Nazis in the Bernhard Soup: The Political succumbing to a serious heart condition that Bernhard Revisited could not withstand the scandal he himself had initiated). In fact, one of the most notorious Dr. Jeanette R. Malkin Bernhard scandals occurred after his death, Theatre Studies Department though in conjunction with the uproar. Hebrew University Jerusalem As many of you probably know, Bernhard demanded in his last will and testament (written, Revisiting the political Bernhard is an easy thing or re-written, two days before his death!) that to do – at least on the evidence of the two plays nothing he had ever written, neither book nor recently translated into Hebrew and published by poem nor essay nor play, was to be published or Schocken (1999). Vor dem Ruhestand (Eve of performed “within the borders of the Austrian Retirement) and Heldenplatz are enormously state, however that state describes itself... for all political plays not only because they deal with time to come”.[ii] He also forbade his own political subjects such as Nazis and their commemoration by in any form continuation into the present of Germany and whatsoever, or by any country supported by Austria, but because both plays were an Austrian money or institutions. In Bernhard’s intervention into real political events occurring at own words, he was thereby performing his own the time the plays were written, and both resulted “posthumous literary exile” from a country with in real political consequences: Eve of Retirement in whom he had been in ideological and political Germany; Heldenplatz in Austria. conflict for most of his life. The depth of Bernhard’s anger and disgust, and the reasons that Before I speak about this, it’s worth noting that underlie it, are what give his political almost none of Bernhard’s other plays are performances their staying power, their power to political in quite this way. None of his other plays convince and move audiences, or readers, long have obvious representations of Nazis (who, eg, after the political circumstances to which they as in Eve of Retirement , secretly celebrate Himmler’s responded, had passed. birthday until this very day) or representations of Jews (who, eg, still today hear the masses The reason for Bernhard’s ideological and roaring Sieg Heil Sieg Heil at Heldenplatz). All of political conflict with (especially) Austria is Bernhard’s plays excel in the grotesque, in historical and moral. The short explanation for his exaggeration, in insults – especially of Austria and Staatsekel and Geschichtshass – his disgust with the Austrian people: “Austria/ Österreich/ the State and his hatred of its history – can be L’Autriche/ ...a cesspool/ in the pus-filled boil of captured through an anecdote he tells about a Europe,” as Bernhard put in his nail. In interview, Bernhard recalled how, as a play Histrionics (Der Theatermacher 1984).[i] youth in the early 1940s, he had attended the NS- Bernhard’s career (especially in the theatre) is Schulerheim (the National-Socialist Boarding awash with scandals. He was a master of School) in Salzburg. After 1945 the school’s name commotion, capable of creating a ruckus – even was changed to the Johanneum and – “Instead of out of a light bulb. In 1972, for example, his Hitler’s picture, they hung a cross on the wall,” play Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (The Ignoramus they hung it, he explained “exactly on the same and the Madman) premiered at the Salzburg Festival nail.”[iii] Or, as Bernhard put it in Histrionics : and turned into Bernhard’s first (of many) “[T]hey’re socialists/ they claim/ and are only Salzburg scandals. In order to achieve a symbolic national socialists/ they’re Catholic/ they claim/ effect, Bernhard demanded that all lights be and are only national socialists” (218). Or, as turned off at the end of the play – exit signs Bernhard rewrote this same sentence in included. The fire marshal refused, as did the Heldenplatz: “In Austria you have to be either Festival authorities. Bernhard refused to relent Catholic/ or a National Socialist/ nothing else is and the quarrel soon turned into a very dramatic tolerated/ everything else is destroyed.” [iv] public squabble. Indeed, Bernhard’s name is synonymous with belligerence, outspokenness, Bernhard’s enmity towards his country was rooted rancor, resentment – or rather: Nietzschean in Austria’s problematic postwar situation: a Ressentiment . Bernhard is famously unforgiving, country that was treated by the Allies as a and is the father of scandals large and small. “victim” nation, and that gladly accepted this assumption – going so far as to label itself By speaking of The Political Bernhard through “Hitler’s first victim.”