In 1949, she received her PhD from the University of Vienna with her dissertation titled "The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy of Martin Heidegger";[5] her thesis adviser was Victor Kraft.

[8] In 1953, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she spent the large part of the following years working on poems, essays and short stories as well as opera libretti in collaboration with Hans Werner Henze, which soon brought with them international fame and numerous awards.

[9] During her lifetime, Bachmann was known mostly for her two collections of poetry, Die gestundete Zeit (The deferred time) and Anrufung des Grossen Bären (Invocation of the big bear).

[10] Bachmann's literary work focuses on themes like personal boundaries, establishment of the truth, and philosophy of language, the latter in the tradition of Wittgenstein.

In Germany the achievements of the women's rights campaign at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century had been systematically undone by the fascist Nazi regime in the 1930s.

A crisis of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, along with the fear of the continued existence of National Socialism within democracy, suffuses Bachmann's oeuvre.

Her first radio play Ein Geschäft mit Träumen (A Shop for Dreams) is concerned with the inhumanity of violence and oppression.

In her analysis of Bachmann's radio drama Die Zikaden (The Cicadas), which was written in Ischia and then Naples towards the end of 1954, and first broadcast on Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) on 25 March 1955, Lucy Jeffery states thatThe transitory existence of the exiled or marginalised writer who escapes prejudice, conflict, and dominance is paralleled by the experience of the refugee.

Bachmann was also in the vanguard of Austrian women writers who discovered in their private lives the political realities from which they attempted to achieve emancipation.

Male Austrian authors such as Franz Innerhofer, Josef Winkler and Peter Turrini wrote equally popular works on traumatic experiences of socialisation.

[15] Bachmann insisted that literature had to be viewed in its historic context, thus foreshadowing a rising interest in studying the connection between literary discourse and the contemporary understanding of history.

According to Karen Achberger Bachmann views the great literary accomplishments of the twentieth century as expressions in language and poetic form of a moral and intellectual renewal in the individual writers; it is the writer's new thinking and experiencing that forms the core of their literary works, and lets them come closer to a new language.

(…) She also associates literary renewal with writers on the verge of silence due to self-doubt and despair over the impotence of language and she cites in this context Hofmannsthal's Ein Brief (1902) … as the first articulation of this dilemma.

She referenced Kafka on the need (with his words) to "take the axe to the frozen sea in us" and refuse to remain indifferent to the injustices that are perpetrated before our eyes.

In the lecture she also named writings of Nelly Sachs, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Paul Celan as examples of his concept of new poetry.

She argued that it was the process that was set in motion in the writer and reader, as a result of their interaction with literature, which made a work utopian.

[21][22] Although German language writers such as Hilde Domin, Luise Rinser and Nelly Sachs had published notable works on women's issues in the post-war period, it was only in the 1970s that a feminist movement emerged in West Germany.

[24] Her works gained popularity within the emerging Frauenliteratur (women's literature) movement which struggled to find the authentic female voice.

[30] The Dreamed Ones (Die Geträumten; 2016), is a feature film based on the almost 20-year correspondence between Bachmann and poet Paul Celan.

It also depicts her friends, composer Hans Werner Henze, and writer Adolf Opel, with whom she travelled to Egypt to experience the desert.