Dr. Jeanette R. Malkin
Theatre
Studies Department
Hebrew
University Jerusalem
Email:
imalkin@post.tau.ac.il
Nazis in the Bernhard Soup: The Political Bernhard Revisited
Revisiting the political Bernhard is an
easy thing to do – at least on the evidence of the two plays
recently translated into Hebrew and published by Schocken (1999).
Vor dem Ruhestand (Eve of Retirement) and Heldenplatz
are enormously political plays not only because they deal with
political subjects such as Nazis and their continuation into the
present of Germany and Austria, but because both plays were an intervention
into real political events occurring at the time the plays were
written, and both resulted in real political consequences: Eve
of Retirement in Germany; Heldenplatz in Austria.
Before I speak about this, it’s worth
noting that almost none of Bernhard’s other plays are political
in quite this way. None of his other plays have obvious
representations of Nazis (who, eg, as in Eve of Retirement,
secretly celebrate Himmler’s birthday until this very day) or
representations of Jews (who, eg, still today hear the masses
roaring Sieg Heil Sieg Heil at Heldenplatz). All of
Bernhard’s plays excel in the grotesque, in exaggeration, in
insults – especially of Austria and the Austrian people: “Austria/
?sterreich/ L’Autriche/ ...a cesspool/ in the pus-filled boil
of Europe,” as Bernhard put in his play Histrionics (Der
Theatermacher 1984).[i] Bernhard’s career (especially
in the theatre) is awash with scandals. He was a master of
commotion, capable of creating a ruckus – even out of a light
bulb. In 1972, for example, his play Der Ignorant und der
Wahnsinnige (The Ignoramus and the Madman) premiered
at the Salzburg Festival and turned into Bernhard’s first (of
many) Salzburg scandals. In order to achieve a symbolic effect,
Bernhard demanded that all lights be turned off at the end of the
play – exit signs included. The fire marshal refused, as did
the Festival authorities. Bernhard refused to relent and the
quarrel soon turned into a very dramatic public squabble. Indeed,
Bernhard’s name is synonymous with belligerence, outspokenness,
rancor, resentment – or rather: Nietzschean Ressentiment.
Bernhard is famously unforgiving, and is the father of scandals
large and small.
By speaking of The Political Bernhard
through Heldenplatz we are actually viewing Bernhard
retrospectively. Heldenplatz was Bernhard’s last play,
the play that probably killed him (he died three months into its
stage run, finally succumbing to a serious heart condition that
could not withstand the scandal he himself had initiated). In
fact, one of the most notorious Bernhard scandals occurred after
his death, though in conjunction with the Heldenplatz
uproar. As many of you probably know, Bernhard demanded in his
last will and testament (written, or re-written, two days before
his death!) that nothing he had ever written, neither book nor
poem nor essay nor play, was to be published or performed “within
the borders of the Austrian state, however that state describes
itself... for all time to come”[ii]. He
also forbade his own commemoration by Austria in any form
whatsoever, or by any country supported by Austrian money or
institutions. In Bernhard’s own words, he was thereby
performing his own “posthumous literary exile” from a country
with whom he had been in ideological and political conflict for
most of his life. The depth of Bernhard’s anger and disgust,
and the reasons that underlie it, are what give his political
performances their staying power, their power to convince and
move audiences, or readers, long after the political
circumstances to which they responded, had passed.