[v] This self-serving Heldenplatz we are actually viewing Bernhard historical distortion required that Austria repress retrospectively. Heldenplatz was Bernhard’s last its own memory of ready collaboration on all play, the play that probably killed him (he died fronts of Germany’s war effort. The joyous three months into its stage run, finally welcome received by Hitler in March of 1938, when hundreds of thousands of supporters onto the determinism of a discourse, a structure gathered in ’s central square, Heldenplatz, of language and ideas that become the mechanism to cheer Hitler’s declaration of the – for Kaspar’s reconfiguration in the form of that was officially forgotten and rarely referred to. discourse.[ix] Kaspar finally performs the Repressed history was replaced by a vacuous and language forced upon him by the Prompters, but sentimental self-image reflecting the “good old” he is lost as an historical subject. prewar Austria of waltzes and bonhomie. The gap between this constructed image, and the Bernhard’s stage characters begin, we might say, awareness of its mendacity, produced in many where Kaspar ends. They are already complete as writers and intellectuals (according to some “discourse” when we meet them, in no need of observers of the scene) “a perception of the world Prompters; but this discourse has been as parody and grotesque and at the same time as consciously steeped in, and reflexively evokes, the suffocatingly banal and stereotypic.”[vi] In this concrete remains of historical memory. analysis we find both the object of Bernhard’s unbending contempt, Austrian history, and the Through the overly-familiar language of his style – parody and grotesque – through which, at endlessly talkative characters, Bernhard portrays least in part, he portrayed that object. not individualized figures, but “mindscapes” that have all been prewritten and overwritten by a The past is the stuff of which Bernhard’s collective historical past. The image of characters are made. His is a theater of voice, of “inscripted” minds creeps up repeatedly in long, unpunctuated monologues delivered on Bernhard’s writings. It is most vividly captured in (usually) metaphoric stages, presenting highly another Bernhard play, his 1974 The Hunting concentrated images of the world. His idiomatic Party (Die Jagdgesellschaft), where the General voices might belong to that other great Austrian says about the Writer: ventriloquist, von Horvath, except that Bernhard’s voices are derealized through the You see he scribbles extended monologue form, the obsessive all over the walls of his mind repetitions and contradictions, and the minimal all over narrative to which they are usually attached. His a mind covered with writing voices and minimal stage images might also a completely covered remind us of Beckett. Like Beckett, Bernhard is and therefore completely blackened mind considered to be an incurable pessimist, in despair scribbled on with such speed of man and god alike. But unlike Beckett, that already one line is scribbled right over the other Bernhard’s language, alternately cynical and like a madman [x] sentimental, mirrors the idioms and inflections of a concrete national past, a past frozen as an Consciousness is thus imaged by Bernhard as a indelible trace into the landscape, language, Derridean primacy of writing over orality; the past situations, and characters of his plays. These is imprinted as language, written and shared traces make specific and provocative what would language, historically formed language, as text. otherwise be parabolic and abstract in Bernhard’s work. By way of comparison, we could think of The text of Germany and Austria’s recent history Peter Handke’s Kaspar, based on the real is clearly inscribed in Eve of historical figure of Kaspar Hauser. Handke’s Retirement and Heldenplatz which, unlike most of clown-like Kaspar is a blank character formed and Bernhard’s other plays, contain both language and created by Prompters: i.e. abstract voices that dramatic situations that are recognizably teach him language, thought, and behavior historical. Moreover, both plays were written with simultaneously. Kaspar learns well, and finally a particular audience in mind, and as answers to comes to resemble his teachers fully. But when he particular political situations. Both were also first appears on stage, and before it is driven out directed by the far-left provocateur Claus of him, Kaspar carries within him a “trace” from Peymann, who had directed almost all of the past: his one “original” sentence – “I want to Bernhard’s plays. The circumstances and be a person like somebody else was once”[vii] as outrageousness of these performances turned Handke puts it. However, the historical Kaspar both productions into political interventions, and Hauser, when he appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, very histrionic scandals. owned a somewhat more explicit sentence: “I want to be a knight like my father was before I won’t have time to get into the full details of me.”