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Chapter One

Fool on the Hill

Thomas Bernhard's Mise-en-Scène

When we look down from this undoubtedly most beautiful spot in the Alpine foothills ... from an elevation such as this onto a landscape such as this you see, we instantly think of everything that is happening in this landscape, that ever happened and will happen there ... all that is past and present and the future ... it is not possible to look on this landscape in any other way.

--Thomas Bernhard, " Ungenach "

IN HIS QUASI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK The Cellar Thomas Bernhard describes what he calls the most decisive period of his life: instead of continuing his high school education, which had been interrupted by World War II, the fifteen-year-old became a grocer's apprentice in the blue-collar district of Salzburg. During that two-year period, at his grandfather's instigation, he also began his musical training as an opera singer. His teacher was Maria Keldorfer, who sang the part of Sophie in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier at its world premiere in Dresden. During the festival weeks he loved to climb up on Mönchsberg and sit under a tree just above the Festival Theater to listen to the opera rehearsals.

I had a favorite spot above the Riding School from which I could listen to the operas which were being performed there. One was The Magic Flute , the first opera I ever saw performed and one in which at one time or another I played no fewer than three parts: Sarastro, the Speaker, and Papageno. In this opera, which throughout my life I have made a point of hearing and seeing as often as possible, all my musical desires were realized to perfection. I sat there under the tree, listening to the music, and there was nothing in the whole world that I would have taken in exchange for what I felt as I sat there listening.... For years I went up onto the Mönchsberg in order to listen to rehearsals of operas that were to be performed in the Riding School.

The musical scores would echo in the syntax of his writing; the operatic archetypes would appear in a dense web of signifying chains sliding across the topography of his work; the operatic dramaturgy would provide the underpinning of his philosophical metatheater.

From his favorite spot below Fortress Hohensalzburg, the landmark castle on Mönchsberg (Monk's Mountain, which happens to face Nonnberg, Nun's Mountain, with the fortress tucked between them), he must have had a dramatic view of the city below. The heavy bombings toward the end of World War II tore an apocalyptic intaglio into the architectural orgy of its large Italian-style plazas, surrounded by baroque churches, palaces, and arches leading through webs of medieval alleys and courtyards. Mozart's baroque wunderkind hell nestled in a soft bend of the Salzach River: the dazzling architectural composition of monastic asceticism exploding into sensuous dramatizations of the seductive physicality of death now frozen in a surreal inferno of gaping domes, cathedrals split in half, convents torn open, spilling their once carefully cloistered entrails; Hitler's dream of a mega-Acropolis on Kapuzinerberg (Capuchin Mountain), immortalized in Alfred Speer's architectural plans, hovering above the still pastoral scenery of his theater of war like an unfulfilled curse. Capuchin Mountain is named after the Capuchin monastery, a fortress-like structure bracing the mountain on the eastern bank of the Salzach River, right across from Mönchsberg, open to the young Thomas Bernhard's view.

Buried in the ruins of World War II was the city's shameful Nazi past. Together with its original splendor, its original sins would eventually also reemerge and blend into the splendidly restored scene. Bernhard would be the first to excoriate the hypocrisy, expediency, and greed of its inhabitants and the fascist underside of its powerful Catholic legacy. For centuries Salzburg had been the capital of an independent state ruled by the Church, presided over by prince archbishops.

By the time Bernhard wrote The Cellar ; the city had been restored to its unblemished beauty. Max Reinhardt's opera stage, the old Felsenreitschule--the archbishops' "Riding School in the Rock," which had been blasted right out of the rock on which the town was built--had been redesigned and enlarged as the festival's majestic open-air stage. The many cathedrals, cloisters, and castles crowning the mountains that weave through and around Salzburg had risen from the ashes in all their awe-inspiring grandeur as daunting reminders of the ever-watchful eyes of godly authority. Every fifteen minutes a symphony of bells resounding from myriads of whitewashed steeples, then as now, reminded the inhabitants that there was no escape from the piercing scrutiny of the Church; that the whole city was a stage where sinners were watched, wherever they might be. Spellbound by the sonorous scene, one can't help being awed by the genius of Max Reinhardt, Austria's Ziegfeld of German classical theater, who transformed a Catholic nightmare in all its perverse splendor into his version of a theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk , a synthesis of the arts. Reinhardt, who founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920, continued to stage his spectacular megaproductions right up to 1937, the summer before the Anschluss and his emigration to the United States.

