Lesbare Häuser? Thomas Bernhard, Hermann Burger und das Problem der Architektursprache in der Postmoderne by Elias Zimmermann (review)

As indicated by the question mark in the book’s title, Elias Zimmerman’s study analyzes the failed architecture projects in two postmodernist novels of the 1970s, Thomas Bernhard’s Korrektur and Swiss novelist Hermann Burger’s Schilten, in the context of architecture theory of the 1960s to the 1980s in attempt to discover to what extent the metaphor of a readable architecture can still have meaning in the postmodern era. The introduction and the conclusion of this study bracket two large, dense sections separately analyzing Korrektur (1975) and Schilten (1976). The discussion of both novels takes into account biographical material relevant to each author’s engagement with architecture as a metaphor in their works but is careful to focus specifically on the texts to analyze the poetological significance of architecture embedded in each novel. Bernhard, for example, made a lifelong project of acquiring and maintaining three Bauernhäuser, though he lived in only one of them. He wrote also at some length about these spaces and their relationship to his own writing process. Burger pursued the study of architecture before abandoning it after two years. More important for Zimmermann, however, is the extent to which the metaphor of the language of architecture continues to have any valence in the postmodern literature of Bernhard and Burger.

The author does not only read these novels in the context of discussion about postmodern architecture; he also looks to the texts themselves, as well as to intertextual references to architecture vis- à- vis theories of language, e.g., Wittenstein and Heidegger (that is: modernists), for support to illuminate the engagement with architecture as readable in Korrektur and Schilten. As Zimmermann explains: “Es wird also nicht nach den abstrakten Raumkategorien des ‘spatial turn’ gefragt, sondern nach den spezifischen Strategien im Text, mit welchen auf die narrativ aufgeworfenen Raumprobleme reagiert wird” (37). What is unique about this study is the way the author situates his analysis of the architect protagonists in the two novels in the context of their time. Zimmermann’s study is therefore a first attempt to bring together literature, philosophy, and architecture in reading these two works in order to analyze postmodern architecture in a literary historical context. The “readable house” therefore has valence as a cultural historically significant metaphor, as Zimmermann’s detailed analysis of each novel reveals. Furthermore, Zimmermann uses Hans Blumenberger’s metaphorology as a theoretical underpinning for understanding architecture in these two novels quite literally as an absolute metaphor for the readability of architecture; that is, the object itself stands in for the idea of its readability even as it evokes the metaphor of readable architecture at the same time (38).

As Zimmermann notes, all authors can be understood as architects, but “[d]as differenzierende Merkmal von Bernhards—und, wie wir sehen werden, auch von Hermann Burgers—Texten ist, dass sie explizit auf die Zeichenhaftigkeit ihrer Architektur aufmerksam machen und damit auf den architekturtheoretischen und - historischen ‘Ursprung’ [ . . . ] des architektonischen Handelns hinweisen” (47). Further, it is important not only to find a way to understand architecture and literature as having similar methods but also to uncover how they are different from one another. The more consequential question is therefore: how are literature and architecture seen as similar or different in the particular social historical context (in this case: the mid- 1970s) (48)? Zimmermann’s analysis of Bernhard’s Korrektur provides, for example, numerous entry points for understanding how the motif “Entsprechung von Mensch und Raum” has culturally historically situated roots, such as Johann Caspar Lavater’s theories of physiognomy. That the architect in Korrektur, Roithamer, chooses to build a “Wohnkegel” for his beloved sister aligns to some extent with the eighteenth- century ideal that external appearance must harmonize with the individual’s character. Roithamer’s insistence that the inner is like the outer recalls eighteenth- century discourse about how space/architecture affects human feelings (98). Zimmermann is...