STEVE DOWDEN
627
woodwork. Now as the sole living male heir of the family and its ruined
traditions, it is his duty to carry on, but he refuses - or so we must as–
sume. He dies an unspecified death and thereby puts an absolute end to
an identity that in his eyes had been murdered by the moral corruption of
his parents, a corruption that is his, too, simply because he is their child.
Questions of identity also predominate in Bernhard's final play,
Heldenplatz
(which Kurt Waldheim denounced as a "vulgar insult to the
Austrian people"). He wrote it for the Burgtheater's 1988 centennial,
which was of course exactly fifty years after Hitler's march into Austria
and his triumphant speech before jubilating masses of Austrians at
Vienna's Heldenplatz. That Bernhard should have composed a play
merely celebrating the Burgtheater, a symbol of Austria's supposedly un–
broken cultural identity, was out of the question. Bernhard - a writer, by
the way, who had also been dismissed by the left as an apolitical and in–
troverted representative of the so-called "neue Innerlichkeit" ("new sub–
jectivity") - chose instead to submit a much more difficult question to the
Austrian intelligentsia. More than any other Austrian writer, Bernhard has
attempted to confront the question of history's meaning for Austrian
identity.
Heldel1platz
presents the family of a Jewish philosopher, a refugee
of 1938 who has spent his life up to 1988 teaching at Oxford. Professor
Josef Schuster has returned with his wife to Vienna, at the invitation of
the city, to live and work there. Once in Vienna, he finds he cannot sur–
vive there and so commits suicide. Schuster's dilemma is this: as an
Austrian he felt isolated in England; as a Jew he felt isolated in Austria.
Which is his true identity: Is he an Austrian or a Jew? The double-bind
drives him to suicide, which should be understood as Bernhard's way of
forcing a question on the Austrian public. He wanted to make it clear that
contemporary Austria has chosen to repress and reject a large part of its
heritage, represented in
Heldenplatz
by the Austrian philosopher who also
happened to be a Jew (and in whom we can recognize traits borrowed
from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean Amery). The obliteration of
Schuster's identity means the obliteration of Austria's.
Bernhard's tirades against Austria have been taken both too seriously
and not seriously enough: too seriously when taken literally; not seriously
enough when dismissed as the ravings of a self-promoting hack writer or
as the eccentrically subjective critique of a loner. What we have in
Bernhard is an Austrian national satirist, whose contribution to national
self-consciousness and self-examination is second to none. Presumably he
took seriously the idea that modern history has obliterated Austria's for–
mer, that is, true identity, but the effect of his writing has been to sharpen
the question of Austrian identity, not
to
eliminate it.
