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Review [published April 2002]
Thomas Bernhard: Playing Dead
Stephen Mitchelmore finds Thomas Bernhard to be elusive within
two studies of the Austrian writer
What if everything we can be depends on playing a
role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it
would mean that the public self, the one presented to
the world, is not ‘a mask’ but the original; the thing
itself. Behind the scenes, alone, we live the mystery
of self-consciousness. We wonder who it is that wakes
at four to soundless dark. Alone, we dream of another
life; the one in the biography. Perhaps the oppressive
climate of our culture – as seen in the triumphant exposés
of the press and the prurience of Reality TV – is
due to our frantic need to remove in others what we see
as a façade in ourselves. And as art is seen as an adjunct
of this removal (‘expressing the inner self’), so the
inevitable disappointment in its resistant playfulness
leads to a shift in preference to revelatory biography
and memoir. Could this be stage fright on our part?
Early on in Thomas Bernhard: The Making Of An
Austrian, the first English biography of the Austrian
novelist, playwright and poet, Gitta Honegger says
the apparatus of the theatre is an “annoyingly overused
existential paradigm”, and she’s right. I’ve only
used it once and it’s annoying me already. However,
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and
it is clear that her subject is the paradigm’s essential
figure. There seems to be no private Thomas Bernhard.
As such, Honegger says he is a particularly Austrian
phenomenon. The nation, she says, transplanted the
baroque theatrics of the old Hapsburg Empire into its
cultural life, notably the Salzburg Festival, the state
run Burgtheatre, and one man: Thomas Bernhard. Each
provided an arena for Austria to conjure its self image.
In Bernhard’s case, it was invariably a negative image,
as if Austria needed an impression of embattlement
against a hostile world. For example, when Bernhard
received a state prize and made critical remarks about
the state in his acceptance speech, a Government minister
stormed out and slammed a glass door so violently
that it smashed. And just before his death in 1989, he
was verbally attacked by the President (an ex-Nazi),
and physically attacked on a bus by an old lady wielding
an umbrella. Since his death, however, Bernhard
has become a national treasure. His vitriol has been rebranded,
Guy Fawkes-like, into a fireworks display. As
a result, his description of Austria as a place with more
Nazis in 1988 than in 1938 (the cause of the President’s
082
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