GITTA HONEGGER
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian novelist, poet, and playwright died as he
had lived, in seclusion, in Upper Austria, on February 12, 1989, two days
after his fifty-eighth birthday. At the time of his death he was at the
center of an embittered, nationwide controversy over his last play,
Heldenplatz.
With its inflammatory wholesale condemnation of Austria's
institutional ized tri n ity, anti-Sem itism, social ism, and Cathol icism
(ubiquitous targets in Bernhard's oeuvre), it was his response to the fifty–
year commemoration of the
Allschlllss,
Austria's annexation into Hitler's
Reich, in March 1983.
Once again Austria found itself in the embarrassing position that its
most accomplished and internationally respected writer, in other words, a
prized export item - and Austrians like to claim cultural superiority -
was also its most outspoken critic, a notorious
Nestbeschmllt z cr
(an un–
translatable term - literally, someone who defiles his own nest - indige–
nous to the Austrians' relationship to the German language, particularly
when it comes to coining new insults). During the last fifteen years or so,
the epithet has been reserved almost exclusively for Bernhard, to the
point where it became interchangeable with his name.
The controversy started a few months before the play's scheduled
opening at the Burgtheater. Against the common practice in German–
speaking countries, where plays usually are published before they are pro–
duced, the script was kept top secret by director Claus Peymann, who is
also the charismatic artistic director of the Burgtheater.
Peymann, as a young director in Hamburg, discovered and pushed
Bernhard's unconventional play, wh ich went against the avant-garde
fashion initiated by Handke's
Offending the Alldience,
over twenty years
ago. Bernhard developed his own technique and far surpassed what
Handke in his youthful rebellion against "Granddad's theater" could
have imagined. Almost all of Bernhard's twenty or so plays had their tri–
umphant premieres staged by Peymann, in the theaters of Stuttgart and
Bochum, where he had been the artistic director, as well as at the
Salzburg Festival. In theatrical terms, Bernhard and Peymann became
synonymous. Two of Bernhard's plays were done with the Burgtheater's
permanent company with such disastrous results that Bernhard prohibited
any further productions in Vienna until Peymann's arrival four seasons
ago. That was when Peymann commissioned Bernhard to write a play
for the "year of commemoration," as 1988 generally was referred to. It
