In Wittgenstein’ s Nephew, Thomas Bernhard describes a trip to the Traunsee in the Salzkammergut with his closest friend, Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the philosopher, during which they spotted a child squatting by the side of the lake. Where Wittgenstein only saw the wretched child, giving him a 100-schilling note out of pity, Bernhard noticed at once that his mother had placed the kid in distress as a prop to arouse sympathy and elicit ill-begotten donations. Where Wittgenstein saw “only the surface,” Bernhard – ever the cynic who expected little and saw the worst – believes he “saw through the whole scene.” The dominant figure of Austrian postwar literature, Bernhard spent a writing life seeing through the whole scene. His novels, including Concrete and Extinction, Woodcutters, The Loser and Wittgenstein’s Nephew show how he distinguished himself as one of Austria’s keenest and sharpest observers, having mastered a particular blend of direct, acerbic commentary in a poetic, even musical voice. Now, 30 years after his death by assisted suicide at his home in Gmunden, aged just 58, the English publishing house Faber & Faber is reissuing those novels – heroically translated by David McLintock – replete with fresh artwork and introductions by his admirers. Mere months before his death, Bernhard experienced his greatest theatrical triumph. Heldenplatz – the story of a Jewish university professor who takes his own life after returning to the Austrian capital to find it as anti- Semitic as ever – premiered at the Burgtheater in November 1988 to a 45-minute standing ovation. Alongside the reissuing of his novels, Bernhard’s plays are being restaged during this memorial year, including revival of Heldenplatz at the Salzburger Landestheater. Heldenplatz is in many ways a historical artifact. At a panel discussion held last November at Vienna’s Literature Museum, the writer Josef Haslinger questioned whether the play could be successfully produced today. Bernhard’s cry that the country was “six-and-a-half million forsaken people screaming at the tops of their voices in search of a director” was indeed a sharp check on the country’s worst tendencies. But in many ways Heldenplatz was a catalyst for coming to terms with the Austrian past, a process whose fruits Bernhard never lived to witness. “There are more Nazis in Vienna now than in 1938” may have been true in 1988. It is not today.
AUSTRIAN WASTELAND
Bernhard’s novels, by contrast, are an enduring summation of all that Bernhard was as a writer and what, in particular, consumedd him. For this, Wittgenstein’s Nephew – his 1982 work of memoir-as-novel or what we would now call autofiction – is the best place to begin. Opening on Bernhard’s stay at Vienna’s Steinhof hospital where, in 1967, he had a “fist-sized tumor” removed from his thorax – part of a life spent haunted by the specter of pulmonary disease – the novel has everything from digressions on coffeehouse culture and the Viennese theater scene to his observations on Wittgenstein’s decline and his own obsession with death. Bernhard understood life in theatrical terms. Austria was a stage and being Austrian, performance art. Workers, the narrator of Extinction says, don their blue overalls and then proceed to do nothing in them, believing the very act of dressing as a worker is the same as work itself. The landed gentry maintain vast libraries but talk only of pigs and cattle and read nothing more stimulating than the Upper Austrian Farmer’s Weekly, living out their days in stuffy rooms behind closed shutters. He wrote endearingly of Austria’s landscape but only with contempt of the nation built upon it, whose perceived emptiness – its philistinism, banality, and small-mindedness – he despised.
Bernhard reserved special contempt
for Austrian culture. He lived
part of the time in Vienna only
because
he hated the other cities
more – especially Graz, which he
called a viper’s nest of Nazis. He
frequented the Hotel Sacher
because
he loathed the literary coffeehouses.
Viennese theater, he
complains in Concrete, is the shabbiest
in Europe and the Burgtheater
“a witless, though unwitting, parody
of theater in general.” In Wittgenstein’s
Nephew, Bernhard complains
at length about how the Burg
and its actors purposefully destroyed
one of his plays, The Hunting Party.
Woodcutters, meanwhile, is a searing
takedown of the Viennese cultural
scene, with Bernhard drily observing
the world from a wing-backed
chair at a party held after a performance
of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.
DEATH AND CONTRARIANISM
This aspect of Bernhard’s thinking
comes across more clearly in the
novels, as does the fact that death,
and not the Nazi past, was his great
subject. When he was a child Bernhard
contracted tuberculosis, recovered,
but was left with sarcoidosis
– a disease characterized by the
growth of tiny collections of
inflammatory cells in one’s lungs –
that dogged him all his life. Understandably,
illness and death stalk his
novels, informing
and shaping his
narrative style; entire novels are
written as unbroken
paragraphs
that circle around and back to core
themes with a crazed and passionate
intensity. Extinction opens with the
death of the narrator’s parents and
older brother in a car accident.
Wittgenstein’s Nephew begins in a
hospital, follows Paul Wittgenstein’s
descent into madness, and
ends with his funeral. As Michael
Hofmann notes in his afterword to
Concrete, Bernhard’s brush with
death and his nihilism are interrelated.
“I don’t know which came
first,” Bernhard writes, “my illness
or my sudden distaste for society.”
Bernhard, Hofmann argues, “lived
the intense and prolific life of the
semi-invalid.” Following his death
in 1989, Bernhard was buried not in
Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof alongside
the great and the good but in an unassuming
grave beneath the shade of
a pine tree in an out-of-the-way
cemetery in Grinzing.
Bernhard was until the end an
awkward cuss, a contrarian who
thought and wrote against the
stream, against all others, at odds
with his country and with himself.
He wrote quickly, furiously, determinedly,
as if in a race against the
clock and a fate whose arrival he very
much foresaw. Thirty years on, his
dark, yet oftentimes comic, novels
continue to throw off heat and light
and retain their power to inspire and
enrage, astound and confound.
Without Bernhard,
there would be
no Austria, German dramatist Heiner
Müller once said.
But even if less true than it once
was, its literary landscape would certainly
be poorer without him.
Bernhard understood life in theatrical terms. Austria
was a stage and being Austrian, performance art.
