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Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) |
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Novelist, dramatist, and poet, whose merciless analysis of the mentality of his fellow countrymen earned him the reputation of the enfant terrible of Austrian literature. Central themes in Thomas Bernhard's work are death, suffering, and the hopelessness of the world in which we live. "Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt – an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect – to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Roger said." (from Old Masters: A Comedy Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by Ewald Osers, London: Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 240-241; first published as Alte Meister by Suhrkamp Verlag 1986) Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard was born in Heerlen, near Maastrich, Holland, the illegitimate son of Austrian parents. His father, Alois Zuckerstätter, who came from Henndorf, Austria, was a carpenter. He never wanted to take care of his son and refused to acknowledge his paternity. Alois committed suicide in 1940 in Berlin, but Bernhard himself has claimed that he died in 1943. Bernhard's mother, Herta Bernhard, was the daughter of the author Johannes Freumbichler. Herta married Emil Fabjan in 1936 and next year Bernhard joined them in Trausntein. Herta died of cancer of the uterus in 1950. His earliest childhood Bernhard spent in the care of his maternal grandparents in Vienna and Seekirchen (Wallersee). His grandfather, Johannes Freumbichler, who devoted himself entirely to his writing, provided for Bernhard the model for his eccentrics in his books. He died in 1949; the year was a turning point in Bernhard's intellectual development. In
1941 Bernhard was sent to an institution for diffucult
children.
After returning in 1942 to Traunstein he continued his school there. In
1943 he was confirmed in a Catholic church. Later in life he equated
Catholicism with Nazism: both were examples of authoritarian order and
control. Bernhard dropped out of the Johanneum Gymnasium in Salzburg in 1947, and apprenticed himself to a grocer. In the dank cellar shop Bernhard contracted a serious lung ailment. At one point he was so ill that he was given last rites in the death ward of the local hospital. Bernhard spent two years in convalescence. At the tuberculosis sanatorium Gratenhof he began to write, first as a reaction to his surroundings, but then he came to the conclusion that he existed only through his writing. "I hate nature, because it is killing me.I live in the country only because the doctors have told me that I must live in the country if I want to survive—for no other reason. In fact I love everything except nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and implacability on nature through the way it has delt with my own body and soul, and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can." (Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friedship, translated from the German by David McLintock, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p. 53; original title: Wittgensteins Neffe, 1982) His first published piece was 'At the Grave of a Poet'. After recovery, he studied music and theatre arts at the Mozarteum Academy in Salzburg. Bernhard received his diploma in directing in 1957. As a student he was not the star of his class. On stage he frequently forgot his lines. While still studying, Bernhard began to work as a courtroom reporter for the Socialist Demokratisches Volksblatt; he got the job through family connections, but when his employers forced him to join the socialist party, he left the paper. Bernhard also contributed to the newspaper Die Furche. In the mid-1950s, Bernhard published short prose pieces and continued with three volumes of poetry in 1957-58. These works went almost unnoticed. After leaving the Mozarteum, he made acquaintance with the composer Gerhard Lampersberg and his wife Maja and wrote an unsuccessful libretto for Lambersberg's opera. His first play was performed in Tonhof, meeting place of the literary avant-garde of the day. Bernhard lived there between 1957 and 1960. His friendship with the Lambersbergs ended in bitter acrimony. Bernhard's prose work Holzfällen: Eine Erregung (1984) re-opened the wounds and the Lampersbergs sued him for defamation. Frost (1963), Bernhard's first novel, was a long
monologue of
a medical student, who observes the fate of a doomed, misanthrophic
painter. "Everything here is barbaric kitsch. Yes, the state itself is
feebleminded and its people are pathetic," he says. The work was highly
prised by Carl Zuckmayer and became an immediate sensation. In the
mid-1960s, after nomadic years, Bernhard bought a fortress-like
farmhouse in Obernathal, a small village in Upper Austria, his
sanctuary for the following decades. He spent also much time in the
fashionable cafés of Vienna, but in Old Masters
(1985) Bernhard
did not hide his hatred of the Viennese: "Everything suggest that they
are a lot dirtier inside than out." Subtitled "A Comedy," this darkly comical work was
Bernhard's final novel. Reger, a recently widowed music critic, meets
his friend Atzbacher in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches museum. Reger
expresses his disgust over Western art, music, philosophy, and
literature in a long monologue: Bruckner is a miserable composer,
Heidegger is a small philosophical rear-rank man, who turned philosophy
into kitsch, "Shakespeare crumbles totally if we concern ourselves with
him and study him for any length," Stifter bores everybody to death,
everything in Beethoven is more or less laughable.
