Thomas Bernhard: Gesellschaftliche und politische Bedeutung der Literatur by Johann Georg Lughofer (review)

The twenty-seven essays collected in this volume were originally given as papers at a conference in February 2011 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on the occasion of Bernhard’s eightieth birthday. While several of the contributors—including Hans Höller, Martin Huber, Stephen Dowden, Alfred Pfabigan, and Bernhard Sorg—are familiar names in Bernhard scholarship, many of the younger scholars are just beginning their careers or are still in the process of completing their degrees. Aside from the array of participants from Western Europe and the United States, several have roots in Eastern Europe, specifically Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary.

In his foreword, the editor gives a short summation of each paper and poses seven broad questions that form the parameters of the volume as a whole. The more theoretical questions are directed at social, political, and philosophical aspects of Bernhard’s work, while others address less commonly treated perspectives such as Bernhard’s marketing strategies and his efforts at “Selbstinszenierung” (16). Even more distinctive are those that involve pedagogical queries about using Bernhard works in the classroom, even in courses for German as a second language.

The collection might be categorized as user-friendly in several ways. For example, in spite of the variety of critical perspectives, individual essays focusing on single prose works are grouped together. The logic behind the sequencing of most other contributions is equally evident, if not as readily summed up. The editor offers an additional aid to the reader with a second abstract at the end of the volume written by the authors themselves. A short sketch of each contributor, including biographical and professional details, rounds out a well-structured and, in many ways, fresh look at a writer whose works continue to stimulate an expanding critical interest.

In such an increasingly crowded critical milieu, the introduction of an untried or new interpretive instrument raises hopes that it might cast new light onto Bernhard’s literary production. On the basis of Jean Baudrillard’s essay La pensée radicale, Philipp Schönthaler declares the French sociologist and the Austrian writer to be “kindred spirits” (285) in the radicality of their thinking and writing. Paola Bozzi finds “parallels” between Bernhard and the late Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Bunuel (321). More successful, on the other hand, is Martin Huber’s reconstruction of the Heldenplatz scandal. It gains in detail, historical perspective, and persuasiveness from a recently published volume of collected materials that brings scattered sources on Bernhard-induced scandals into manageable form. Huber coedited the volume Der Wahrheit auf der Spur: Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons, which appeared shortly before the conference with Suhrkamp in December 2010.

The theme of Bernhard as provocateur, as a literary figure with ambitions to bring about political or social change, gives focus to the probings of the first five contributions. Erika Tunner—and the others would surely agree—points to the limits of such sociopolitical expectations from an author who denied in interviews that he harbored such ambitions. She dismisses any such actively subversive expectations of his oeuvre while granting it a passive role as an irritant in naming and exposing collective “sins” in postwar Austria. If any of his works might have directly promoted political or social change, Heldenplatz, she argues, would be the prime candidate. In the essay on Heldenplatz mentioned above, Martin Huber maintains that the play’s critical view of twentieth-century Austrian history has by now been broadly accepted so much so “dass sich niemand mehr über Heldenplatz erregt!” (135) The passage of time has undercut its capacity as a public irritant.

Other individual works of prose that come under close scrutiny include Alte Meister, Der Untergeher, and Auslöschung. In an essay focusing on iconoclasms in Alte Meister, Làszló Szabo views Bernhard’s art as a diagnostic tool for social ills and his humor as a means of therapy for his “Lebensekel” (89). The four essays devoted to Auslöschung are followed by one...