[viii] Handke’s simplification and abstraction these rich and rather amusing political uproars, of this sentence purposely displaces the influence but briefly: Eve of Retirement , which premiered in of the biological father, or the historical knight, Stuttgart, takes off on the infamous Filbinger affair, the public discovery at the end of the 1970s of hot soup with their great- and great-great that the powerful conservative Minister-President grandchildren. But alas – they keep on finding of Baden-Wurttemberg, Hans Karl Filbinger, a “Nazis in the soup”. (I will quote first in German potential future CDU candidate for President of then in my English translation): West Germany, had long concealed his past as a (naval) “hanging” judge. As would Waldheim a “Nazis in der Suppe... Nazisuppe auf few years later, Filbinger first protested his den Tisch/ lauter Nazis statt Nudeln” innocence, then contested the importance of his complains Herr Bernhard; to which Frau activities, and only finally, and under severe Bernhard explains: “wir bekommen in pressure, resigned his post.[xi] Bernhard’s play is ganz Deutschland/ keine Nudeln mehr/ about another judge, the soon-to-retire Judge nur noch Nazis/ ganz gleich wo wir Rudolf Höller, who had enthusiastically served Nudeln einkaufen/ es sind immer nur under Himmler and who still secretly celebrates Nazis/ ganz gleich was f?r eine Himmler’s birthday every year with his two Nugelpackung wir aufmachen, es quellen sisters. The presentation of the ritual of National immer nur noch/ Nazis heraus...”. Socialist worship in this play was apparently less upsetting to Bernhard’s audience then the “Nazis in the soup...Nazi soup on the table/ addition of the theme of incest: there’s a long always Nazis instead of noodles” complains erotic scene between Holler, getting dressed in his Herr Bernhard; to which Frau Bernhard meticulously prepared SS uniform, and his no- explains: “in all of Germany/ there are no longer-young sister Vera. This intimate coupling noodles to be had/ only Nazis/ no matter of Nazism and perverted passions was found to where you shop for noodles/ all you get are be particularly tasteless. Never one to leave bad Nazis/ no matter what kind of noodle package enough alone, Bernhard adds insult to incest by you choose, out crawl nothing but Nazis...” having his characters give explicit voice to the rarely (until then, in post-) publicly This dramatized verbal coin – the equivalent of spoken diction of mythic Jew-hating, to the entire finding a Nazi under every bush – is both a bit of lexicon of National Socialist demonization of the self-irony and a further bit of offence, implying Jews. that not only Filbinger, but every part of German life is infected by its past, that nothing in “The Jews destroy annihilate the surface of the Germany can be considered to be – NOT earth/ and some day they will have achieved its political. final destruction” (163) says the Judge. This is not only his personal opinion. As he tells us, or rather Eve of Retirement generated extensive discussion; as he tells the audience, ninety-eight percent of all but this reaction was as nothing compared to the Germans “hate the Jews/ even as they claim just genuine political uproar – leading to the opposite/ that’s the German nature... in a demonstrations and attacks, involving thousand years the Germans will hate the Jews/ intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and regular in a million years” (138). These sentiments, for all citizens – created nine years later, in 1988, their comic hyperbole, in addition to Peymann’s by Heldenplatz . explicit and offensive directing, created unprecedented political recrimination. Filbinger 1988 marked the hundredth anniversary of called for Peymann’s dismissal from the Stuttgart Vienna’s building, and it was within theatre, claiming him to be a mad leftist and those centenary festivities that Bernhard’s play dangerous “supporter of terrorism”. had been commissioned by Peymann – who had by now left Stuttgart