How German is It: Thomas Bernhard at the Guthrie

How German Is It Thomas Bernhard at the Guthrie Gitta Honegger ... I'm returning from the edge of forgetfulness. Walter Abish The day I arrived in Minneapolis, Guthrie Managing Director Don Schoenbaum gave an Open House Party. It was a beautiful midsummer afternoon. A live band evoked what I assumed a beautiful-people affair in the heyday of Glenn Miller must have looked like as Guthrie dignitaries, including many familiar New York theatre faces, mingled with the local corporate aristocracy, headed by Mr. and Mrs. Pillsbury, on the back lawn of a stately, well, not mansion, but in any case, impressive, home. Meeting all those New York actors, among them some friends, gave me the feeling that I had just arrived from the mainland, on a visit to a very prosperous colony. There was a spirit of exuberance and triumph-after all, Liviu Ciulei, the new artistic director, and his team had just conquered not only this city but the whole country, with two nationally acclaimed productions: Ciulei's own Tempest and Richard Foreman's Don Juan, followed by Alan Schneider's much less breathtaking, but extremely popular production of Our Town. But there was also a sense of isolation as I, the newcomer, was eagerly questioned for news from the city, from civilization. Donald Madden doesn't fly. He took the train all the way from New York to Chicago and from there to Minneapolis. He arrived a day later. I was asked to welcome him at his hotel. Don will play Chief Justice Hoeller, a former concentration camp commander in Thomas Bernhard's Eve Of Retirement, which I translated and Liviu will direct. Train service isn't what it used to be, Donald said, and he began to talk about the days of a bygone era of lovely dining cars, sophisticated personnel and exquisitely cultured service. Somehow I have visions of magnolias. The hotel is an old actors' hotel. Touring companies and vaudevillians stopped there and you could almost 7 smell the spilled champagne in the faded carpeting, and sense old theatrical ghosts lurking behind the peeling plaster. It would make the perfect setting for another Bernhard play -Minetti, where an old actor, Minetti, is waiting for the artistic director of a small provincial theatre to talk to him about playing Lear at that theatre's 200th anniversary. I had never met Don before. The first thing he showed me was a case filled with Nazi medals and orders, which he had tracked down in New York in preparation for his part. I was scared to touch those things. It must be my Austrian childhood. After all, we were made to believe in the power of the relics of saints. These then were the relics of the devil and I was sure they would ignite any minute or bring some other fatal curse upon us. In any case, it was a peculiar feeling to be confronted-for the first time-with tangible remnants of a time nobody spoke of when, and where, I grew up. Minneapolis is an Austrian childhood dream come true. This isolated outpost of civilization in the middle of the prairie (the prairie!!!-how many wonderful associations are triggered off by that word alone!) in the state with the Sioux name "Land of the Sky-Tinted Waters" and resonating with all the picturesque lakes and rivers leads me back to Karl May and his fifty odd volumes of adventure novels about the "Wild West," which, although the author himself had never been there, became the American Dream for many a generation of German-language children. How do I get there representing one of the most serious, intense, contemporary German-language writers and, what's even more amazing, what does Bernhard with his very European vision of a decaying, dying world have to do with Minneapolis, the town of the Jolly Green Giant, Betty Crocker, Land o'Lakes, Wheaties and Mary Tyler Moore and its wholesome Nordic population whose genuine good will and friendliness is unsettling even to the cynic? The Guthrie is enormous, with its 1500 seats and thrust stage. The raked seats on one side drop down from the ceiling to the stage like...