Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard (German: ; 9 February 1931 – 12 February 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, poet and polemicist who is considered one of the most important German-language authors of the postwar era.
He explored themes of death, isolation, obsession and illness in controversial literature that was pessimistic about the human condition and highly critical of post-war Austrian and European culture. He developed a distinctive prose style often featuring multiple perspectives on characters and events, idiosyncratic vocabulary and punctuation, and long monologues by protagonists on the verge of insanity.
Thomas Bernhard | |
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Born | Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard 9 February 1931 Heerlen, Netherlands |
Died | 12 February 1989 (aged 58) Gmunden, Austria |
Occupation | Novelist, playwright |
Nationality | Austrian |
Period | 1957–1989 |
Literary movement | Postmodernism |
Notable works | Correction Extinction Gathering Evidence Woodcutters |
Signature | |
Website | |
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His major works include the novels Correction (1975) and Extinction (1986) and his memoirs Gathering Evidence (1975-82). George Steiner called him: "at his best, the foremost craftsman of German prose after Kafka and Musil." He influenced a younger generation of Austrian writers including Elfriede Jelinek.
Bernhard was controversial in Austria for his public polemics against what he saw as his homeland's post-war cultural pretensions, antisemitism, provincialism and denial of its Nazi past. While critics labelled him a Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest), he described himself as a Störenfried (troublemaker). The controversy extended beyond his death when it was revealed that his will sought to prohibit the publication or performance of his works in Austria for 70 years.
Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen in the Netherlands, where his unmarried mother Herta Bernhard worked as a maid. From the autumn of 1931 he lived with his grandparents in Vienna until 1937 when his mother, who had married in the meantime, moved him to Traunstein, Bavaria, in Nazi Germany. There he was required to join the Deutsches Jungvolk, a branch of the Hitler Youth, which he hated. Bernhard's natural father Alois Zuckerstätter was a carpenter and petty criminal who refused to acknowledge his son. Zuckerstätter died in Berlin from gas poisoning in an assumed suicide in 1940; Bernhard never met him.
Bernhard's grandfather, the author Johannes FreumbichlerSeekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer. George Steiner describes Bernhard's schooling as "hideous... under a sadistically repressive system, run first by Catholic priests, then by Nazis".
, pushed for an artistic education for him, including musical instruction. Bernhard went to elementary school inBernhard's Lebensmensch (a predominantly Austrian term, which was coined by Bernhard himself and which refers to the most important person in one's life) was Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he cared for alone in her dying days. He had met Stavianicek in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the death of his beloved grandfather. Stavianicek was the major support in Bernhard's life and greatly furthered his literary career. The extent or nature of his relationships with women is obscure. Thomas Bernhard's public persona was asexual. Suffering throughout his teens from lung ailments, including tuberculosis, Bernhard spent the years 1949 to 1951 at the Grafenhof sanatorium in Sankt Veit im Pongau. He trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1955–1957) and was always profoundly interested in music. His lung condition, however, made a career as a singer impossible. After that he worked briefly as a journalist, mainly as a crime reporter, and then became a full-time writer. In 1970, he won the Georg Büchner Prize.
In 1978, Bernhard was diagnosed with sarcoidosis. After a decade of needing constant medical care for his lungs, he died in 1989 in Gmunden, Upper Austria. Although there have been claims that he died by assisted suicide, contemporaneous obituaries reported, and Bernhard's half-brother, Dr. Peter Fabjan, confirmed that Bernhard had a heart attack. His death was announced only after his funeral. In his will, which aroused great controversy on publication, Bernhard prohibited any new stagings of his plays and publication of his unpublished work in Austria; however, in 1999 this was annulled by his heir, Peter Fabjan. Bernhard's attractive house in Ohlsdorf-Obernathal 2 where he had moved in 1965 is now a museum and centre for the study and performance of his work.
Bernhard's work presents a pessimistic view of the human condition in which death is an inescapable presence. Critic Mark Anderson states, "death in his writing comes as a random, unjustifiable, but unavoidable cut in existence that cancels all previous hope and striving." Literary critic Stephen Dowding states that in Berhard's fiction there is no redemption for man in religion, politics, art or history.
The typical Bernhard protagonist is a middle-age male who, according to Dowden, is "self-absorbed, histrionically pessimistic, and motivated by a deep loathing of culture and self," but who is nevertheless "strangely charismatic because of the powerful musical language with which he expresses his inner life." His protagonists must "learn to live without recourse to metaphysical lies or utopian deceptions."
Bernhard depicts a postwar Austria steeped in cultural pretensions, antisemitism, denial of its Nazi past and devotion to a morally bankrupt Catholicism. Dowden argues that Austria is often used as a metaphor for the human condition. Just as Austrian history is a story of decline into insignificance, so human beings struggle pointlessly against death; just as Austria engages in self-deception regarding its past and its place in the world, so human beings engage in self-deceptions about the redemptive power of religion, family and culture.