and was beginning his Bernhard, of course, would not allow an attack to directorship of the National Burgtheater. But: the go unanswered, and subsequently wrote an officially titled “memorial year” of 1988 also additional play, a short mock-Expressionist sketch commemorated other titled Der deutsche Mittagstisch (The German Lunch events. Heldenplatz premiered under tight police Table: A Tragedy to be Performed by the Burgtheater security on 4 November 1988, fifty years after the when Touring Germany ), which indeed premiered in Anschluss, and fifty years almost to the day after Bochum in 1981. In this small play Bernhard Kristallnacht (9 November 1938) for which takes politics a step further. Rather than attack a Vienna has a particularly despicable record.[xii] specific person or political incident, Bernhard Peymann had been expected to commemorate a develops the connections between the seemingly century of Austrian culture at the Burgtheater. banal rituals of daily life in Germany, and the The choice of a play centering on the Anschluss inevitable infiltration of ideology. An elder couple and on the memory of Austria’s destruction of its named Frau and Herr Bernhard try to eat a lunch Jews, was not considered, by most, to be a fitting tribute. Even its title (which remains untranslated in both the Hebrew and the English versions) requires at Heldenplatz centers on a Jewish family in the least some historical sensitivity. Obviously, the Vienna of 1988. The main character, Professor Israeli publishers had greater faith in the Josef Schuster, a mathematician, who can no likelihood that their readers might recognize the longer stand the anti-Semitism he still finds in historical, geographical, and political references Austria 50 years after the Anschluss – commits within the play than do the Americans. suicide by jumping out of his apartment window onto the historic Heldenplatz before the play The enormous public outcry against Bernhard’s begins. The metaphoric center of the play is his play preceded both its performance and its wife Hedwig. Hedwig, since their return to publication. The outcry was based on passages Vienna, suffers constant auditory seizures in “leaked” to the press during rehearsals, passages which she – and finally the audience too – relives attacking the Austrians, their government, their the cheering of the masses as they applaud mendacity, their vulgarity, their hatefulness. [xv] Hitler’s triumphant 1938 speech on the square The media dedicated weeks of daily coverage to below their apartment. By the end of the play, the the as-yet unseen and unread play. Waldheim roaring repeating choruses of “Sieg Heil Sieg called the play an insult to all Austrians. He was Heil” will lead to Hedwig’s final collapse: she will joined by ex-Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, among fall over dead into her bowl of soup. Through others, in calling for the play’s removal from the these extravagant and unheroic deaths, Bernhard National Theater. Bernhard was vilified and even performs the taboo evocation of Austria’s attacked on the street by an angry citizen. “What destruction of its Jews and of its willing writers write/ is nothing compared with the acceptance of the Anschluss. With Heldenplatz , reality” – one of the characters says; “yes yes they Bernhard created a memory-scandal within the write that everything is terrible/ that everything is deeply etched space of Austrian repression and ruined and depraved/ that it’s all a catastrophe/ denial. that it’s hopeless/ but all of this/ is nothing compared with the reality” (115). Bernhard As all Austrians know, Heldenplatz is a huge claimed that he had to keep revising and square positioned close to the lovely Volksgarten “sharpening” his text during rehearsals in order, (the garden where scene two of Bernhard’s play as he put it, “not to be left behind by reality” [xvi] takes place), and near the famous Burgtheater – that is, by the uproar raging in the press, the (where the play itself was performed). Two large Parliament, and on the streets. Egon Schwarz museums, the National Library, and the old summarized it well: “One could say that the play Kaiser palace are all situated around this central was already being performed in the country, while square. Literally meaning “Hero’s Square,” it was still in rehearsal at the Burgtheater”.[xvii] Heldenplatz figures in Bernhard’s play as And indeed, on opening day, two groups of geography, history, and fable. As many have protesters – for and against Bernhard – chanted noted, Heldenplatz embodies much of Austria’s and marched in front of the theater; and the night national identity.