Moreover, Viennese
restaurants are the dirtiest in Europe. All old masters are failures,
Reger thinks, but rather than committing suicide after the death of his
wife, it has been their imperfectness that has helped him to overcome
his despair and face up to life. At the end of the novel he
reveals the reason why he has summoned Atzbacher to the museum: he has
two tickets to a performance of Kleist comedy Der zerbrochene Krug
(The Broken Jug) at the National Theater, the Burghtheater. They both
go to see the play. The novel closes with the line: "Die
Vorstellung war entsetzlich." (The performance was terrific.) Bernhard received several literary awards, including Österreichische Staatspreis für Literatur (1967), the Anton-Wildgans-Preis der Österreichischen Indistrie (1967), the Georg-Büchner-Preis (1970), the Franz-Theodor-Csokor-Preis (1972). "I always was a free person, I receive no stipend and I write my books in a completely natural way, according to my lifestyle, which is guaranteed different from all those people's," Bernhard said in an interview, ignoring the fact that his publisher had helped him to buy his farm and stood by him through the many lawsuits initiated against him. Almost all of Bernhard's complete works were published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Nevertheless, Bernhard was not faithful to Suhrkamp but gave the fourth part of his autobiography to the Austrian publisher Residenz. Siegfried Unseld, the head of Suhrkamp, tolerated Bernhard's quirks, until the author gave yet another manuscript to Residenz in 1988. Bernhard never married. His Lebensmensch,
companion for life, was Hedwig Stavianicek, "Auntie", the widow of a
high-ranking Viennese ministry official. She was more than
thirty-seven years his senior. "Without her, I would not be alive at
all," Bernhard once confessed, "or at any rate I would certainly not
the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time
happy." Bernhard regularly stayed in Stavianicek's apartment in Vienna.
His female friends also included Ingrid Bülau, a pianist
whom he had met at the Mozarteum. The relationship lasted over thirty
years. Stavianicek died in 1984. Thomas Bernhard died on February 12, 1989. His half brother, Dr. Peter Fabjan, was with him all the time during the day of his death. Bernhard's will caused much controversy—as a final act of opposition, Bernhard banned all further publications of his books and prohibited the performances of his plays in Austria. Bernhard's novels are populated with physically and mentally
defective characters, stupid peasants, isolated artists, criminals,
hypocrites and philistines. Disillusioned cold perspective, shaped by
his childhood experiences and harsh years during WWII, marks his
attitude toward the whole society, his disdain of the masses, for their
taste and general brutality. In the novel Ja (1978, Yes) the
protagonist says yes to suicide. Though his social reflections, he was
not a social critic—Bernard simply hated the world and its occupants.
