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PARTISAN IUVIEW
composer.) The novel that stands as the most savage indictment of his
own circle of friends ("Artistic corpses, failures, Viennese failures, the liv–
ing dead of the artistic world - writers, painters, dancers, and hangers-on,
artistic cadavers not yet quite dead") and, by implication, of himself,
surges towards the end in a Mahlerian apotheosis of his much maligned
city:
... and as I ran, I reflected that the city through which I was running,
dreadful though I had always fclt it to be, was still the best city there
was, that Vienna which I found detestable and had always found de–
testable, was suddenly once again the best city in the world, my own
city, my beloved Vienna, and that these people, whom I had always
hated and still hated and would go on hating, were still the best
people in the world: I hated them , yet found them somehow
touching - I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them - I
hated Vienna, yet couldn't help loving it....
With the
mise-en-scene
or, rather, the
anti-mise-en-scene
of his own
death, Bernhard also sabotaged a favorite national pastime. Austrians are
notorious for their enjoyment of the proverbial
schone Leiche
(exquisite
corpse), magnificently staged funerals for its heads of state and other
celebrities - the cortege of legendary actors from the Burgtheater, for
example, will move down the Ringstrasse and circle the Burgtheater. No
doubt Bernhard would have qualified for such posthumous honors. Many
among those buried in splendor were
personae non gratae
or had been
driven out during their lifetime - as was highlighted recently by the
anachronistic pomp of an "authentic" Habsburg funeral for Empress
Zita, banished from Austria after the collapse of the monarchy in 1919,
only to be returned to the Habsburg family crypt in the same splendid
horse-drawn coach that was used for Kaiser Franz Josef in 1916.
Following the tradition of Nestroy, Karl Kraus, and Elias Canetti,
Bernhard never tired of satirizing the perverse theatricality of Austrian
society, which he chastised and exposed with as much perverse pleasure in
his plays and novels and in his rare but always explosive public statements.
No one understood this national penchant for public drama better than
he, a notorious recluse with an enormous appetite for histrionics which
he never denied.
In
the course of his distinguished writing career that
established him as one of the giants of German literature alollg with
Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, he also perfected himself as the
classic fool who claimed all that character's historic privileges as shameless
public scourge and made instant fools out of those who tried to get too
close to him or claimed to understand him. His death was as contradic–
tory and controversial as his life: his last grand theatrical coup and a quiet
