STEVE DOWDEN
Thomas Bernhard's Austria
Among Austrian writers, no one has been more preoccupied with the
myths of Austrian national history and identity than Thomas Bernhard.
Bernhard was famously hostile to Austria, which he denounced frequently
and vociferously as "the most menacing of all European states"; Vienna is
no more than a "sewer of mind and culture"; and he described Salzburg,
his native city, as having been deformed by the malign spirits of
Catholicism and National Socialism. In the following passage from his
novel
Old Masters,
the serio-comic tone of his animadversions are appar–
ent. The protagonist - an eighty- two year-old curmudgeon named Reger
- warms up to a long tirade against the Prater, longstanding symbol of
Vienna and Austria (perhaps best known to Americans from Harry Lime's
ferris-wheel ride with Holly Martins in
The Third Man):
The Prater today is no longer the turbulent amusement park of my
childhood: the Prater today is a repulsive collection of vulgarians, a
collection of criminal types. The whole Prater reeks of beer and crime
and we encounter in it nothing but the brutality and the brazen fee–
ble-mindedness of the mean-spirited , snotty Viennese. Not a day
passes without a murder in the Prater being reported in the papers,
daily at least one, usually several, rapes in the Prater. [n my childhood
a day at the Prater was always a joyous occasion, and in the spring the
scent of lilac and chestnuts really did hang in the air. Today proletar–
ian perversity stinks to high heaven. The Prater, this most charming of
all
inventions for bringing pleasure, said Reger, is now no more than a
universal fairground of vulgarity. Yes, if the Prater were still as it was
in my childhood, said Reger, ( would go there with the (rrsigler fam–
ily, but as matters stand ( do not go there, I cannot afford to; if I went
to the Prater with the [rrsigler family I would be a wreck for weeks to
come. My mother used to be driven to the Prater with her parents in
a horse-drawn carriage, she would run along the Prater Avenue in a
floating silk dress. These images are history, said Reger, all that is long
past. Today you are lucky if you are not shot in the back in the Prater,
Reger said, or stabbed through the heart, or at the least have your
wallet snatched right from your jacket pocket. The present age is an
utterly brutalized age.