His characters are portrayed with bleak humor, the achitect of Correction (modelled on
Wittgenstein), the writer of Concrete
(1982), and the misanthropic loner in Extinction
(1986). In his home county Bernhard was labelled as the "Nestbeschmutzer" (someone who fouls his own nest). He once called his native land "a common hell in which the intellect is incessantly defamed and art and science are destroyed." Although Bernhard insisted on nonideology and subjectivism, at the same time he did not hesitate to attack the Nazi past of his country and other sore spots. In his last play, Heldenplatz (1988) Bernhard tore apart the national myths around Hitler's annexation of Austria. The play created outrage before it even opened at Vienna's Burgtheater. Kurt Waldheim, whose presidency was surrounded by controversy due to his alleged Nazi activities during WW II, declared that the play was a crude insult to the Austrian people. After the opening night, protected by 200 policemen, most reviewers agreed that it was not Bernhard's best play. Bernhard's style avoids all comprimisess, his sentences are serpentive and complex; the flow of the text sometimes approachers the formal structutes of music. Referring to Bernhard's book-lenght monologues Elfriede Jelinek called him "a poet of speaking" rather than writing. "German words hang like lead weights on the German language . . . and constantly drag the mind down to a level that can only be harmful to it," says Franz-Josef Murau, one of his characters. "German thought and German speech soon become paralyzed under the intolerable weight of the language, which suppresses any thought before it can find expression." (Extinction, translated from the German by David McLintock, New York: Vintage International, 1995, p. original title: Auslöschung, 1986) As in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground the narrator, Rudolf, is a hermit and a hypocondriac. Rudolf's monologue reveals his psychosis, and his hatred of the Austrian society. Wittgenstein's Nephew (1983), Bernhard's quasi memoir about Paul Wittgenstein (1907-1979), actually the grandnephew of the towering philosophical giant, consist of one long paragraph. With Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, Bernhard shared similar lifelong obsession with the relationship between language and inner experience. Bernhard's plays show the influence of the theatre of the absurd, especially Ionesco and Beckett. The German director Claus Peymann staged the premiere performances of most of his pieces. From the 1970s he started to gain fame as one of the most successful modern playwrights with such works as A Party for Boris (1969), a grotesque drama written for leggless cripples in wheelchairs, The Ignoramus and the Madman (1972), The Hunting Party (1974), The Power of Habit (1974), set in a circus, The President (1975), about power and corruption, and Minetti (1976), written for the German actor Bernhard Minetti. In 1975 Bernhard started from Die Ursache his autobiographical series, which contined in Der Keller (1976), Der Atem. Eine Entscheidung (1978), Die Kälte (1981), Ein Kind (1982)—together translated as Gathering Evidence. The works covered the first nineteen years of his life (the truth and not the absolute truth), exceptionally ending in his early childhood. Bernhard parallelled breathing to writing in Der Atem, they are the one and same. For further reading: Über Thomas Bernhard, ed. by Anneliese Botond (1970); Thomas Bernhard by Herbert Gamper (1977); Thomas Bernhard by Bernhard Sorg (1977); Thomas Bernhard by Manfred Mixner (1979); Kritik einer literarischen Form: Versuch über Thomas Bernhard by Hans Höller (1979); 'Bernhard, Thomas,' in World Authors 1975-1980, ed. by Vineta Colby (1985); Understanding Thomas Bernhard by Stephen D. Dowden (1991); Thomas Bernhard and His Grandfather Johannes Freumbichler: "Our Grandfathers Are Our Teachers" by Caroline Markolin, Petra Hartweg (1993); Der Übertreibungskünstler: Studien zu Thomas Bernhard by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler (1997); 'Bernhard, Thomas,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature, vol. 1, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Das Theater Thomas Bernhards by Dirk Jurgens (1999); The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek by Matthias Konzett (2000); Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian by Gitta Honegger (2001); The Novels of Thomas Bernhard: Form and Its Function by J.J. Long (2001); A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard, ed. by Matthias Konzett (2002); Walking Through History: Topography and Identity in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard by Katya Krylova (2012); How We Learn Where We Live: Thomas Bernhard, Architecture, and Bildung by Fatima Naqvi (2016); Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives, edited by Olaf Berwald, Stephen D. Dowden, and Gregor Thuswaldner (2020); Thomas Bernhard: Language, History, Subjectivity, edited by = herausgegeben von Katya Krylova, Ernest Schonfield (2023); Wittgenstein Fiction: Portrayals of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Contemporary Western Novels by Walker Zupp (2024); Textual Entanglements: Handke, Bernhard, Rilke, and the Materiality of Literature by Jacob Haubenreich (2025) Selected works:
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