Thomas Bernhard: My Prizes: An Accounting

In the summer of nineteen seventy-six I spent three months in the Lung Disease Hospital that was and is attached to the Steinhof Insane Asylum in Vienna, in the Hermann Pavilion which had seven rooms with either two or three patients, all of which patients died during the time I was there, with the exception of a theology student and me. I have to mention this because it is quite simply essential for what follows. I had, as so often before, hit the limits of my physical existence once again and the doctors had abandoned me. They’d given me no more than another few months, at best no more than a year, and I accepted my fate. I had been cut open below the larynx for the purposes of the removal of a tissue sample and left for six weeks in the certainty that I was going to die of cancer until they discovered that in my case it pointed to a lifelong lung infection causing an illness called Morbus Boeck, although this hasn’t yet been proved and I have lived until this day with that assumption, and, I believe, more intensely than ever. Back then, in the Hermann Pavilion, among the hundred-percent-certain candidates for death I made my peace, just as they did, with my rapidly approaching end. The summer, I remember, was particularly hot and the Six-Day War that had already entered history was raging between Israel and Egypt. The patients lay in bed in the shadows in eighty-six-degree heat and in truth, like me, they were all longing for death and they all, as I have already said, got their wish and died one after the other, among them the former policeman Immervoll who was in the room next to mine and who, for as long as he was in a state to do so, came to my room every single day to play Pontoon with me, he won and I lost, for weeks he won and I lost until he died and I didn’t. Both of us passionate Pontoon players, we played Pontoon together to kill time until it wasn’t time that was killed, it was he. He died only three hours after playing and winning the last game. In the bed next to mine was a theology student whom in the course of a few weeks hanging between life and death I made into a skeptic and thus a good Catholic, forever, or so I think. I undermined him with my theories about bigoted Catholicism using contemporary examples from the hospital, from the daily course of events with the doctors and nurses and patients, and also from the repellent priests and nuns who buzzed around all over the mental hospital on the scrubby, windy Baumgartner Heights, this westerly range of hills in Vienna, it wasn’t hard for me to open the eyes of my pupil. I think his own parents were grateful for my lessons. I gave them with passion, also their son, as I know, did not become a theologian, even if he was a very good Catholic but no theologian, today, I’m sad to say, like everyone else in Central Europe, he’s a rather unsuccessful, sidelined, paralyzed socialist. But it gave me the greatest pleasure to explicate the God he had clung to so unconditionally, to literally enlighten him, to rouse the sleeping skeptic in his sickbed, which in turn roused me in my own sickbed and possibly signified my own survival. I am recounting this because when I remember the price of the prize of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry, it all, quite simply, comes back to me, the sweltering hospital in the summer heat, and the hopelessness. I see the patients and their relatives, both with the hopelessness steadily tightening around their throats, the perfidious doctors, the bigoted nurses, all these stunted characters in the stinking, sticky hospital corridors, meanness and hysteria and self-sacrifice in equal measure, deployed only for the purposes of human destruction and I hear in the fall the thousands upon thousands of Russian cranes flying high above the hospital, darkening and blackening the afternoon sky and shattering the eardrums of all the patients with their shrieking cries. I see the squirrels picking up the hundreds of paper handkerchiefs filled with sputum and discarded by the lung patients and racing like mad with them for the trees. I see the famous Professor Salzer coming up from the city to the Baumgartner Heights, and going through the corridors to excise the lobes of the patients’ lungs in the operating theater, with his famous little-Professor-Salzer’s elegance, the professor was a specialist in larynxes and halves of thoraxes, the professor came increasingly frequently to the Baumgartner Heights and increasing numbers of patients had ever-decreasing numbers of larynxes and thoraxes. I see them all prostrating themselves before Professor Salzer, although the professor couldn’t work any miracles and could only cut into the patients and mutilate them with the best of intentions and I see him with his meticulous planning and highly developed skills bringing the victims of his work