Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard (; 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.
Born in the Netherlands to his unwed Austrian mother, for much of his childhood he lived with his maternal grandparents in Austria and in boarding homes in Austria and Nazi Germany. He was closest to his grandfather, the novelist Johannes Freumbichler, who introduced him to literature and philosophy. As a youth, he contracted pleurisy and tuberculosis and lived with debilitating lung disease for the rest of his life. While recovering in a sanatorium he began writing poetry and stories and met Hedwig Stavianicek, a wealthy heiress who supported his literary ambitions and whom he later described as the most important person in his life.
After his breakthrough novel Frost (1963), he established himself over the next 20 years as a leading novelist and playwright in German. 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 the Austrian vernacular and 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 fouls his own nest), he described himself as a troublemaker. He died of heart failure in his apartment in Gmunden, Upper Austria, in February 1989. 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.
Life and work
Early life (19311950) Thomas Bernhard was born on 9 February 1931 in Heerlen, the Netherlands, where his unmarried Austrian mother, Herta Bernhard, worked as a maid. In the autumn of 1931, Herta took Thomas to Vienna to live with her parents: Anna Bernhard and her de facto husband, the novelist Johannes Freumbichler. (Thomas never met his biological father, Alois Zuckerstätter, who refused to acknowledge him and committed suicide in 1940.)
In 1935, Herta's parents moved with Thomas to Seekirchen, near Salzburg. In 1936, Herta married Emil Fabjan and the following year moved with him and Thomas to Traunstein, Bavaria, in Nazi Germany. Fabjan never adopted Thomas, and Bernhard always referred to him as his guardian rather than his stepfather. Herta's parents moved to the nearby village of Ettendorf in 1939. Bernhard was closest to his grandfather and later called him "an anarchist, if only in spirit." Freumbichler introduced Bernhard to literature and philosophy and was a major influence on his life.
Bernhard was miserable in the Nazi school system where he was required to join the Deutsches Jungvolk, a branch of the Hitler Youth, which he hated. At age eight, he was sent to a home for maladjusted children and at age 12 to a boarding school in Salzburg where he experienced allied bombing raids. After the war, the Fabjan and Freumbichler families moved to Salzburg where Bernhard continued his schooling. In 1947, Bernhard left school to start an apprenticeship with a grocer.
Bernhard took private singing lessons and aspired to become an opera singer. In early 1949, he developed pleurisy and was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis. He stayed in various hospitals and sanatoriums until January 1951. Bernhard's grandfather died in 1949 and his mother died of cancer the following year.
In 1950, while staying at the Grafenhof sanatorium in Sankt Veit im Pongau, Bernhard met Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a wealthy heiress who was more than thirty-seven years his senior. Stavianicek was to provide him with financial and emotional support and introductions to patrons of art and culture. Bernhard later called her his Lebensmensch (a predominantly Austrian term coined by Bernhard which refers to the most important person in one's life). He cared for her in her home in Vienna in the last months of her life in 1984.
Literary apprenticeship (19511963) From 1951 to 1955, Bernhard worked as a court reporter and cultural journalist for the Salzburg newspaper Demokratisches Volksblatt. He continued his private singing lessons and had poems and short stories published in the Volksblatt and other publications. In late 1955, he published a scathing critique of the Salzburger Landestheater and the ensuing controversy ended his journalistic career. From autumn 1955 to 1957, with the financial support of Stavianicek, he studied acting and singing at the Salzburg Mozarteum. There he met a music student Ingrid Bülau. They became lifelong friends and at one point considered marriage.
From 1956 to 1960, Bernhard was associated with the literary and cultural groups centred on the magazine Stimmen der Gegenwart (Voices of the Present) and the composer Gerhard Lampersberg and his wife, the singer Maja Lampersberg. At this time, Bernhard's first volumes of poetry were published: Auf der Erde und in der Hölle (On Earth and in Hell, 1957), In hora mortis (At the hour of death, 1958), and Unter dem Eisen des Mondes (Under the Steely Moon, 1958). His libretto for Gerhard Lampersberg's Die Rosen der Einöde (Roses of the Wasteland) was also published in 1958.
From 1960 to 1963 Bernhard travelled extensively in Austria, England and mainland Europe. In 1962, he wrote a novel Frost, which was revised and published in 1963.. (The title is the same in German and English.)
