GITTA HONEGGER
503
departure that insisted one more time to be reckoned with beyond
cliched assumptions, in all his contradictions and his ambivalent love-hate
relationship towards Austria.
He lived a solitary life on his farm in a remote little village in Up–
per Austria without a telephone and with a Mercedes and a jeep. But his
habits also made him an easily traceable public figure. Every morning at
seven he drove to the Rathaus Cafe in nearby Gmunden, a picturesque
resort at Lake Traunsee,
to
read all the available newspapers and tabloids
over breakfast. This is where his friends and collaborators in the publish–
ing and theater worlds would try to reach him by telephone. When he
wasn't around, the waitresses always gave information about his where–
abouts.
From his work people expected him to be a forbidding, brooding
figure. But he was a very kind, charming, polite gentleman with a great
sense of humor and a ready laugh. "I get rid of my misery in writing. I
don't have to live it," he once told me. In contrast to his public image
as a raging misanthrope, he was extremely
loyal
to the people he loved -
most notably his maternal grandfather, Johannes Freumbichler, a novelist
whose work was published posthumously, whose
Weltanschauung
and pa–
triarchal temperament had the most crucial influence on the boy who
would later use him as a model for many of his characters of old
thinkers, isolated and on the verge of madness in their singleminded pur–
suit of one idea. For most of his adult life, he was closest to a Viennese
woman thirty years his senior, whom he had met at the age of eighteen,
one year before his mother died, during one of his prolonged stays in a
sanitarium for treatment of his persistent lung ailment. Her support en–
abled the young man to concentrate exclusively on his writing, which
led to his first major breakthrough with his novel,
Frost,
at the age of
thirty-two. (It stopped him from proceeding with his plans to join a
missionary organization in Africa.) Known to those who knew Bernhard
as
die Tante
(the Aunt), he refers to her in
Wittgenstein's Nephew
as his
Lebensmensch,
(inadequately translated as "companion"), the term coined
by Bernhard like so many other unmistakably "Bernhardian" expressions
which, in the meantime, have entered the German vocabulary. As a vari–
ation on the commonly used
LebensgeJiihrte
for "companion," or
"partner," it suggests a relationship not only for life, but as a matter of
life or death. And in fact, Bernhard survived her by only five years. His
profoundly moving novel
Alte Meister (Old Masters),
also known as
Komodie,
was written in response to her death.
Bernhard was also known for suddenly shutting the heavy wooden
gates to his farmhouse to all visitors and for cutting people out of his life
for no apparent reason at all. He often insisted, privately and through his
work, that he was not a letter writer. Yet his impassioned letters to the
