Thomas Bernhard is a gifted writer, a vulnerable and tormented man

Thomas Bernhard is considered one of the most significant writers of the German-speaking world from the second half of the 20th century.

He was born in the Dutch city of Heerlen on February 10, 1931. His mother Herta, who was unmarried at the time, fled Austria to give birth there and avoid the shame of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

In fact, Bernhard's biological father, Alois Zuckerstätter, a carpenter and petty criminal, refused to recognize his son. Thomas never met him.

After a year, Herta returned to Vienna with Thomas. Her father, the Austrian writer Johannes Freumbichler, had a great influence on Bernhard. Grandfather advocated for him to get a good education in the field of art, so he studied music and acting in Salzburg and Vienna.

When Bernhard was five years old, his mother remarried and moved to Bavaria, where she gave birth to two more children. Thomas joined them. He was expected to join the Hitler Youth, in what was then Nazi Germany, which he hated.

Peter Fabjan, Bernhard's half-brother, spoke in his memoirs about difficult and often tense family life.

He described his brother as a generous, disciplined and prolific artist, but also as a vulnerable and tormented man.

“My life was life with a phantom - actually a demon - by my side."

Peter Fabjan

Writing style

The internationally recognized Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard was often compared by critics to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.

His novels have been classified among the masterpieces of the 20th century. Bernhard began his career as a poet in the 50s of the 20th century, and published his first novel entitled Mraz in 1963.

In his writing, he used modernist and avant-garde methods,and in his first works he dealt with themes that would continue to attract him in his later works.

Bernhard's novels and plays they are imbued with characteristic black humor, and most often he wrote about nature, death, religion and nonsense.

His characters are faced with spiritual and physical decay. 

Just like Kafka, one of the writers he appreciated the most, Thomas Bernhard often based the story on one character, and the purpose was to show the mental and emotional state of the main protagonist.  

His novels often take the form of long monologues that can last almost a hundred pages without a paragraph.

"Arrogance is a perfectly suitable weapon to fight against a hostile world, a world where arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it is only deceptive."                                                                         &nb sp;                                 Thomas Bernhard

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Photo: Biblos

We will mention some of Thomas Bernhard's novels that you can also find here in Biblos.

Beton

The novel was published in 1982. Like many of Bernhard's other books, Concrete is written in the form of a monologue that stretches over a hundred pages.

A dark, grotesque story of failure and despair follows a young married couple and their tragedy, which is the result of a failed attempt to take fate into their own hands.

Wittgenstein's nephew: jedno prijateljestvo

It is an autobiographical work that was originally published in 1982. It is a memory of the author's friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

A very sensitive man who finds it difficult to navigate the world, Paul Wittgenstein is obsessed with music, sailing and racing cars. 

He spent all his wealth and finally died poor. Thomas and Paul deepened their friendship when both were recovering in hospital; Bernhard from a lung disease, and Wittgenstein from an attack of insanity.

The Loser

The theme of one of Bernhard's most significant novels is an imaginary relationship between three characters; of piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel they have to give up their musical ambitions because they can't match Gould's musical ingenuity.

The book is written as a monologue in one continuous paragraph, and talks about success, failure, brilliance and fame.

Deletion. Disintegration

This classic of Austrian literature is also the last novel by Thomas Bernhard, and was published in 1986.

Franz-Josef Murau is the black sheep of a powerful Austrian landowning family. He lives in Rome, surrounded by friends, in a self-imposed asylum.

At one point, Franz-Josef receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother, who killed in a traffic accident and must return to his native country.

The work is written in Bernhard's recognizable style, where exaggeration turns into grotesque, and tragedy into comedy. 

 

Private life

Thomas Bernhard was a great critic of Austrian provincialism, as well as the Catholic Church and its relationship with the Nazi regime. Through his characters, he often kitisized anti-Semitism in Austria.

On one occasion, they say, he declared:

"I cannot listen to Beethoven without thinking of Nuremberg."

He forbade the posthumous performance of his works in Austria.

As for his emotional life, his relationship with women is quite unclear. Namely, in public he gave the impression of an asexual person.

However, the most important woman in Bernhard's life, and perhaps the only person who really got close to him, was the rich widow Hedwig Stavianicek.

Hedwig was more than thirty years older than him, and they met in 1950, when his mother died, i.e. a year after the cape of the beloved grandfather.

Stavianicek was the main support in the writer's life and significantly advanced his literary career. He described her as his Lebensmensch - a term that denotes the most important person in one's life. The term was coined by Bernhard himself.

His brother Peter Fabjan stated that Hedwig was the center of Thomas' world, but the relationship remained platonic because Bernhard was essentially asexual.

She died in 1984, and the writer was by her side at the time. After the death of his lifelong companion, Bernhard withdrew even more into his own world.

During his life, the writer suffered from numerous lung diseases, including tuberculosis. In 1978, he was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, a disease of unknown cause. After a decade of constant medical care, he died of a heart attack in 1989 in Gmunden, a small town in Austria.

Thomas Bernhard, in his will, which caused great controversy when it was published, forbade the staging of his plays and the publication of unpublished works in Austria.

However, this decision was overturned by his half-brother and heir Peter Fabjan.

 

Prepared by: Marijana Matijević