[xiii] During Austria’s First before, a group of rightists dumped horse-manure Republic, Heldenplatz was the place for military on the theater steps. parades. Already in 1932, the first Nazi demonstration with Goebbels and Röhm took The play, and the production, were far more place there. It was at Heldenplatz that the crowds nuanced and complex – though no less fierce – gathered in 1934 to mourn the assassination of than these hysterical anticipations. Bernhard’s their right-wing chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. tactics in this uncompromising play go beyond And it was there, in 1938, that cheering Austrians the litany of brutal verbal attacks expected by his welcomed Hitler and the Anschluss that ended audience. This verbal outer layer is contained the First Republic and made Austria part of the within a complex and sophisticated recreation of German Reich. Bernhard didn’t need to detail all the geographic and historic “space” within which of this within the play: he could assume his Austria, and the audience, were defined. audience’s knowledge. Heldenplatz was recently translated into English, but has yet to find a Briefly: Bernhard conflated the play’s fabula with publisher (it has only appeared in a journal so far the geography of the theatre and city where the [xiv]). This is not surprising since, even more than performance was being held, and where the most of Bernhard’s locally-inscribed Anschluss had taken place. He achieved this plays, Heldenplatz demands an understanding of through the spacial re-inscription of the Austrian history, as well as of Viennese Burgtheater (within which the audience was geography. Heldenplatz is like a Baedeker, a Blue sitting) and the Heldenplatz (geographically so Guide to Vienna’s sites – and their significance. close to the actual Burgtheater) – on stage. Visual reinscription is one of Bernhard’s central, and both in support of and against Peymann, most effective strategies for tying audience, city, who bowed next to Bernhard. ...To and history together. For example: scene two some, the two men, their hands clasped takes place in the Volksgarten which adjoins and held up high, appeared like a Heldenplatz to the Burgtheater. For this scene, triumphant pair of conquerors as the Peymann had his set-designer, Karl-Ernst ‘Sieg Heil’ choruses on stage segued Herrmann, build a side-wall of the Burgtheater on hauntingly into the warring choruses in stage, thus reflecting the outside of the building the auditorium. [xix] inside of which the audience watching this play was sitting [xviii] and underlining the simultaneity Thus, the unbearable shouts coming from stage of stage and world, of past and present, of back – from the stage’s (and history’s?) hidden Heldenplatz as diachronic and synchronic site of recesses – merged with the cheers and boos memory and identity. coming from the front, from the audience that was simultaneously acclaiming and despising the Scene three takes place in the dining room of the performance they had just participated in. Schuster apartment. Against the back wall of the Together, these concrete gestures, and the dead stage Bernhard placed three high windows which Mrs. Schuster on stage, made an iconic – and look out onto Heldenplatz. This time, the ironic – statement about Austria’s willing part in audience can actually see the square for which the Nazism, in the destruction of its Jews, and in the play is named. This time, the audience will also repression of its past. “hear” the square, “hear” Bernhard’s anger and his unforgiving memory of Austria’s past. As Mrs. With this: Bernhard’s theatre became a platform, Schuster begins to eat her soup in scene three, her and an instrument, for political intervention. affliction suddenly becomes a reality: the audience Vienna was his extended stage, just as his actual – together with her – hear the “slowly swelling theatre-stage reflected the geography of Vienna. cheers of the masses at Hitler’s arrival on The insistence on recognizing the past and its Heldenplatz nineteen-thirty-eight”(159). These continuation into the present was figured in this cheers, as though struggling to break through the play not through a metaphysical Beckettian fable barrier of collective repression, begin as barely (as Bernhard had often done in the past), but audible background noise. Mrs. Schuster goes stiff through detailed historical and local references. and pale in her chair while Robert, unaware, Through this Bernhard showed that his famous continues to