Das Marterkapital meiner Herkunft: Economic Narrative in Thomas Bernhard’s Korrektur

Thomas Bernhard hated Austria, but his larger subject was the economic logic of modernity. In his novels Frost, The Loser, Extinction, and especially Korrektur, writing, madness, and the state are produced by a modern relationship with objects that requires infinite expenditure. Drawing on Marx, Simmel, Freud, and Sartre, this article contests readings of Bernhard as romantic provocateur, showing instead that for Bernhard, narrative consciousness is economic. The failure of the state and the failure of narrative reflect the economic world that produces both. Austria is not to blame for its complicity with modernity, but only because it is the symptom of irredeemable culture.