A Wildermuth by Ingborg Bachmann

"I began to tell the even truer truth." (Ingeborg Bachmann)

Reading with Michael Maertens
Claudia Kaufmann-Freßner | Version

Higher Regional Court judge Anton Wildermuth hopes for a simple case, a short trial: farm worker Josef Wildermuth has apparently killed his father in the heat of the moment and confessed to the crime. However, it is not only the coincidentally identical surname that connects the judge and the 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 turns from a court report into a dramatic monologue that puts all convictions about truth and reality, law and justice to the test: so that no longer only "the truth we can use comes to light."