Generic Youth Suffering in a Generic Town

By Annie Robinson

 It is only in connection with specific remnants of the life that I had before the war—“only when the tree outside the theatre works the miracle, when the torch burns, do I manage to see everything mingled”

A few months ago, I was on a cruise ship. I was laying out in the sun, relaxing, watching 700
miles of Cuban coastline slowly melt off into the distance. As our boat sailed on towards the tropics, I flipped through an anthology of literature, that I’d decided on a whim to bring with me. This was my first cruise, the farthest I’d ever been south, and in the heat of the day, I languidly landed on a short story from Ingeborg Bachmann called “Youth in an Austrian Town”.

I mention all these details because one might have considered it inappropriate, the way I disrupted the sacred relaxation of my cruise with such a story of growing and suffering, learning and loss, but how was I to know in that moment that such a story would cut through all the fluff of the day and unexplainably capture the feelings that I’d been gravitating towards for a few years. There are many parallels between a youth in an Austrian town and an American girl on a boat in the Atlantic. 

The first great symbol of this story is a tree ablaze with the orange glow of autumn. It symbolizes something that cannot be conveyed in words known to man—something of innate nature, uncapturable except through its imagery “Who, faced with this tree, is going to talk to me about falling leaves and the white death? Who will prevent me from holding it with my eyes and believing that it will always glow before me as it does at this moment and that it is not subject to the laws of the world?” Something happens when you are too young and the world comes too quickly, shattering the life you’ve always known. Your life is suddenly in shards and there are parts of you that become stuck in these shards, unable to move forward. These parts are stuck in specific moments of time and take the form of objects, or habits, or places, or words.  This tree is one of those shards and by beginning the story with it, it sets a pattern that allows for other intangibles to be explained by not actually being explained.  It brings to light the undercurrents of our lives, things felt without words, things that can only be intrinsically experienced as part of growing up and becoming aware.  

            

In this story Bachmann allows us to grow up with her main characters “the children” by her use of detail and description.  The collective children are without name or physical characterization; they are the universal children bound to senseless suffering of some sort. The story ebbs and flows with the ins and outs of their daily lives highlighting what they collectively think and feel. In my own life, my siblings and I--we are the children. We grew up as they did: “without looking forward, without looking back, in good, in evil—without hope… [these children they] have no future. They are afraid of the whole world, they don’t picture the world; only the geography of a hopscotch square because its frontiers can be drawn in chalk.” There is something in these lines that resonated with me. The way it takes intangible ideas and connects them to concrete objects: the abstractness of hopelessness connected to the physical hopscotch square. 

 We grew up in the light of the ever-day, only ever looking forward towards the next day, never more, never to the edge of time. We evolved as the children did with the houses they lived in, and trees they planted in their gardens and the school lessons they memorized. These children,--"they laugh at every opportunity; they can scarcely contain themselves and fall off the bench for laughing” we were these children: laughing with every minute,
delighting in wrestling matches and warm summer rain storms, making a muck of grandmothers house, and all the time personifying as Bachmann does all the bushes and houses and animals—experiencing all the wonders of childhood with a sort of magic. 

We were, as these children, not fully comprehending what our parents were saying when they spoke in their own “veiled hints,” though maybe our parents couldn’t comprehend it either. Maybe no one understands war and suffering until it’s on your back porch: whether it be a war of the whole world, or a single splintered soul. The children got sick, and so did we, only we got sick at different times and in different ways. My brother was sick first; I would only ever be sick after. He was “suspended between life and death; and one day [he lay] there numb and shaky, with new thoughts about everything,” just as those children had, only his sickness had no temperatures or vomit, shivers or sore throats. His instead had scars and death notes, wrecked cars and counseling appointments. The war had broken out. He would not survive. 

“There is no more light in the house. No glass in the windows. No door on the hinges. Nobody stirs and nobody rises.” There are things that can only be described by not actually describing. Some things we can only imply through symbolism. Bachmann reminded me of this. You can’t put words to death but you can put words to all the things around death—the things that change and the things that stay the same. The children are the house. I am the house and for a great and terrible time nothing stirred inside of me. 

The whole story has a detached tone until the end. This is where it becomes personal. This is where the connection between the author and children becomes clear and potent. It is here in the end that you come to find that Bachmann was one of the children herself, robbed of innocence and report cards, forced to “step into life.” The shift changes the way the audience feels about the children. It becomes all the more real, all the more personal and it plays to Bachmann’s credibility as the author because it’s her personal experience.

It is here I connected with Bachmann because after the war, after the death of my brother, I returned to a life that very much resembled my old one. And I began to know as she did: “that everything was as it was, that everything is as it is, and [I] abandon[ed] any attempt to find a reason for everything. For there is no wand that touches [me], no transformation… nothing touches [my] heart.” And it is only in connection with specific remnants of the life that I had before the war—“only when the tree outside the theatre works the miracle, when the torch burns, do I manage to see everything mingled.” It is only in the things that don’t try
to spell out or interpret the meaning of the great void left in my life that I can find a trace of the actual thing. It is only when I read of this gold-burning tree sitting on a deck of a cruise ship that I can feel a sense of the insensible things.