Die Begräbnisfeier für Otto Habsburg aus der “Fenstersicht” von Thomas Bernhards Auslöschung. Ein Zerfall (1986)

Otto Habsburg, the oldest child of the last reigning Austrian emperor Karl I and nephew of Franz Joseph I, passed away in July 2011. His momentous and highly public funeral simultaneously catalyzed and presented as farce nostalgia for the bygone Habsburg dynasty, since only its Auslöschung enabled a Republican tradition in Austria. The essay scrutinizes the public ambivalence toward the funeral by utilizing Thomas Bernhard’s novel Die Auslöschung. Ein Zerfall (1986) in four ways: the narrator creates a distancing “Fensterblick” toward his family’s funeral, sees the pompous funeral as a farce, deconstructs the representative status of photographic images, and ultimately pushes for a break from the dubious past. Yet where Bernhard’s novel symbolically aims for a radical break from the Nazi past, the death of the Habsburg heir served, the article argues, as another attempt to avoid Austria’s discomfort with its own Nazi past. To this end, Otto Habsburg himself eschewed his anti-Semitic sentiments in order to be viewed as a safeguard of tradition resistant to the taint of the Nazis.