Ingeborg Bachmann ranks with Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Peter Handke as one of the most distinguished Austrian prose writers of the twentieth century and is recognized, along with Günter Eich and Paul Celan, as the most prominent German-language lyrical voice of the early post-World War II period. Her influence on contemporary German-language authors is comparable to that of Virginia Woolf on modern English writers; it can be seen in the works of the East German writer Christa Wolf, the West German Günter Grass, the Swiss Max Frisch, and the major Austrian writers Thomas Bernhard, Erich Fried, and Handke. The city of Klagenfurt has established a Bachmann museum and in 1977 began awarding an annual Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Prize for young writers. Several documentary films have been made on her life, and five of her stories have been made into films. Poems by Bachmann have...