to an earlier grave than they would have found of their own accord, although he, the best of the best in his field, could do nothing about it, quite the opposite, he and his art and his elegance were totally guided by his high, even the highest, ethics. They all wanted to be operated on by Professor Salzer, who was an uncle of my friend Paul Wittgenstein, one of the expert authorities at the University in the city, and so unapproachable that if they’d been standing in front of him, they’d have lost their voices. The professor’s coming, the word went out, and the entire hospital became a holy place. The Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt was at its height, and my aunt, who came to the Baumgartner Heights every day after a two-hour journey in the streetcar in boiling heat carrying several pounds of newspapers, brought me the first copy of Gargoyles . But I was too weak to be able to take pleasure in it, even for a moment. My theology student was amazed that I wasn’t happy, that I wasn’t proud of the beautifully printed book, I couldn’t even lift it. My aunt stayed with me all through visiting hours, how often she held the basin under my chin when I vomited after so-called attacks. I lay there with the same incision below the larynx as the people dying to my right and left, and got the news that I had been selected for the so-called prize of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry. I have sketched this more gloomy than entertaining introduction because I want to establish why this so-called prize was more welcome to me back then than anything could have been. Just to be accepted into the hospital — and I had had to be delivered to the hospital on the Baumgartner Heights! — I had first had to pay over the sum of fifteen thousand schillings, which naturally I didn’t have and which my aunt advanced to me. But of course I wanted to pay her back this amount as soon as possible, so I had barely been delivered to the hospital on the Baumgartner Heights before I wrote to my publisher about the amount, more accurately to the editor, with the request that my publisher send me two thousand marks. And promptly a few days after my request two thousand marks arrived for me. Then I wrote to my editor that I would thank my publisher immediately for the two thousand marks, but I had barely sent off the letter to the editor before she sent a telegram Do not thank the publisher! Why not, I had no idea. I learned she had laid out the two thousand marks from her own private bank account, the publisher had been unwilling. It is depressing to have to get hold of fifteen thousand schillings just to be admitted to a death ward, but that is how things were, those were the circumstances. In brief, this was the situation into which the news arrived that I should expect the prize of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry. The award event would take place in the fall, either September or October, I no longer remember. In any case, I had been out of the hospital for a mere two or three days before traveling to Regensburg, where they planned to stage the award ceremony in the town hall. The poet Elisabeth Borchers was due to share the award with me. I went to Regensburg weak-kneed, with a shoulderbag of my grandfather’s. All the way up the Danube, I thought of nothing but the eight thousand marks, the gigantic sum of money I was to receive. I dreamed of the eight thousand marks behind closed eyes and painted the scene that awaited me in Regensburg. I was to be put up at the Hotel Thurn und Taxis, a famous address. My frailty made me keep dozing off at the compartment window the whole way along, the Danube, the Gothic, the German Emperors, I kept thinking, but whenever I woke up from my dozes the first thing I thought about was always the eight thousand marks. I didn’t know Herr Rudolf de la Roi, the spokesman of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry, who had given me the award. Probably, I thought, he knows about my illness and because of my illness he has made sure I got the prize. This thought lowered my self-estimation, for I would like to have received the award for Gargoyles or for Frost , not for Morbus Boeck . But I must not brood, I forbade myself to devalue this award even before I’d received it. Doderer and Gütersloh have received this award before you, I thought, writers of major stature, even if I had no access to them, nor could. Three days ago still in your sickbed, now already en route to Regensburg where the Gothic awaits you, I thought. The Danube kept getting narrower, the landscape kept getting more lovely, finally, as it suddenly turned desolate and gray and insipid, there was Regensburg. I got out and went straight to the Hotel Thurn und Taxis. It really was a first-class hotel for a town like Regensburg. I liked it and I truly did immediately feel well in this hotel, and