The Political Bernhard Revisited Dr. Jeanette R. Malkin

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 Heldenplatz 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 Austria 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 Vienna’s central square, Heldenplatz, of language and ideas that become the mechanism to cheer Hitler’s declaration of the Anschluss – 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.

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