Originally Reinhardt had envisioned the entire city as the setting for his mise-en-scène, which would restore to the theater the festive uniqueness of ceremony it had for the Greeks. Instead, Salzburg turned into a theme park, nourished by Mozart and the conspicuous triumvirate of Reinhardt, the German composer Richard Strauss (who would continue his career under the admiring patronage of the Nazis), and the aristocratic playwright-librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (the quintessential fin-de-siècle Austrian, who died in 1929, many years before his children were forced to flee from the Nazis). The conductor Herbert von Karajan, Salzburg's postwar favorite son despite his highly problematic Nazi past, ruled over the city for many decades. To this day he exercises posthumous power--his more progressive detractors would call it his artistic stranglehold--over the festival. He was Bernhard's earliest and most lasting musical influence: "Ever since my childhood I have seen Karajan's genius develop and come closer and closer to perfection; I have attended almost all his rehearsals of concerts and operas in Salzburg and Vienna. The very first concerts and operas I heard were conducted by Karajan," he wrote in Wittgenstein's Nephew .

But it finally was up to Hollywood to give Salzburg its quintessential mythical family and recast it as the object of global desire, cloistered in kitsch and saturated with the sound of music. Never mind that the mountains Julie Andrews climbs from her supposedly downtown convent (actually located twenty miles east) are miles across the border in Bavaria; that the front of the Trapp residence is Fronburg Castle, to the south of the city; and that its backside is Leopoldskron Castle, at the other end of town. They all come together in the evenings, over mugs of beer and bottles of wine, at open-mike Sound of Music singing contests for hordes of eager tourists, predominantly American and Japanese, joined in multi-accented harmonies of "Edelweiss." It's all part of the annual summer spectacle of an entire city performing itself, selling itself shamelessly to fit all high- and lowbrow expectations: the lederhosen and the dirndls, the Alps and the Schlag and the Knödls , Mozart on chocolate balls and in concert halls, the wannabe literati in the outdoor cafés along the Salzach River; Everyman in front of the cathedral called upon by Death across the Domplatz with the setting sun casting long shadows of the magnificent baroque facades over the audience in the square and the chilly evening breeze blowing in from the mountains. Therein lie the archaeological, anthropological, and political roots of Bernhard's theatricalized ontology and etiology of Austria's cultural pathology. Eventually Bernhard himself became an integral, if enthusiastically hated, staple of the festival. Several of his plays that premiered at the festival consciously deconstructed its glamour.

Twenty-some years after his adolescent excursions to his hillside opera watch, Bernhard would find himself on another hill, overlooking the other city that became fateful to his life and work. He had just completed his third major novel, Verstörung (Gargoyles) . After the removal of a tumor from his chronically ailing lungs, he was hospitalized at Baumgartnerhöhe on Wilhelminenberg, on the outskirts of Vienna. The sanitarium is adjacent to Steinhof, Vienna's historic mental institution, with its unique fin-de-siècle church crowning Wilhelminen Mountain. Steinhof would serve as a point of reference for Austria's state of mind in many Bernhard texts. As Bernhard tells it in his quasi memoir Wittgenstein's Nephew , while he was staying at Baumgartnerhöhe, his good friend Paul Wittgenstein (actually Ludwig Wittgenstein's grandnephew) was in Steinhof, committed there once again by his family. The two men sneaked out to meet on a bench halfway between the Hermann and Ludwig pavilions, Bernhard's and Wittgenstein's respective places of confinement. Fourteen years later Bernhard would write: "This meeting on the bench, with each of us wearing the appropriate uniform--I that of a lung patient, he that of a Steinhof lunatic--had the most shattering effect on me." All Paul could say was "Grotesque, grotesque," before he was shaken by sobs and Bernhard led him back to his pavilion. Not included in the freeze-framed image of their encounter on a bench at the arbitrary border between mental and physical decay was the panoramic view that extends from their hill beyond Vienna all the way to Hungary, beyond fairly recent borders into the former empire. The narrator doesn't need to describe the geography at large. It is embedded in the history and mythology of Steinhof, a favorite Bernhard scenario.

