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  • Morbus Austriacus: Thomas Bernhards Österreichkritik by Gregor Thuswaldner
  • J. J. Long
Morbus Austriacus: Thomas Bernhards Österreichkritik. By Gregor Thuswaldner. Vienna: Braumüller, 2011. Pp. 175. Paper €22.00. ISBN 978-3700317678.

Thomas Bernhard’s vexed relationship with his homeland has been much explored by literary scholars, and Gregor Thuswaldner’s book continues this critical project. After a brief contextualising introduction, he devotes three substantial main chapters to an examination of the critique of Austria as it emerges in four texts from Bernhard’s early, middle, and late periods: Frost (1963), Die Ursache (1975), Auslöschung (1986), and Heldenplatz (1988).

Any contribution to debates on an author like Bernhard, whose work has given rise to a truly vast body of secondary literature, sets itself the difficult task of saying something important and original. This task is even trickier when the author revisits an existing critical topos and seeks to revise a more or less established view of the author in question. Thuswaldner is up to the task, however, and Morbus Austriacus makes several important contributions to our understanding of Bernhard.

The first is to embed Bernhard’s critical tirades against Austria far more firmly in the historical circumstances of their production than has hitherto been the case. In the discussion of Frost, he argues that the main focus of critique is not Austria’s involvement in Nazi atrocities, but rather the emergence of an officially propagated Österreichbewusstsein or Austrian national consciousness that mythologized the timeless natural beauty of the countryside and rural life. The negative portrayal of Weng and its inhabitants in Frost, Thuswaldner argues, implies that any attempt to build a nation on the basis of such a morbid and morally decrepit rural populace is doomed to failure (43). At the same time, however, Bernhard’s narrator in Frost, as well as the authorial persona in Die Ursache, remains bound by taboos concerning Austrian involvement in the Holocaust. Although both texts seek to bring to light buried or repressed memories of World War II, these memories are concerned solely with the victimhood of Austrian soldiers and civilians, and fail to mention any acts of perpetration carried out by Austrians. Despite the critique, Thuswaldner suggests, Bernhard was, at a deeper level, ideologically aligned with the public discourse and self-understanding of the Second Austrian Republic. It was only with the Waldheim scandal, which broke in 1986, that Bernhard was able to confront Austria’s history of perpetration, with his last major essays in prose and drama thematizing adherence to Nazism, the victims of political and racial persecution, and the question of reparations. In making these points, Thuswalder presents a far more ambiguous view of Bernhard’s approach to Austria’s involvement in Nazism.

Thuswaldner makes his second major point with reference to the notion of Unbestimmtheitsstellen as developed by Konstanz reception theorists Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser. Noting the tendency either to take Bernhard’s criticisms at face [End Page 479] value or to dismiss them as simply unworthy of seriously attention, he argues that indeterminacy is structurally embedded in the texts in a way that makes the question as to how seriously to take Bernhard’s Österreichkritik fundamentally unanswerable. He supports this case by examining the self-undermining aspects of the texts in question, most notably the unstable mental state of Strauch in Frost and the extreme perspectivism that is explicitly announced in both Auslöschung and Die Ursache— aspects of the texts to which many other critics have already drawn attention.

Following on from this, a third point emerges, albeit in passing. Concluding his chapter on Frost, Thuswaldner argues that the immoderate nature of Strauch’s attacks on Austria, and his own mental instability, make his critique unconvincing, but that the critique is nevertheless profoundly unsettling (Thuswaldner uses the Bernhardian verb ”verstören”). In other words, the force of Bernhard’s Österreichkritik lies not in its logic but in its affective power. This argument could have been developed and extended to encompass the other texts discussed, and bolstered by recent insights deriving from the so-called affective turn in Cultural Studies. It certainly opens up a valuable new perspective for future research.

Thuswaldner’s undeniable achievements in...

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