Thomas Bernhard: The Loser

During his lifetime Thomas Bernhard’s texts provoked more than the ordinary share of scandals. But perhaps the most enduring scandal will turn out to be his very last text, his will: “Whatever I have written, whether published by me during my lifetime or as part of my literary papers still existing after my death, shall not be performed, printed or even recited for the duration of legal copyright within the borders of Austria, however this state identifies itself.” Bernhard had taken care not to reveal the contents of this will before he died; in fact, he even stipulated that news of his death not be announced until he was buried. This parting slap in the face of his native country thus came not only as a surprise; it came from the hand of a dead man, whose laughter rang out from the grave.

To be sure, it was absurd laughter that had something of a bad and willfully unpatriotic joke. But then so did most of Bernhard’s literary works. In his last play, Heldenplatz , one of the members of a Jewish family that has recently returned to Vienna characterizes the country as a pigsty with only “black” (i.e., fascist) and “red” (socialist) pigs living there:

In this most horrendous of states

you have only a choice

between black pigs and red pigs

an unbearable stench from the Royal Palace

and Ballhaus Square and Parliament

spreads over this completely disgusting and

decrepit country

(shouts)

This tiny state is a gigantic dunghill

“The whole thing was an absurd idea/to come back to Vienna,” the same character concludes in the very last lines of the play. “But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.”

Not to hear the laughter behind these last texts of Bernhard’s would be a mistake, for it would mean reading him literally, hence missing the dimension of irony, exaggeration, and pose that characterized all his writings and public statements to the very last. That Bernhard maintained this dimension even where it supposedly doesn’t belong, that quite literal and serious legal battles are being fought over the interpretation of his will, only points to his characteristic unwillingness to compromise what he saw as his fundamental task and pleasure as a writer: to denounce, scandalize, and just plain get on people’s nerves. “To shake people up, that’s my real pleasure,” he once admitted. This Bernhard undoubtedly managed to do for most of his life, and to judge from the court battles over his literary estate, he may well be doing it for some time to come.

Not that a serious dose of unassuaged anger wasn’t part of Bernhard’s vitriolic gestures. But by the same logic that made him refuse the world’s distinction between fact and fiction, between legal seriousness and poetic license, so Bernhard always maintained that this animosity was in fact an expression of his deep and abiding love for Austria. He once told a journalist, lowering his eyes and laughing quietly to himself, that he had signed the guestbook in a friend’s house as “die Güte selbst” —goodness in person. “Everybody was very surprised.” But Bernhard meant it, just as he meant it when he claimed that his anti-Austrian, lugubrious, death-obsessed narratives (“automatically black” in George Steiner’s phrase) sprang from his sense of humor, of the absurd, even from his “positive” view of life. Hence his refusal to paint Utopian or idealistic portraits: “An idealistic literary work can produce disgust in the reader. Whoever sees through the author’s intention and recognizes that in reality things are completely different will fall back into negativity.” Bernhard’s “negative” books, which make no attempt to prettify or soften reality, should produce the opposite reaction — cathartic or “tragic” laughter.

Bernhard loved as well as hated his native country, was tied to it by the chains of a passionate ambivalence, which is the true wellspring of all his work. Once a court reporter for the left-wing paper Demokratisches Volksblatt , Bernhard remained a “Zeitungsfresser” all his life, a person who “devoured” newspapers, local as well as national, gleaning from them his daily ration of outrage, humor, and absurdity. I remember sitting next to him in his favorite café in Vienna, the Bräunerhof, listening to a steady stream of polemical and witty commentary on each little story or fact, watching him return again and again to the newspaper table in search of more reading material. A master at provoking scandals, he relished reading about himself. But he also enjoyed the news about everyday life in small rural towns — land disputes, court trials, stories of adultery, murder, or suicide — which gave him the ideas for much of his work. And for this reason it is doubtful whether he could ever have lived and worked abroad. Most of Austria’s major postwar writers — Canetti, Celan, Bachmann, Handke — have preferred self-imposed exile to residence in their native country. Bernhard, ostensibly the most anti-Austrian of them all, is one of the few who never left.

But whereas Bernhard both loved and hated Austria, most Austrians simply hated Bernhard and would readily have done without his muck-raking attacks. The scandal provoked by Heldenplatz in the fall of 1988 is a case in point. Shortly before the opening, in November, newspapers leaked a few quotes from the play, which, like the above passage, were not exactly measured political assessments of Austria and its inhabitants. Without knowing anything about the play, in what context these passages appeared, or what irony Bernhard might have given them, journalists and politicians felt called upon to protest the use of taxpayers’ money for staging such an unpatriotic work in the Burgtheater, Austria’s national theater. Kurt Waldheim characterized the play as “an insult to the nation.” Popular outrage took to the streets. Normally well-behaved citizens scrawled obscene messages in public places against the ungrateful author, and one elderly lady attacked Bernhard with her umbrella as he was getting on the bus.

Of course there was a deeper reason for Austrians to be upset, as they would learn when the play finally opened. Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) had been commissioned and written that year to “commemorate” the fifty-year anniversary of Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany. The play begins with the suicide of an eminent Jewish professor who fled Austria in 1938 and lived in exile in England before returning to present-day Vienna. Despairing of the still virulent anti-Semitism he encounters there, he throws himself from the window of his apartment overlooking Heroes’ Square, which not coincidentally is the square where thousands of cheering Austrians greeted Hitler in 1938 and which, also not coincidentally, is adjacent to the offices of Austria’s major politicians and the very Burgtheater where the play is performed. Bernhard’s sense of dramatic irony and historical context is superbly evident in the play, especially in the final scene, when the professor’s aged mother hears recorded chants of “Sieg Heil!” that emerge from the wings (and as if from outside the theater). She is hallucinating, since no one else on stage pays any attention to the chants. But the audience hears them, and as we look about we realize that some of the elderly, elegant spectators must have been on Heroes’ Square in 1938 shouting those very words. The voice Bernhard confronts his audience with is its own, the recorded voice of Austria’s buried political unconscious.