The reason for Bernhard’s ideological
and political conflict with (especially) Austria is historical
and moral. The short explanation for his Staatsekel and Geschichtshass
– his disgust with the State and his hatred of its history –
can be captured through an anecdote he tells about a nail. In
interview, Bernhard recalled how, as a youth in the early 1940s,
he had attended the NS-Sch?lerheim (the National-Socialist
Boarding School) in Salzburg. After 1945 the school’s name was
changed to the Johanneum and – “Instead of Hitler’s picture,
they hung a cross on the wall,” they hung it, he explained “exactly
on the same nail.”[iii] Or, as Bernhard put it in
Histrionics: “[T]hey’re socialists/ they claim/ and
are only national socialists/ they’re Catholic/ they claim/ and
are only national socialists” (218). Or, as Bernhard rewrote
this same sentence in Heldenplatz: “In Austria you
have to be either Catholic/ or a National Socialist/ nothing else
is tolerated/ everything else is destroyed.”[iv]
Bernhard’s enmity towards his country
was rooted in Austria’s problematic postwar situation: a
country that was treated by the Allies as a “victim” nation,
and that gladly accepted this assumption – going so far as to
label itself “Hitler’s first victim.”[v] This
self-serving historical distortion required that Austria repress
its own memory of ready collaboration on all fronts of Germany’s
war effort. The joyous welcome received by Hitler in March of
1938, when hundreds of thousands of supporters gathered in Vienna’s
central square, Heldenplatz, to cheer Hitler’s declaration of
the Anschluss – was officially forgotten and rarely
referred to. Repressed history was replaced by a vacuous and
sentimental self-image reflecting the “good old” prewar
Austria of waltzes and bonhomie. The gap between this constructed
image, and the awareness of its mendacity, produced in many
writers and intellectuals (according to some observers of the
scene) “a perception of the world as parody and grotesque and
at the same time as suffocatingly banal and stereotypic.”[vi] In
this analysis we find both the object of Bernhard’s unbending
contempt, Austrian history, and the style – parody and
grotesque – through which, at least in part, he portrayed that
object.
The
past is the stuff of which Bernhard’s characters are made. His
is a theater of voice, of long, unpunctuated monologues delivered
on (usually) metaphoric stages, presenting highly concentrated
images of the world. His idiomatic voices might belong to that
other great Austrian ventriloquist, ?d?n von Horvath, except
that Bernhard’s voices are derealized through the extended
monologue form, the obsessive repetitions and contradictions, and
the minimal narrative to which they are usually attached. His
voices and minimal stage images might also remind us of Beckett.
Like Beckett, Bernhard is considered to be an incurable pessimist,
in despair of man and god alike. But unlike Beckett, Bernhard’s
language, alternately cynical and sentimental, mirrors the idioms
and inflections of a concrete national past, a past frozen as an
indelible trace into the landscape, language, situations, and
characters of his plays. These traces make specific and
provocative what would otherwise be parabolic and abstract in
Bernhard’s work. By way of comparison, we could think of Peter
Handke’s Kaspar, based on the real historical figure of
Kaspar Hauser. Handke’s clown-like Kaspar is a blank character
formed and created by Prompters: i.e. abstract voices that teach
him language, thought, and behavior simultaneously. Kaspar learns
well, and finally comes to resemble his teachers fully. But when
he first appears on stage, and before it is driven out of him,
Kaspar carries within him a “trace” from the past: his one
“original” sentence – “I want to be a person like
somebody else was once”[vii] as Handke puts it.
However, the historical Kaspar Hauser, when he appeared in
Nuremberg in 1828, owned a somewhat more explicit sentence: “I
want to be a knight like my father was before me.”[viii]
Handke’s simplification and abstraction of this sentence
purposely displaces the influence of the biological father, or
the historical knight, onto the determinism of a discourse, a
structure of language and ideas that become the mechanism for
Kaspar’s reconfiguration in the form of that discourse.[ix]
Kaspar finally performs the language forced upon him by the
Prompters, but he is lost as an historical subject.
Bernhard’s stage characters begin, we
might say, where Kaspar ends. They are already complete as “discourse”
when we meet them, in no need of Prompters; but this discourse
has been consciously steeped in, and reflexively evokes, the
concrete remains of historical memory.
