Yingxi Chen German 380 Dec 5th, 2012

No path to the Lake An analysis of Elisabeth’s alienation in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Three Paths to the Lake

Three paths to the Lake is a story by Ingeborg Bachmann published in 1973. In the story, the female protagonist Elisabeth Matreis is a world-renowned photojournalist reaching her fifties. Frustrated after attending her brother Robert's wedding in London, she took a vacation back to her hometown Klagenfurt in South Austria. Elisabeth tried to hike to the lake of her childhood memory through different trails with the help of an outdated map, and she reflected in terms of her past during the trips. In the end, she found out all paths to the lake were destroyed by Germans building Autobahn. The lake she wanted to reach also serves as a metaphor for “Heimat”(home), and salvation of her inner life. There was no path to the lake, so there is no path to Elisabeth's salvation—each of them has been destroyed in their own ways. In this paper, I attempt to analyze Elisabeth’s inner morass and alienation through her geographic and the language deterritorialization associated with Heimatlosigkeit, and substantiate them with the recollections between her and her former lover Franz Joseph Eugen Trotta.

In the beginning of the story, Elisabeth was exhausted from the "bad time she'd had" in London (Bachmann 129), desperately seeking an escape back to her childhood home and

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Yingxi Chen visiting her father for the same sort of consolation and familiarity. After many years of travelling around the globe, Elisabeth felt the sense of aloofness around her life, she tried to recover the sense of home and rootedness (Heimatgefühl) by coming back to Austria "It was not homesickness that made her come home", "for she had never known homesickness." (Bachmann 135) Elizabeth’s problematic is exactly that she has lost her feeling of homesickness, the lost of Heimatgefühl. Elisabeth considers the AustriaHungarian Empire root of her beloved Austria, hence a certain historical, territorial, and language link to Austria she is seeking for, and when the ghostly empire of gigantic dimension they came from dissolved in 1918, she felt estranged in the present world.

" She and Robert had escaped abroad and worked as people do in important countries, and Robert's detachment would increase through Liz. But what made them strangers wherever they went was their sensitivity, because they came from the periphery and thus their thoughts, feelings and actions were hopelessly bound to this ghostly empire of gigantic dimensions. The right passports didn't exist for them, for it was a country, which didn't issue passports. " (Bachmann 123)

Hiking around Klagenfurt near the border of South Austria, where "nothing transfiguring had ever taken place" brought Elizabeth deeper nostalgia for her former lover Franz Joseph Trotta and his world. (Bachmann 135)

"On Trail 1 she came to the Zillhöhne with its benches where she sat for a moment, gazing down at the lake, but then she looked up to the Karawankan and, beyond, to Carniola, Slavonia, Croatia, Bosnia; once more she was searching for a world that no longer existed

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because there was nothing left of Trotta except the name and a few sentences, his thoughts and tone of voice. " (Bachmann 154)

The “Adel” name of Trotta reminds us of the Austrian’s last Emperor Franz Joseph I. Contrarily, Trotta was a member of rebellion group against the Hapsburg Monarchy rather than of its noble offspring. As the biggest antagonist in the story, Trotta destroyed Elisabeth’s ideal of old innocent Austrian-Hungarian Empire which was predated by the Germans, “…that the year 1938 had not been a turning point: the split had occurred much earlier and everything that followed had been a consequence of this old split, and that his world was destroyed for good in 1914…” (Bachmann 197) Trotta shared his experience in World War II with Elisabeth, observed and drew distinction between German soldiers and the depraved Austrian soldiers:” The Austrians, of course, and their baseness, the enjoyment they got out of every kind of brutality imaginable was written clearly all over their ugly faces,…, whereas for the Germans orders were orders.” (Bachmann 151)

The alienation Elisabeth had between the worlds around her is not only geographical but also linguistic. She laughed at Germans who called simple cheesecake “Käsesahnetorte” (Bachmann 192); she was bugged for years because all her French lovers would either call her a “chérie” or “mon chou”. When she was in London, Elisabeth complained that the guest in hotel did not even speak English properly:

“The guests and employees communicated in an English limited to a handful of expressions, and using one more than the allotted number meant not being understood. It wasn’t a living language that was spoken, it was a kind of Esperanto . . .” (Bachmann 130)

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Yingxi Chen Despite that she “quickly forgot her English, using that confounded Esperanto”, as a well-travelled cosmopolitan, Elisabeth was surprisingly uncomfortable about the surroundings. “In this place everything was so monotonous, the people were all completely mindless, nothing was right.” She “felt sick”, “she felt no urge to see London, she was completely indifferent, she was tired, she wanted to leave and go home, she wanted to go to the woods and the lake”. (Bachmann 130,131)

One aphorism states:” Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.” Our world, reality, reaches only as far as the language does. In Wittgenstein’s theory, he separates the language into two parts: the Sagbares (speakables) and the Unsagbares (unspeakables). Language as a form of depicting reality is the Sagbares; and the mythical, which lies outside the limits of our world, shows itself. (Meek 23) Elisabeth was not a genius in Language- “She never attempted to speak a certain kind of English: her accent was neutral and she didn’t copy the idioms of her English and American friends.” (Bachmann 178) If her English and French were the “Sagbares” those functions as depiction and narration for ordinary reality, Elisabeth longed for the purity of an originary mother tongue to convey her missing “Unsagbares Heimatgefühl”. When she finally arrived home, her father’s “old civil German” soothed her.

Trotta on the contrary, who recognized his position as “a real exile”, spoke all languages of his exile equally well. He once told Elisabeth that “he didn’t wish it upon her, it would be better if she didn’t end up in that state of disintegration, for languages had also made him to pieces. ” “I don’t belong anywhere anymore, I don’t long to be anywhere, but I

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Yingxi Chen used to think I had a heart and I belonged in Austria.” (Bachmann 178) He said, Trotta asserted diaspora. He eventually grew on Elisabeth, shattered her dream of longing and striving in many ways to return to an originary home somewhere.

"…But rather because he made her conscious of so many things, because of his origins and because he- a real exile, one of the lost ones- had made her- an adventuress who expected God knows what from the world during her lifetime- had made an exile of her: long after his death he slowly pulled her down with him to ruin, alienating her from the miracles and allowing her to recognize this alienation as her destiny. " (Bachmann 139)

“Where am I to go now, a Trotta?” Elisabeth asked, she realized she could not find home in any country, as her country doesn’t exist anymore. As her lover Trotta who chose suicide as his destiny, Elisabeth acknowledged her alienation as finality. She took the suicidal mission to Saigon reporting about the Vietnam War. In the end of the book, “Nonetheless she kept repeating: It’s nothing, it’s nothing, nothing else can happen to me now. Something might happen to me, but nothing has to happen.” (Bachmann 212)

Works Cited Bachmann, Ingeborg. Three Paths to the Lake. Trans. Mary Fran Gilbert. Munich: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1989. Meek, Sherri. "A Translation Analysis of Ingeborg Bachmann's "Simultan": Narration, Focalization and Intersexuality in the Stream of Contiousness Narrative ." 1999. University of Ottawa. 04 12 2012 .

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