Diaries are often compared to mirrors that reflect or distort the diarist’s emotional and intellectual disposition while portraying degrees of intimacy and encounters with the world. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature, kept a diary during the war from late summer 1944 to June 1945. These sketches depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria enable us to gain a sense of a period in history and in Bachmann’s life that reached deep into her later work. What makes these articulate and powerful entries so special are the details of the resistance described, the exhilaration of unexpected peace, the joy of freedom. In this event, organised in collaboration with the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre London, excerpts of Bachmann’s diary and letters will be read and discussed in view of contemporary war diaries and accounts.