discuss Vienna: “In this most terrible pessimism, and his unbending animosity, were of all cities,” he says, “... an unbearable stink less ontological than historical, less concerned spreads itself out/ from the and the with “human nature” than with the nature of the / and from the Parliament/ over the past. entire wretched and despoiled land” – thus remapping a circle around the same Heldenplatz. “This little city is one huge pile of garbage” (164) * * * * * * * * Robert concludes, as “the shouts of the masses in Heldenplatz swell to the limits of the bearable” – NOTES and Mrs. Schuster falls face forward into her soup bowl. [i]. , Histrionics, in Histrionics: Three Plays , trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth The unbearable shouts of the masses welcoming Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Hitler fifty years ago, at a spot close enough to the 1990), 218. Subsequent references are to this theatre for those shouts to have actually been edition, and will appear parenthetically within the heard inside the theatre – those same shouts filled text. the theatre for the last long stretch of the play’s premiere. Peymann, however, did not turn the [ii]. Quoted from Heinrich Wille, “Wunsch oder horrible noise off with the play’s end. Gitta Bedingung? Zum Rechtsstreit ?ber Thomas Honegger, a Bernhard specialist who was in the Bernhards letztwillige Verf?gung,” Der Standard , 7 audience that night, describes how the first March 1989: 19. performance ended: [iii]. “Die Vergangenheit ist Unerforscht” ( The The ...four-hour long performance was Past is Unexamined ), an interview with Viktor followed by forty minutes of thundering Suchy, 5 March 1967, reprinted in Von einer applause, standing ovations, boos and Katastrophe in die andere: 13 Gesprache mit whistles, with the Austrian flag and Thomas Bernhard, ed. Sepp Dreissinger banners unfolding from the balcony (Katsdorf: Bibliothek der Provinz, 1992), 21. premiere performance in order to increase tension [iv]. Thomas Bernhard, Heldenplatz (Frankfurt am and interest. Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 63. All translations from Heldenplatz are my own. [xvi]. Quoted in the wide-ranging book published Subsequent references are to the German edition, by Peymann and the Burgtheater, documenting and will appear parenthetically within the text. the scandal, the play, and subsequent reactions, from August 1st to December 31st [v]. On Austria’s ‘Lebensluge’ (survival-lie) – that 1988. Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation (Vienna: Austria was Hitler’s victim – see Richard Burgtheater, 1989), 220. Mitten, The Politics of Antisemitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria (Boulder: [xvii]. Egon Schwarz, "Heldenplatz?" German Westview Press, 1992). Politics & Society 21 (Fall 1990): 38.

[vi]. Gabrielle Robinson, “Slaughter and Language [xviii]. In the text Bernhard writes that from the Slaughter in the Plays of Peter Turrini,” in Theater garden, we can see the Burgtheater “through a Journal 43 (May 1991): 199. fog”. In production, Peymann and Bernhard placed the theatre wall right by the bench where [vii]. Peter Handke, Kaspar , in Kaspar and Other the characters were sitting. Plays , trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 68-72 and passim. [xix]. Gitta Honegger, “Thomas Bernhard,” in Partisan Review 58/3 (1991): 496. [viii]. “Ich macht a sochener Reiter warn, wie mei Voter aner gween is.” This is how his sentence was transcribed by A. Ritter von Feuerbach in his Kaspar Hauser, Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen (Ansbach: J.M. Dollfuss, 1832).

[ix]. I discuss this, and Handke’s Kaspar , at some length in my book Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepard (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Chapter 1.

[x]. Thomas Bernhard, The Hunting Party , trans. Gitta Honegger, in Performing Arts Journal 13/1 (1980): 127. Honegger discusses this section in “The Theater of Thomas Bernhard,” 12.

[xi]. For a concise description of the political background see Dowden, Understanding Thomas Bernhard , 77.

[xii]. See for example, Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti- Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 286-289; on “The November Pogrom”.

[xiii]. See for example, Egon Schwarz, “Heldenplatz?” German Politics & Society 21 (Fall 1990): 36.

[xiv]. Conjuctions

[xv]. Most critics suspected Peymann and Bernhard of orchestrating the scandal by leaking the passages themselves, and of purposely postponing publication of the play text until the