Through
the overly-familiar language of his endlessly talkative
characters, Bernhard portrays not individualized figures, but “mindscapes”
that have all been prewritten and overwritten by a collective
historical past. The image of “inscripted” minds creeps up
repeatedly in Bernhard’s writings. It is most vividly captured
in another Bernhard play, his 1974 The Hunting Party (Die
Jagdgesellschaft), where the General says about the Writer:
You see he scribbles
all over the walls of his mind
all over
a mind covered with writing
a completely covered
and therefore completely blackened mind
scribbled on with such speed
that already one line is scribbled right over the other
like a madman[x]
Consciousness
is thus imaged by Bernhard as a Derridean primacy of writing over
orality; the past is imprinted as language, written and
shared language, historically formed language, as text.
The
text of Germany and Austria’s recent history is clearly
inscribed in Eve of Retirement and Heldenplatz
which, unlike most of Bernhard’s other plays, contain both
language and dramatic situations that are recognizably historical.
Moreover, both plays were written with a particular audience in
mind, and as answers to particular political situations. Both
were also directed by the far-left provocateur Claus Peymann, who
had directed almost all of Bernhard’s plays. The circumstances
and outrageousness of these performances turned both productions
into political interventions, and very histrionic scandals.
I won’t have time to get into the full
details of these rich and rather amusing political uproars, but
briefly: Eve of Retirement, which premiered in Stuttgart,
takes off on the infamous Filbinger affair, the public discovery
at the end of the 1970s that the powerful conservative Minister-President
of Baden-W?rttemberg, Hans Karl Filbinger, a potential future
CDU candidate for President of West Germany, had long concealed
his past as a (naval) “hanging” judge. As would Waldheim a
few years later, Filbinger first protested his innocence, then
contested the importance of his activities, and only finally, and
under severe pressure, resigned his post.[xi]
Bernhard’s play is about another judge, the soon-to-retire Judge
Rudolf H?ller, who had enthusiastically served under Himmler and
who still secretly celebrates Himmler’s birthday every year
with his two sisters. The presentation of the ritual of National
Socialist worship in this play was apparently less upsetting to
Bernhard’s audience then the addition of the theme of incest:
there’s a long erotic scene between H?ller, getting dressed in
his meticulously prepared SS uniform, and his no-longer-young sister
Vera. This intimate coupling of Nazism and perverted passions was
found to be particularly tasteless. Never one to leave bad enough
alone, Bernhard adds insult to incest by having his characters
give explicit voice to the rarely (until then, in post-Nazi
Germany) publicly spoken diction of mythic Jew-hating, to the
entire lexicon of National Socialist demonization of the Jews.
“The Jews destroy annihilate the
surface of the earth/ and some day they will have achieved its
final destruction” (163) says the Judge. This is not only his
personal opinion. As he tells us, or rather as he tells the
audience, ninety-eight percent of all Germans “hate the Jews/
even as they claim just the opposite/ that’s the German nature...
in a thousand years the Germans will hate the Jews/ in a million
years” (138). These sentiments, for all their comic hyperbole,
in addition to Peymann’s explicit and offensive directing,
created unprecedented political recrimination. Filbinger called
for Peymann’s dismissal from the Stuttgart theatre, claiming
him to be a mad leftist and dangerous “supporter of terrorism”.
Bernhard, of course, would not allow an
attack to go unanswered, and subsequently wrote an additional play,
a short mock-Expressionist sketch titled Der deutsche
Mittagstisch (The German Lunch Table: A Tragedy to be
Performed by the Burgtheater when Touring Germany), which
indeed premiered in Bochum in 1981. In this small play Bernhard
takes politics a step further. Rather than attack a specific
person or political incident, Bernhard develops the connections
between the seemingly banal rituals of daily life in Germany, and
the inevitable infiltration of ideology. An elder couple named
Frau and Herr Bernhard try to eat a lunch of hot soup with their
great- and great-great grandchildren. But alas – they keep on
finding “Nazis in the soup”. (I will quote first in German
then in my English translation):
“Nazis in der Suppe... Nazisuppe auf
den Tisch/ lauter Nazis statt Nudeln” complains Herr Bernhard;
to which Frau Bernhard explains: “wir bekommen in ganz
Deutschland/ keine Nudeln mehr/ nur noch Nazis/ ganz gleich wo
wir Nudeln einkaufen/ es sind immer nur Nazis/ ganz gleich was f?r
eine Nugelpackung wir aufmachen, es quellen immer nur noch/ Nazis
heraus...”.
