Long Fiction:
Frost, 1963
Verstörung, 1967 (Gargoyles, 1970)
Das Kalkwerk, 1970 (The Lime Works,1973)
Korrektur, 1975 (Correction, 1979)
Ja, 1978 (Yes, 1991)
Die Billigesser, 1980 (The Cheap-eaters, 1990)
Beton, 1982 (Concrete, 1984)
Der Untergeher, 1983 (The Loser, 1991)
Holzfällen: Eine Erregung, 1984 (Woodcutters, 1987; also known as Cutting Timber: An Imitation, 1988)
Alte Meister, 1985 (Old Masters, 1989)
Auslöschung: Ein Zerfall, 1986 (Extinction, 1995)
In der Höhe: Rettungsversuch, Unsinn, 1989 (On the Mountain: Rescue Attempt, Nonsense, 1991)
Short Fiction:
Amras, 1964
Prosa, 1967
Ungenach, 1968
An der Baumgrenze: Erzählungen, 1969
Ereignisse, 1969
Watten: Ein Nachlass, 1969
Gehen, 1971
Midland in Stilfs: Drei Erzählungen, 1971
Der Stimmenimitator, 1978 (The Voice Imitator, 1997)
Drama:
Die Rosen der Einöde, pb. 1959 (libretto)
Ein Fest für Boris, pr., pb. 1970 (A Party for Boris, 1990)
Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige, pr., pb. 1972
Die Jagdgesellschaft, pr., pb. 1974
Die Macht der Gewohnheit, pr., pb. 1974 (The Force of Habit, 1976)
Der Präsident, pr., pb. 1975 (The President, 1982)
Minetti: Ein Porträt des Künstlers als alter Mann, pr. 1976
Die Berühmten, pr., pb. 1976
Immanuel Kant, pr., pb. 1978
Der Weltverbesserer, pb. 1979
Vor dem Ruhestand, pb. 1979 (Eve of Retirement, 1982)
Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh: Ein deutscher Dichtertag um 1980, pb. 1981
Am Ziel, pr., pb. 1981
Der Schein trügt, pb. 1983
Ritter, Dene, Voss, pb. 1984 (English translation, 1990)
Der Theatermacher, pb. 1984 (Histrionics, 1990)
Elisabeth II, pb. 1987
Heldenplatz, pr., pb. 1988
Histrionics: Three Plays, pb. 1990
Screenplay:
Der Italiener, 1971
Poetry:
Auf der Erde und in der Hölle, 1957
In hora mortis, 1957
Unter dem Eisen des Mondes, 1958
Die Irren-die Häftlinge, 1962
Contemporary German Poetry, 1964 (includes selections of his poetry in English translation)
Nonfiction:
Die Ursache: Eine Andeutung, 1975 (An Indication of the Cause, 1985)
Der Keller: Eine Entziehung, 1976 (The Cellar: An Escape, 1985)
Der Atem: Eine Entscheidung, 1978 (Breath: A Decision, 1985)
Die Kalte: Eine Isolation, 1981 (In the Cold, 1985)
Ein Kind, 1982 (A Child, 1985)
Wittgensteins Neffe: Eine Freundschaft, 1982 (Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship, 1986)
Gathering Evidence, 1985 (English translation of the first five autobiographical works listed above; includes An Indication of the Cause, The Cellar: An Escape, Breath: A Decision, In the Cold, and A Child)
Thomas Bernhard (BEHRN-hahrt) was undoubtedly one of the most prominent Austrian writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was born out of wedlock in the Netherlands in 1931. His mother was the daughter of the Austrian writer Johannes Freumbichler, and his father was an Austrian peasant. He spent his first years with his grandparents in Bavaria and then attended a private school in Salzburg, Austria, in 1942. Bernhard was alienated from his abusive mother but felt a close attachment to his grandfather. He eventually contracted a severe lung ailment and spent several years in a sanatorium. Bernhard had begun studying music as a child and continued this first love in 1952 after his recovery. He completed his studies in 1957 and worked for a time in Vienna and Salzburg. In 1965, he bought a farm in Ohlsdorf, Austria, and lived there until his death from heart failure in 1989. Bernhard never married.
