A Wildermuth by Ingeborg Bachmann

What's it about?

Reading with Michael MaertensClaudia Kaufmann-Freßner | VersionRegional Court Judge Anton Wildermuth hopes for a simple case, a short trial: The farm worker Josef Wildermuth has apparently killed his father in a fit of rage and confessed to the crime. But not only the coincidentally same surname connects judge and accused, but also the obsessive search for the truth, which becomes all the more incomprehensible the more precisely one tries to grasp it. The "simple case" plunges Anton Wildermuth into a deep crisis, in which he ultimately has to negotiate his own life.Michael Maertens reads Ingeborg Bachmann's story, published in 1961, which transforms from a court report into a dramatic monologue that puts all convictions of truth and reality, law and justice to the test: so that no longer only "the truth that we can use comes to light."