“Nazis in the soup...Nazi soup on
the table/ always Nazis instead of noodles” complains Herr
Bernhard; to which Frau Bernhard explains: “in all of Germany/
there are no noodles to be had/ only Nazis/ no matter where you
shop for noodles/ all you get are Nazis/ no matter what kind of
noodle package you choose, out crawl nothing but Nazis...”
This dramatized verbal coin – the
equivalent of finding a Nazi under every bush – is both a bit
of self-irony and a further bit of offence, implying that not
only Filbinger, but every part of German life is infected by its
past, that nothing in Germany can be considered to be – NOT
political.
Eve
of Retirement generated extensive discussion; but this
reaction was as nothing compared to the genuine political uproar
– leading to demonstrations and attacks, involving
intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and regular citizens –
created nine years later, in 1988, by Heldenplatz.
1988
marked the hundredth anniversary of Vienna’s Burgtheater
building, and it was within those centenary festivities that
Bernhard’s play had been commissioned by Peymann – who had by
now left Stuttgart and was beginning his directorship of the
National Burgtheater. But: the officially titled “memorial year”
of 1988 also commemorated other events. Heldenplatz
premiered under tight police security on 4 November 1988, fifty
years after the Anschluss, and fifty years almost to the
day after Kristallnacht (9 November 1938) for which Vienna
has a particularly despicable record.[xii]
Peymann had been expected to commemorate a century of Austrian
culture at the Burgtheater. The choice of a play centering on the
Anschluss and on the memory of Austria’s destruction of
its Jews, was not considered, by most, to be a fitting tribute.
Heldenplatz
centers on a Jewish family in the Vienna of 1988. The main
character, Professor Josef Schuster, a mathematician, who can no
longer stand the anti-Semitism he still finds in Austria 50 years
after the Anschluss – commits suicide by jumping out of
his apartment window onto the historic Heldenplatz before the
play begins. The metaphoric center of the play is his wife Hedwig.
Hedwig, since their return to Vienna, suffers constant auditory
seizures in which she – and finally the audience too –
relives the cheering of the masses as they applaud Hitler’s
triumphant 1938 speech on the square below their apartment. By
the end of the play, the roaring repeating choruses of “Sieg
Heil Sieg Heil” will lead to Hedwig’s final collapse: she
will fall over dead into her bowl of soup. Through these
extravagant and unheroic deaths, Bernhard performs the taboo
evocation of Austria’s destruction of its Jews and of its
willing acceptance of the Anschluss. With Heldenplatz,
Bernhard created a memory-scandal within the deeply etched space
of Austrian repression and denial.
As
all Austrians know, Heldenplatz is a huge square positioned close
to the lovely Volksgarten (the garden where scene two of Bernhard’s
play takes place), and near the famous Burgtheater (where the
play itself was performed). Two large museums, the National
Library, and the old Kaiser palace are all situated around this
central square. Literally meaning “Hero’s Square,”
Heldenplatz figures in Bernhard’s play as geography, history,
and fable. As many have noted, Heldenplatz embodies much of
Austria’s national identity.[xiii]
During Austria’s First Republic, Heldenplatz was the place for
military parades. Already in 1932, the first Nazi demonstration
with Goebbels and R?hm took place there. It was at Heldenplatz
that the crowds gathered in 1934 to mourn the assassination of
their right-wing chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. And it was there,
in 1938, that cheering Austrians welcomed Hitler and the Anschluss
that ended the First Republic and made Austria part of the German
Reich. Bernhard didn’t need to detail all of this within the
play: he could assume his audience’s knowledge. Heldenplatz
was recently translated into English, but has yet to find a
publisher (it has only appeared in a journal so far[xiv]). This is not
surprising since, even more than most of Bernhard’s locally-inscribed
plays, Heldenplatz demands an understanding of Austrian
history, as well as of Viennese geography. Heldenplatz is
like a Baedeker, a Blue Guide to Vienna’s sites – and their
significance. Even its title (which remains untranslated in both
the Hebrew and the English versions) requires at least some
historical sensitivity. Obviously, the Israeli publishers had
greater faith in the likelihood that their readers might
recognize the historical, geographical, and political references
within the play than do the Americans.