Established author (19631978) Bernhard's poetry received little critical attention but Frost sparked controversy and divided critical opinion. Novelist Carl Zuckmayer praised the novel and it won the Julius Campe Prize and the Bremen Literature Prize. Bernhard's novella Amras was published in 1964 and, according to biographer Gitta Honegger, consolidated his favourable critical reputation. In 1965, Bernhard bought a disused farmhouse in Obernathal, Upper Austria. For the rest of his life he divided most of his time between his farmhouse and Stavianicek's apartment in Vienna.
In 1967, after completing his second novel Gargoyles, Bernhard had surgery to remove a tumour from his lungs and spent several months recovering in the Baumgartnerhöhe sanatorium. The following year he was awarded the Austrian Little State Prize for emerging talent. His acceptance speech, in which he stated: ''We are Austrians, we are apathetic; we are life as crass disinterest in life; in the process of nature we are megalomania..." caused an uproar and an angry response from the Austrian minister for culture. The following year, the ceremony for the Anton Wildgans Prize was cancelled when the organisers learned that Bernhard intended to deliver a revised version of the same speech.
In 1970, Bernhard's novel The Lime Works was published and his first professionally produced play, A Party for Boris, premiered at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg. The production was overseen by German director Claus Peymann who went on to direct most of Bernhard's premieres. The Lime Works and A Party for Boris earned Bernhard the Georg Büchner Prize. When Bernhard was awarded the Grillparzer Prize for the same play in 1972, he staged a protest because the organisers of the ceremony did not recognise him and escort him to his seat.
The 1970s was Bernhard's most productive decade. His plays The Ignoramus and the Madman (1972) and The Force of Habit: A Comedy (1974) premiered at the Salzburg Festival, The Hunting Party (1974) and The President (1975) premiered at the Vienna Burgtheater, and Minetti (1976), Immanuel Kant (1978) and The Eve of Retirement (1979) premiered at the Stuttgart Staatstheater under Peymann. His novel Correction (1975) is widely considered his masterpiece and his five volumes of memoirs (1975–82) (collected in English translation as Gathering Evidence) achieved critical acclaim.
Final years and late work (197889) In 1978, Bernhard was diagnosed with sarcoidosis and a terminal heart complaint. His half-brother Peter Fabjan, a doctor of medicine, moved to Gmunden, near the author's farmhouse, and became his unofficial medical adviser. In 1979, Bernhard resigned from the German Academy for Language and Literature when it made the former West German president Walter Scheel an honorary member. In a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he called the academy pretentious and hypocritical for admitting mediocre politicians.
Bernhard continued his prolific output in the 1980s. Eight new full-length plays were premiered and he wrote a series of novels comprising long monologues by ageing and ill protagonists who Honegger compares to Bernhard in their "race against death." His 1984 novel Woodcutters was controversial for its attack on Austrian culture and cultural figures. Gerhard Lampersberg sued him for defamation but later withdrew his suit. The novel was Bernhard's most commercially successful, selling 60,000 copies within six weeks of publication.
Bernhard frequently engaged in public controversies, writing letters, opinion pieces and satirical sketches for newspapers and magazines in which he attacked politicians, public figures and European culture. He was often criticised as a Nestbeschmutzer (one who fouls his own nest; that is, Austria) but preferred to call himself a troublemaker. His final play Heldenplatz (1988), commissioned by Vienna's Burgtheater for the celebrations of its centenary, sparked another controversy when the press revealed that it would include attacks on Austria for antisemitism and denial of its Nazi past. Numerous politicians and public figures called for a ban on the production, Bernhard received death threats, and the Burgtheater was guarded by 200 police officers on the opening night of the play in November 1988.
Following the Heldenplatz dispute, Bernhard's health deteriorated. He died of heart failure in his apartment in Gmunden on 12 February 1989. His reputation as a troublemaker continued beyond the grave when a clause of his will was published, stipulating that none of his works or plays could be performed in Austria for the duration of copyright:
Themes and style Themes Most of Bernhard's work has autobiographical elements, although fact and fiction are freely mixed. According to Honegger: "Bernhard's life and work are inextricably intertwined with Austria's convulsive history in the twentieth century."
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".Mark M. Anderson "Fragments of a Deluge: The Theater of Thomas Bernhard’s Prose". in Literary critic Stephen Dowden 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-aged 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."