Recurring motifs in Bernhard's work include isolation, incest, madness, chronic illness and suicide. Many of Bernhard's characters suffer from mental and physical illness which Dowden sees as metaphors for Bernhard's moral pessimism and the decline of European society and culture. His protagonists are often engaged in failed intellectual and artistic projects in a futile and destructive attempt to achieve perfection and thus transcend death.
In the face of inevitable death, Bernhard's characters often demonstrate a will to survive. Biographer Gitta Honegger states, "The Überlebenskünstler is Bernhard's central archetype: the survival artist as a virtuoso performance artist." Dowden argues that Bernhard's works also attest to a will to rebel against conformity and develop an independent self identity: "His entire oeuvre amounts to one unswerving experiment in thinking against the grain, in forcing the imagination to explore the parts of life it resists the most."
Bernhard developed a distinctive prose style which is often described as musical, emphasising the rhythms of Austrian German, repetition of key phrases, and variations on recognisable themes. Anderson states that his prose works "all spring, or appear to spring, from the obsessive monologue going on inside Bernhard’s head, a continuous text uttered by a single droning voice that is endlessly reformulated, corrected, and filtered through a hundred different registers." Honegger distinguishes between Bernhard's early prose which was characterised my multiple perspectives and stylistic experimentation and the late works beginning with Yes (1978) which she calls "concerts for a solo mind."
Bernhard is known for his distinctive punctuation and vocabulary. Many of his works comprise a stream of long sentences, unbroken by any paragraph or chapter markings. Honegger states: "His verbal inventions have entered the German vocabulary. His constructions of interminably interlocked clauses and sub-clauses stretch the German language to its limit."
Bernhard's tone is often described as satirical, ironic, polemical and unsentimental. Dowden argues that the extreme and often contradictory views of his protagonists invite the reader to detect ironies and read them as satires. Readers are not expected to accept or reject the opinions of Bernhard's protagonists but to engage with their "verbal struggle against death".
Bernhard's pessimism is often undercut by comedy and black humour. According to Anderson: "The death narrative is always also the record of survival, a survival through a grotesquely jubilant, at times comic writing." Dowden states that "comedy arises when people attempt to create meaning or convince themselves that the world holds something for them....[It is] an austere comedy of catastrophe, despair and mockery."
Bernhard is widely considered one of the most important German-language writers of the second half of the 20th-century. His poetry of the late 1950s received little critical attention but his first published novel Frost (1963) sparked controversy and divided critical opinion. Novelist Carl Zuckmayer praised the novel and it won the Julius Campe Prize and the Bremen Literature Prize. In 1970, Bernhard received the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize for his novel The Lime Works (1970) and his play A Party for Boris (1970).
Critics generally consider his major prose works to be Correction (1975), Extinction (1986) and his five volumes of memoirs (1975-82) (collected in English translation as Gathering Evidence.) His most commercially successful novel was Woodcutters (1984) which sold 60,000 copies within six weeks of publication.
Bernhard wrote 18 full-length plays, many of which premiered at leading German-language venues including the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna Burgtheatre. His plays polarised audiences and critics and often caused media and political controversy for their pessimism and polemics against Austrian and European culture and institutions. According to Dowden: "His public was eager to see what powerful figure he would insult next, what enraged outcry he would elicit, who would try to sue him, and how he would respond."
Honegger states that Bernhard's prose style has influenced the German language: "his performative grammar and incendiary vocabulary have been appropriated by politicians of all persuasions, exploited by the media, and imitated by lesser writers." Bernhard has influenced younger Austrian writers including Elfriede Jelinek, Lilian Faschinger, Robert Menasse and Josef Haslinger. His works have been translated into over 20 languages, and Dagmar Lorenz states that he is one of the few Austrian authors that have won international acclaim.
Although Bernhard stipulated in his will that none of his unpublished writings should be published, this has been sometimes been circumvented. Notably, a memoir My Prizes appeared in 2009 and his correspondence with his publisher Siegfried Unseld from 1961 to 1989 – about 500 letters – was published in December 2009. Bernhard's collected works were published in 22 volumes from 2003 to 2015.
Bernhard's half-brother and literary executor, Peter Fabjan, is honorary secretary of the International Thomas Bernhard Society. The Thomas Bernhard house in Ohlsdorf/Obernathal is open to the public.
Bernhard received numerous awards in recognition for his work. These include:
This partial bibliography lists works by Bernhard by the date of their first publication in separate volumes in commercial editions. Plays are listed by the date of first publication or performance. English translations are listed by date of publication. Unless otherwise stated, the sources are Honneger, Dowden, the International Thomas Bernhard Society, and the indivdual works listed.
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