The
enormous public outcry against Bernhard’s play preceded both
its performance and its publication. The outcry was based on
passages “leaked” to the press during rehearsals, passages
attacking the Austrians, their government, their mendacity, their
vulgarity, their hatefulness.[xv]
The media dedicated weeks of daily coverage to the as-yet unseen
and unread play. Waldheim called the play an insult to all
Austrians. He was joined by ex-Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, among
others, in calling for the play’s removal from the National
Theater. Bernhard was vilified and even attacked on the street by
an angry citizen. “What writers write/ is nothing compared with
the reality” – one of the characters says; “yes yes they
write that everything is terrible/ that everything is ruined and
depraved/ that it’s all a catastrophe/ that it’s hopeless/
but all of this/ is nothing compared with the reality” (115).
Bernhard claimed that he had to keep revising and “sharpening”
his text during rehearsals in order, as he put it, “not to be
left behind by reality”[xvi] – that is, by the
uproar raging in the press, the Parliament, and on the streets.
Egon Schwarz summarized it well: “One could say that the play
was already being performed in the country, while it was still in
rehearsal at the Burgtheater”.[xvii]
And indeed, on opening day, two groups of protesters – for and
against Bernhard – chanted and marched in front of the theater;
and the night before, a group of rightists dumped horse-manure on
the theater steps.
The play, and the production, were far
more nuanced and complex – though no less fierce – than these
hysterical anticipations. Bernhard’s tactics in this
uncompromising play go beyond the litany of brutal verbal attacks
expected by his audience. This verbal outer layer is contained
within a complex and sophisticated recreation of the geographic
and historic “space” within which Austria, and the audience,
were defined.
Briefly:
Bernhard conflated the play’s fabula with the geography of the
theatre and city where the performance was being held, and where
the Anschluss had taken place. He achieved this through
the spacial re-inscription of the Burgtheater (within which the
audience was sitting) and the Heldenplatz (geographically so
close to the actual Burgtheater) – on stage. Visual
reinscription is one of Bernhard’s central, and most effective
strategies for tying audience, city, and history together. For
example: scene two takes place in the Volksgarten which adjoins
Heldenplatz to the Burgtheater. For this scene, Peymann had his
set-designer, Karl-Ernst Herrmann, build a side-wall of the
Burgtheater on stage, thus reflecting the outside of the
building inside of which the audience watching this play was
sitting[xviii] and underlining the
simultaneity of stage and world, of past and present, of
Heldenplatz as diachronic and synchronic site of memory and
identity.
Scene
three takes place in the dining room of the Schuster apartment.
Against the back wall of the stage Bernhard placed three high
windows which look out onto Heldenplatz. This time, the audience
can actually see the square for which the play is named.
This time, the audience will also “hear” the square, “hear”
Bernhard’s anger and his unforgiving memory of Austria’s past.
As Mrs. Schuster begins to eat her soup in scene three, her
affliction suddenly becomes a reality: the audience – together
with her – hear the “slowly swelling cheers of the masses at
Hitler’s arrival on Heldenplatz nineteen-thirty-eight”(159).
These cheers, as though struggling to break through the barrier
of collective repression, begin as barely audible background
noise. Mrs. Schuster goes stiff and pale in her chair while
Robert, unaware, continues to discuss Vienna: “In this most
terrible of all cities,” he says, “... an unbearable stink
spreads itself out/ from the Hofburg and the Ballhausplatz/ and
from the Parliament/ over the 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” – and Mrs. Schuster falls face forward into
her soup bowl.
