of both human and natural events, Bachmann reveals that, though in the postwar period “there is peace,” one is unable to avoid “the joyless dying of leaves” that heralds autumn.

Similarly, Bachmann’s poem argues that one cannot ignore the human “beggar” and those who have “slam[med] the door in his face.” This image of the beggar in “Autumn Maneuver” evokes the biblical tale in the book of Hebrews of an angel disguised as a destitute who is repeatedly turned away from townspeople’s doors when he seeks shelter. The biblical passage serves as a moral reminder of human beings’ responsibility toward one another; similarly, Bachmann’s reference to the beggar can be understood as an exhortation for postwar responsibility for human death and, in some sense, for the death of humanity itself.

Bibliography

Bachmann, Ingeborg. In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Mark Anderson, Princeton University Press, 1986.

Boa, Elizabeth. “Reading Ingeborg Bachmann.” Postwar Women’s Writing in German, edited by Chris Weedon, Berghahn Books, 1997, pp. 270–280.