Thomas Bernhard
Bernhard’s literary reputation was established with his first novel, Frost, and his first play, A Party for Boris. His tightly controlled use of language and his complex narrative style of paraphrase and quotation astounded many readers, as did his pessimistic and sardonic themes. The characters in his first novel, the young medical student and the insane painter Strauch, are caught within a bleak cycle of obsessive self-reflection that alienates them from their own feelings and from those of others. The play is narrated in a series of self-conscious monologues, a style that characterizes much of his narrative work. A Party for Boris also establishes the existential themes and ironic dialogue of Bernhard’s considerable dramatic writing. It deals with a party held for the crippled Boris and his legless friends, all trapped in wheelchairs and condemned to endless thoughts of suicide.
Gargoyles, with its monologues by the prince whose compulsion to think has driven him to insanity, is similar to Frost. All of Bernhard’s characters suffer from varying degrees of physical and mental disease. The novel The Lime Works continues these primarily existential themes. In this text, Konrad and his crippled wife live alone in an abandoned lime works. Konrad is obsessed with writing the ultimate intellectual treatise on the subject of hearing; he eventually goes insane and murders his wife. Correction deals with the genius scholar Roithammer, who constructs a house for his beloved sister; she dies shortly thereafter. He, like Konrad, is obsessed with writing a work about his childhood and commits suicide after destroying the last of the innumerable revisions he vainly attempts. Bernhard has also written a series of five autobiographical works that attempt to capture his childhood and to portray the origins of his worldview. The novel Concrete again deals with an alienated intellectual who seeks to write a book–this time about the composer Felix Mendelssohn–but is never quite able to get started. Woodcutters is a bitterly satirical and thinly veiled portrait of Viennese society; it provoked a heated controversy upon publication. The Loser and Extinction both offer obsessive, contemptuous narrators confronted by sudden deaths of loved ones.
Bernhard’s numerous plays echo the themes of despair, insanity, and death that inform his narrative works. In Die Jagdgesellschaft (the hunting party), a one-armed general is going blind and remains unaware that his beloved forest is being destroyed by an insect infestation. The play Minetti depicts an aging and insane actor who is asked to perform William Shakespeare’s King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606) and, in an ongoing struggle between himself and the audience, eventually commits suicide. This theme of the integrity and obsessive character of the artist occurs in many of Bernhard’s works. The stupidity of the general public is an aspect of Bernhard’s often-biting criticism of Austrian, especially Viennese, society. Other Bernhard plays, such as Die Berühmten (the famous) and Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (the ignorant man and the insane man), are critical of the artist’s obsessive demands for technical perfection.
The comedy Immanuel Kant is a satirical play that attacks the thought of the well-known eighteenth century German philosopher. Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz (heroes’ place), also provoked bitter controversy upon its production at the 1988 Salzburg Festival. It attacks what Bernhard saw as the lingering vestiges of racism and hatred in Austrian society. It deals with a Jewish professor who emigrated in 1938 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were welcomed into Vienna and who, upon his return fifty years later, commits suicide when he sees that anti-Semitic attitudes still exist within Austrian society.
The predominantly existential themes of Bernhard’s writings–death, alienation, and the crippling weight of obsessive self-consciousness–made him an heir to Franz Kafka and other modernist authors of the early twentieth century. Such melancholic and morbid preoccupation with death, suicide, and disease has been, for centuries, characteristic of many writers in the Austrian tradition. Life was defined by death for Bernhard, and his writings suggest a deeply rebellious and hostile attitude toward the very fact of existence. At times, especially in his vitriolic criticism of his Austrian homeland, he appeared misanthropic. The intensity and insistence of his themes and the singular and complex narrative technique of paraphrase, quotation, and repetition give Bernhard’s writings a unique profile in the history of modern European literature.