from the very first moment, I wasn’t alone, but in the company of Elisabeth Borchers, whom I had already met in Luxembourg at one of the many so-called Poets’ Assemblies to which I used to go with my poems when I was around twenty. So there was none of the boredom that always hits me otherwise in every hotel in the entire world where I arrive on my own. I knew that Borchers was an intelligent person and a charming lady and her reputation in my eyes was superb. We wound our way through the town, laughing madly, and used the opportunity to enjoy a casual evening together. Naturally it didn’t run late, my illness soon sent me to bed. The next day I met Herr Rudolf de le Roi and the publisher of Akzente , Hans Bender, who, I assume, had a say in the awarding of the prize, I still have a photograph of Borchers and Bender in front of a Gothic Regensburg fountain. I didn’t like the town. It’s cold and repulsive and if I hadn’t had Borchers and my thoughts of the eight thousand marks, I would probably have left again after the first hour. How I hate these medium-sized towns with their famous historical buildings by which their inhabitants allow themselves to be perverted their whole lives long. Churches and narrow alleys in which people vegetate, their minds turning more mindless all the time. Salzburg, Augsburg, Regensburg, Würzburg, I hate them all, because mindlessness has been kept warming over in them for hundreds of years. But I kept going back to the eight thousand marks. During my Morbus Boeck illness so many debts mounted up that I can now pay off, I thought. And at the end there’ll still be an amount left over just for me. So I let the morning of the ceremonial awarding of the prize of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry (naturally I want to be sure I always use the full, correct title) creep up on me. Herr de la Roi collected me and Frau Borchers and we went to the town hall, which ranks as one of the precious monuments of German Gothic. It threatened to stifle and choke me as soon as I went in, but I said to myself, Be brave, be brave, just be brave, go along with everything that’s going to happen and take the check for eight thousand marks and vanish. The ceremony was fairly short. Herr von Bohlen und Halbach, the Chairman of the Federal Association of German Industry, was to make the presentation to Frau Borchers and myself. We had taken our seats in the front row with Doctor de le Roi. To the left and right of us were the town dignitaries including the mayor wearing his heavy chain of office. I had eaten too much the night before and felt queasy. I can no longer remember whether there was a speech, but probably there was, for such ceremonies always have to include a speech. The guests of honor threatened to cause the main room in the town hall to explode. I could hardly breathe. I was in danger of suffocating in the air of the hall. Everything was all sweat and dignity. But we’d laughed so much the night before, I thought, Frau Borchers and I, that it was all worth it for that alone. And now the eight thousand marks on top of it all! In a moment all the magic rigmarole will be over and we’ll have the checks in our hands! I thought. Of course a chamber music ensemble had also taken their seats here too, what they played escapes me. And then, as I recall, the definitive moment arrived without warning. President von Bohlen und Halbach stepped to the podium and read from a piece of paper the following: … and the Federal Association of German Industry herewith bestows the nineteen sixty-seven awards on Frau Bernhard and Herr Borchers! My neighbor jumped, as I noticed. She was in shock for a second. I squeezed her hand and told her she should just think about the money, whether it was Herr Borchers and Frau Bernhard or Herr Bernhard and Frau Borchers, as was the fact, was irrelevant. Frau Borchers and I got up on the stage of the Regensburg town hall, in which absolutely nobody aside from those affected and perhaps also Herr de le Roi and Herr Bender had noticed Herr von Bohlen und Halbach’s mistake, and we each received a check for eight thousand marks. We also spent a beautiful day in the horrible town and I returned to Vienna where I was welcomed and fussed over by my aunt. A year ago I received a so-called Jubilee Book from the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry, the so-called Jahresring , which proudly presents all of their prizewinners. My name was the only one missing. Had Doctor de le Roi, the extremely nice (as I recall) gentleman, removed my name from the list of honorees because of the changes in my life meantime, changes I find no fault with myself? In any case, here I have the opportunity to share with you the fact that I too am a winner of the prize of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry. And in Regensburg. And in the town hall in Regensburg to boot.