GITTA HONEGGER
Every time I return from abroad, I keep thinking that I am returning
to
one of the most beautiful areas in the world, and certainly
Gmunden is the absolute highlight in all of Salzkammergut, as far as
the town and its environs are concerned. To my horror I find out in
your paper for which I have the highest regard that the trolley will be
discontinued. There is no greater catastrophe that could befall this
town which I love so much! It is this trolley which is one of the
most prominent landmarks of this town and I use it with the greatest
pleasure every time I arrive at the train station. This trolley is a gem
and irreplacable, and Gmunden would lose one of its biggest attrac–
tions among old and young alike.... "
505
Bernhard finally succumbed to the lung ailment which had marked
him for death since his teens, but which he turned into "the main spring
of his existence," as he put it in
Wiftgensfein's Nephew.
AU
his work is in–
formed by his lifelong experience of closest proximity to death. Ulti–
mately, it was his and his characters' rage that kept them going in their
passionate and, as they themselves knew, futile and often grimly comical
pursuit of their own brand of uncompromising truth. " I rave, therefore I
am" is the precept to their survival, which earned Bernhard a nickname
borrowed from his many lin guistic inventions,
Oberlebenskunstler .
(Literally, "survival artist," it is a play on the common expression
Leuel1skiinsfler,
someone who knows how to live.) In Bernhard's
Beckett-like, postcatastrophe universe, the art and the comedy and
tragedy of it all lie in one's astonishing feats of survival in a world
marked by death. Therefore, his death came as a shock to all of us who
had begun to trust (and rely on) his art of survival more than his closeness
to death. Yet even his death seemed a deliberately staged, marvelously
consistent continuation of his life.