The institution opened in 1908 in the presence of the ill-fated archduke Franz Ferdinand, the kaiser's difficult nephew, whose assassination in Sarajevo triggered World War I. The "white city," as it was called by one of the leading art historians, was the world's largest, most advanced institution of its kind. Nestled in the hills of the Vienna Woods, with rows of pavilions in the style of patrician mansions arranged around Otto Wagner's famous fin-de-siècle church, Steinhof still looks like a miniature imperial village. Some still call it a microcosm of the capital at its feet. The hierarchy of class was preserved in the location, architecture, and interior design of the individual buildings. An exclusive block of Italianate villas was reserved for the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie. There were libraries, winter gardens, a jewel of a theater, elegant reception and banquet halls, and drawing and smoking rooms with storybook views of rolling hills cradling the monarchy's metropolis. Bars were discretely set into the windowpanes to give the impression of wrought-iron ornamental grillework. Everything was arranged to simulate the continuation of exclusive sophisticated leisure. The pavilions for the lower classes were more stripped down and situated near the institution's workplaces for the inmates. With its stables and pigpens, its butcher shop, bakery, laundry, smokehouse, and mortuary, its "workhouse" with locksmith, blacksmith, bookbinding, and print shops and many other workshops, Steinhof represents an odd replica, cynics might consider it a fitting continuation, of the feudal structure of the old Habsburg country estate.

Gargoyles deals with the inevitable demise of a large aristocratic estate and the rural economy sustained by it. It is a theme Bernhard will thread as a leitmotiv through nearly all of his works. In retrospect they add up to one single-minded composition, its themes and variations orchestrating the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Gargoyles features an eccentric aristocrat and mad philosopher, Prince Saurau, the next-to-last male descendant of a powerful dynasty who may well owe some of his enlightened insanity to Paul Wittgenstein. With an extensive monologue that explodes the boundaries of a prose narrative, the prince emerges as a dazzling madcap stage character against the grotesquely tragic backdrop of a dying culture.

Appropriately enough for Bernhard's perception of the world, Steinhof flourished for a while as a hideaway for uncomfortable members of wealthy families. Later exploited by the Nazis to facilitate the deportation and murder of Jews and other "undesirables," whose names and numbers have not yet been adequately established, it never regained its original distinction after World War II. Nevertheless, it continues to play a major role in the popular imagination. The beautiful facades, now somewhat in disrepair, overshadowed by tall pine trees whose rustling underscores the all-pervasive silence, exude an eerily melancholy serenity. But the stillness is occasionally disrupted by a scream, a moan, a spectral figure dressed in nothing but pajama pants turning the corner; an old woman sitting on a bench, rocking a bed that has been wheeled outdoors, staring at the open-mouthed face of the sleeping old man hooked up to tubes, swaddled like a baby in a heavy blanket; a middle-aged woman with ruddy features and disheveled hair eagerly sucking on a cigarette--the scenic clichés of despair turned shamelessly real, putting the metaphor-chasing tourist-turned-voyeur to shame. Such contrasts animate the dramaturgy of Bernhard's literary endgames.

Otto Wagner's church at Steinhof stands as the only fin-de-siècle church, an ambitious synthesis of ecclesiastical architecture, religious artwork, and ritual objects site-specifically designed to accord with the most advanced standards of psychiatric care. The battles surrounding the construction and particularly the interior design of the church could not be outdone even by Bernhard's most outrageous histrionics. Artistic designers were at odds with financially prudent clerical consultants; a conservative Catholic hierarchy aghast at Kolo Moser's original modernist designs for mosaic representations of Bible stories warred against an imperial bureaucracy caught between its traditional cultural megalomania and its historical alliance with the clergy. The political intrigues and verbal assaults contributed to a frustratingly comic scenario that is conceivable only in Robert Musil's Kakania, in the city of Bernhard's literary ancestors, Ferdinand Raimund, Johann Nestroy, and Karl Kraus.

The church's cupola, once sparkling gold, now oxidized green, balanced on the white, cross-shaped crypt, is widely visible above the wooded hills, like an oddly displaced emblem of the imperial crown. During the tumultuous planning stages one incensed state representative warned, "The golden dome will shine all the way to Hungary so that the Hungarians can say, `That's where the idiots live who pay 70 percent of our bills.'"

While this sort of mentality with its hideously amusing menace is at the core of Bernhard's relentless variations on Homo austriacus , the archaeology of the institution holds the locus of a personal conflicted desire that is the driving force of nearly all his works: it is the longing to locate himself within the Habsburg tradition in full awareness that the very idea is madness. As an illegitimate child born into a scattered, impoverished family, he sought to construct himself within a continuum of culture that preserved the grace, elegance, and sophistication associated with nobility at the same time that he documented its inevitable deterioration. Paul Wittgenstein provided a connection not only to the philosopher but also to a family that represented the Grossbürgertum , the bourgeois elite, which rivaled the old aristocracy in influence, power, savoir vivre, and exquisite taste. Throughout his life Bernhard accepted the patronage of descendants of the Habsburg nobility and their cosmopolitan satellites only to sever the connection abruptly. In an effort to become a part of Austria's bona fide elite, he played the part of its most relentless critic. In public he took the part of the Fool, traditionally an intrinsic part of the court.