The
unbearable shouts of the masses welcoming Hitler fifty years ago,
at a spot close enough to the theatre for those shouts to have
actually been heard inside the theatre – those same
shouts filled the theatre for the last long stretch of the play’s
premiere. Peymann, however, did not turn the horrible noise off
with the play’s end. Gitta Honegger, a Bernhard specialist who
was in the audience that night, describes how the first
performance ended:
The ...four-hour long performance was followed by forty minutes
of thundering applause, standing ovations, boos and whistles,
with the Austrian flag and banners unfolding from the balcony
both in support of and against Peymann, who bowed next to
Bernhard. ...To some, the two men, their hands clasped and held
up high, appeared like a triumphant pair of conquerors as the ‘Sieg
Heil’ choruses on stage segued hauntingly into the warring
choruses in the auditorium.[xix]
Thus,
the unbearable shouts coming from stage back – from the stage’s
(and history’s?) hidden recesses – merged with the cheers and
boos coming from the front, from the audience that was
simultaneously acclaiming and despising the performance they had
just participated in. Together, these concrete gestures, and the
dead Mrs. Schuster on stage, made an iconic – and ironic –
statement about Austria’s willing part in Nazism, in the
destruction of its Jews, and in the repression of its past.
With
this: Bernhard’s theatre became a platform, and an instrument,
for political intervention. Vienna was his extended stage, just
as his actual theatre-stage reflected the geography of Vienna.
The insistence on recognizing the past and its continuation into
the present was figured in this play not through a metaphysical
Beckettian fable (as Bernhard had often done in the past), but
through detailed historical and local references. Through this
Bernhard showed that his famous pessimism, and his unbending
animosity, were less ontological than historical, less concerned
with “human nature” than with the nature of the past.
[i].
Thomas Bernhard, Histrionics, in Histrionics: Three
Plays, trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth Northcott (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 218. Subsequent references
are to this edition, and will appear parenthetically within the
text.
[ii].
Quoted from Heinrich Wille, “Wunsch oder Bedingung? Zum
Rechtsstreit ?ber Thomas Bernhards letztwillige Verf?gung,” Der
Standard, 7 March 1989: 19.
[iii].
“Die Vergangenheit ist Unerforscht” (The Past is Unexamined),
an interview with Viktor Suchy, 5 March 1967, reprinted in Von
einer Katastrophe in die andere: 13 Gespr?che mit Thomas
Bernhard, ed. Sepp Dreissinger (Katsdorf: Bibliothek der
Provinz, 1992), 21.
[iv].
Thomas Bernhard, Heldenplatz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1988), 63. All translations from Heldenplatz are
my own. Subsequent references are to the German edition, and will
appear parenthetically within the text.
[v].
On Austria’s ‘Lebensl?ge’ (survival-lie) – that
Austria was Hitler’s victim – see Richard Mitten, The
Politics of Antisemitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in
Austria (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).
[vi].
Gabrielle Robinson, “Slaughter and Language Slaughter in the
Plays of Peter Turrini,” in Theater Journal 43 (May 1991):
199.
[vii].
Peter Handke, Kaspar, in Kaspar and Other Plays,
trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969),
68-72 and passim.
[viii].
“Ich m?cht 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 premiere performance in
order to increase tension and interest.
[xvi]. Quoted in the
wide-ranging book published by Peymann and the Burgtheater,
documenting the scandal, the play, and subsequent reactions, from
August 1st to December 31st 1988. Heldenplatz: Eine
Dokumentation (Vienna: Burgtheater, 1989), 220.
[xvii]. Egon Schwarz,
"Heldenplatz?" German Politics & Society
21 (Fall 1990): 38.
[xviii]. In the text Bernhard writes that from the
garden, we can see the Burgtheater “through a fog”. In
production, Peymann and Bernhard placed the theatre wall right by
the bench where the characters were sitting.
[xix]. Gitta Honegger,
“Thomas Bernhard,” in Partisan Review 58/3 (1991): 496.