GITTA HONEGGER
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helplessness and
Schadel'ifreude.
All in all, everybody seemed to enact a
classic Bernhard scene of exaggerated theatricality marked, typically, by
the absence of the central character.
Under the circumstances, the play itself could only be anticlimactic
for those who might have expected a political thriller or an emotional
psychological drama about anti-Semitism and the situation of Jews in
Waldheim's Austria. Bernhard employs the same unrelenting dramaturgy
of his previous plays, which are usually dominated by the voice of one
speaker (more often than not an overbearing, misanthropic and some–
what cranky old man), who continues to talk obsessively and relentlessly
with only a few interruptions from others. Or he is quoted at length and
with equal obsessiveness by those who learned from him. The format of
the speeches is the same in all plays. Bernhard never uses punctuation
marks. Instead, he breaks down individual sentences into several lines, so
that meaning and emotional pitch are revealed through their rhythmical
structuring. Action, as it unfolds in conventional dialogue, is replaced by
a deliberately musical structure of themes and their insistent repetitions
and variations. His characters' loquacious excursions traverse the entire
landscape of popular
Weltanschallung
and alienated iconoclasm mapped
out in the familiar peaks and hidden ravines of their native idiom, under–
scored by the deceptively cozy flow of Austrian speech rhythms and cod–
ified in the idioms that had been distilled, perfected, and finally ossified
through the use and abuse of generations. They are the bitterly comic
relics in a country that shrank from a global empire to a tiny
Alpenrepub–
Iik,
marionettes suspended on the cultural strings of their shared language,
clinging
to
the arrogance and self-important posturing of an entire cul–
ture frozen in anachronistic gestures of imperial domination. In Bern–
hard's tragic universe, fate is language, the Austrian language. There is no
escape, although many characters try. Modeled after Ludwig Wittgen–
stein, Bernhard's favorite native archetype, they seek refuge in Cambridge
or Oxford or, like Bernhard himself, in Mallorca, Rome, or Crete. The
price of resistance to the traps of language is usually madness. In this
doomed world, the Jew represents its most tragic victim and serves as its
most extreme paradigm. Professor Schuster in
Heldenplatz
is one of
Bernhard's classic madmen who could not survive because he could not
be reconciled with his predicament. He got homesick for his native cul–
ture . His love of music lured him back to Vienna, although "he could
only hear the music/ when he stopped hearing/ the national-socialist
orientation of the concert-goers/ he had to as they say cover both his
ears and eyes/ in order to hear the music." "We walked straight into the
Viennese trap/ We walked straight into the Austrian trap," says his
brother. They are not just victims in the context of persistent Austrian
anti-Semitism; they are also victims of their own Austrian-
