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PARTISAN REVIEW
eration of Austria - thus the title "AusI6schung." Bernhard offers no pos–
sibility of redemption from the fallen state of the Austrian soul.
This sounds at least a little like the pessimism of Arthur
Schopenhauer, one of the philosophers whom Bernhard mentions from
time to time. Schopenhauer speaks of existence as the original sin from
which no redemption is possible . Yet Bernhard's debt to Schopenhauer
and other philosophers has been exaggerated. Bernhard's pessimism is at
bottom anchored in historical experience - his own and Austria's - not in
ontological philosophy. The "original sin" of Bernhard's Austria is not its
existence, but its morally blighted history. Metaphors that have generally
been understood to be grounded in an arbitrary Bernhardian ontology are
really anchored in his experience and vision of history, especially his pre–
occupation with disease and deformity.
Disease is above all a metaphor for the course of Austrian history
since World War Two: in
Amras,
two brothers are subject to a genetically
inherited form of epilepsy.
Gargoyles
and
Frost
give us the land of Styria, a
hellish landscape of every imaginable social disease and congenital defect.
Even in his memoirs, it is plain that Bernhard's own tuberculosis runs a
course that is parallel to the moral state of postwar Austria as a whole. He
portrays himself and his family as the innocent victims of a morally
bankrupt state. He owes his disease to the state doctors who bungled his
case and to the state institutions - managed by former Nazis, as he makes
clear - in which he was treated . And his recovery is only apparent: he
never heals; instead he only just manages to suppress the worst symptoms.
Eventually the disease would destroy him, as he knew, and it did so in
1989.
It is a short step from the idea of a family whose bloodline has been
tainted by moral depravity to the idea of hereditary disease as a symbol for
the ruined state of Austria's national identity. Not every family member is
directly debilitated. In
Amras,
one brother succumbs and the other does–
n't; in
Frost
and
Gargoyles
the narrator does not succumb to the main pro–
tagonist's contagious insanity; in
Correction,
Roithamer and his favorite
sister seem untouched by traits from the mother's side of the family. Still,
no one escapes the juggernaut of Austrian moral guilt in Bernhard's
universe. It crushes and maims all Austrians, the guilty generation of the
parents and the relatively innocent generation of their children.
In
Ausloschung
Franz-Josef Murau tries to escape his family and its his–
tory by moving to Italy. By changing countries and languages he hopes to
eradicate or at least minimize his Austrianness. But to be born Austrian is
a curse from which there is no release. He must return to Austria when
his parents and older brother are killed in an automobile accident. During
the funeral, old Nazis, some even in uniform, come pouring out of the