Ultimately there is no contradiction between Bernhard's literary wrath and his private desire. His infatuation with a defunct aristocracy is part of his obsession with death. Bernhard's starting point is a dead society. Traditions provide merely the stage directions for the enactors of a memorized culture. His mise-en-scène reenacts again and again its final dying process. It reflects his own confrontations with death, first as a young boy during the bombardment of Salzburg in World War II. In his unsparing coming-of-age memoir, An Indication of the Cause , he documents the cinematic hyperreality that the spectacle of war presents to the awestruck boy. After the first bombing of Salzburg he was swept along by throngs of people as they emerged from their shelters and converged toward the cathedral, which had been hit by a

so-called aerial mine, and the dome had crashed into the nave. We had reached the Residenzplatz at just the right moment: an enormous cloud of dust hung over the mined cathedral, and where the dome had been there was a great gaping hole the size of the dome itself. From the corner by Slama's we had a direct view of the great paintings that had adorned the walls of the dome and were now for the most part savagely destroyed, what remains of them standing out against the clear blue sky in the light of the afternoon sun. It was as though the gigantic building, which dominated the lower part of the city, had had its back ripped open and were bleeding from a terrible wound. The whole square below the cathedral was strewn with fragments of masonry, and the people who had come running like us from all quarters gazed in amazement at this unparalleled and unquestionably fascinating picture, which to me seemed monstrously beautiful and not in the least frightening. Suddenly confronted with the absolute savagery of war, yet at the same time fascinated by the monstrous sight before my eyes, I stood for several minutes silently contemplating the scene of destruction presented by the square with its brutally mutilated cathedral--a scene created only a short while before, which had still not quite come to rest and was so overwhelming that I was unable to take it in.

On his way to look at other scenes of destruction, he stepped on "something soft," which he took to be the hand of a doll, but "in fact it was the severed hand of a child. It was the sight of the child's hand that quite suddenly transformed the first attack on the city by American bombers from the sensation it had been up to then--a sensation which produced a state of feverish excitement in the boy I was at the time--into an atrocity , an enormity" (90-91). There is a totemic quality to the child's severed hand as a ghostly plaything. It will inform the fragile anatomy and shell-shocked aesthetics of Bernhard's Homo ludens .

Three and a half years after the war, not quite eighteen, he found himself in the "death ward," hospitalized with pneumonia. It was the beginning of a lifelong battle with life-threatening pulmonary illnesses. In Breath: A Decision , the sequel to The Cellar , he recalls the adolescent's first encounter with a scenario that would become paradigmatic for his theater of death:

All the patients were on drips of some sort, and from the distance the tubes looked like strings. I had the constant impression that the patients lying in their beds were marionettes on strings--though left lying in their beds and only rarely, if ever, manipulated. But in most cases, these strings to which they were attached were their only remaining link to life. I often reflected that if somebody were to come along and cut the strings, the people attached to them would be dead in no time. The whole scenario was much more theatrical than I was ready to admit. The ward was indeed a theater, however conducive to pity and fear, a marionette theater in which the strings were worked by the doctors and sisters--on the one hand according to a highly sophisticated system yet on the other, it seemed, quite arbitrarily.... The marionettes I saw in the death ward were of course old, for the most part exceedingly old, quite outmoded and of no possible value; moreover, they were so impossibly worn out that they were only ever manipulated with reluctance, after which they were very soon thrown on the rubbish heap to be buried or burnt. It was perfectly natural for me to think of them as marionettes and not as human beings--to think that sooner or later everybody must become a marionette, to be thrown on the rubbish heap and buried and burnt, no matter where they had once performed, no matter when or for how long, in this marionette theater we call the world. (233-34)

Schopenhauer's world of objects interlocked in intricately connected chains of causality and ratted by the all-pervasive will provided the philosophical underpinning for Bernhard's anthropology of marionettes. He was introduced to Schopenhauer by his maternal grandfather, the novelist Johannes Freumbichler, who had a great impact on his life (and who died in another wing of the hospital where his grandson lay in the death ward). During his extended hospital stays over the next two years Bernhard would have ample time to think and read.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Thomas Bernhard by Gitta Honegger. Copyright © 2001 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Thomas Bernhard : The Making of an Austrian

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