Abstract
In the past twenty years, few literary events have caused as much controversy in German-speaking Europe as the awarding of second prize (the Bachmann Preis des Landes K?rnten) in the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Competition to Urs Allemann's Baby ficher) In a list prepared for the newsmagazine Spiegel of the top forty-five scandals between 1949 and 1999, the affair is one of only three cultural events listed.2 The announcement of the prize sparked vehement reactions from the right and the left, ranging from a statement by J?rg Haider in a full-page newspaper advertisement to a spectacular attack, before a reading, in which a group of masked protestors covered Allemann in red oil paint as a protest against his putative aestheticization of rape and violence against children.3 For those readers unable to deduce the subject matter and the motivation of these attacks from the title, the text's first sentence clears things up: fuck babies [Ich fiche Babys]. This sentence is declared by a Beckettian voice, which continues, in the seventy-two pages that follow, to describe some of the technicalities of this act. But this voice also undercuts the text by thematizing the difficulties of the text's composition, and it also raises the possibility that the narrator's sentence does not refer to his activity (7). A few pages into the book, the opening sentence appears again, in a juxtaposition that reveals the philosophical stakes of Allemann 's text: fuck babies. Therefore I am, maybe [Ich fiche Babys. Also bin ich vielleicht] (11). In this parody of the cogito, Allemann makes explicit the link that will be the focus of my reading: the relation between his text's violent thematic content and a literary voice's mode of existence.
Published Version
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