Siegfried Mattl
In October 1988, some days ahead of the premiere of Heldenplatz and without even knowing Bernhard’s play, former Austrian Vice-Chancellor Fritz Bock, in a letter to Vienna’s leading conservative newspaper, named the play „Kloakenst?ck“ - a play for the sewer. He referred to its author as a „so-called writer“ and a dilettante in the field of literature. Moreover Bock, a conservative Catholic and former Nazi prisoner, called for the cancellation of the performance at the Burgtheater, rather than for censorship as other critics did. In an act of metapolitics, he called Bernhard’s play a desecration of a national symbol and tried to force the Minister of Cultural Affairs to dismiss Klaus Peymann, Burgtheater’s most controversial director. There was not much support for Bernhard and Peymann in those weeks, and even the Social Democratic minister, though defending freedom of art and cultural expression, personally distanced herself in advance from the play.
The conceptualization of the Burgtheater as a sacred space seems significant to me. It is - or rather: in the 1980s it still was - deeply rooted in the image of high culture as the essence of the Austrian nation. There was a strong belief that a particular mode of producing and performing works of art were the main force in constructing a genuine Austrian national community. Within a framework of nation-states as the fundaments of international politics, Austria declared itself a nation of culture - implying that it did not want to be considered as a nation defined by common descent, common language, or the common political aims of its citizens. But, as we know, so much depends on the definition of culture. As Geoffrey Hartman puts it: we should not trust in culturalism which offers us a nationalistic collection of works of art.
There never was, and for good reasons
never could be something like a definitive canon of Austrian
culture. This holds true even though in schools, in the theatres
and in the state-owned mass media, emphasis was put on a power-list
of, as it were, “genuine” Austrian artists, such as
Grillparzer and Mozart, whilst modernists were avoided. Step by
step a nostalgic, retrospective and consumerist system of
highbrow culture gained an unquestionable hegemony. The only way
one could probably challenge state culture was by irony, such as
bringing together in one and the same text the aura of a museum
with dirty toilets - as did Bernhard in Alte Meister.
As early as 1946, the leading
intellectual Friedrich Heer called Austria the idea of a
particular and timeless human being, endowed with female
qualities like passion, dedication and soft-heartedness, whose
realm is the stage of the theatre. In using culture as dominant
means of representation of the Austrian state, cultural politics
impaired the critical function and self-reflective power of art.
The work of art either became a narcissistic performance, or was
banned to the margins.
Like Robert Schuster, I would like to
read Bernhard’s persona as a mimicry of common Austrian
cultural narcissism, making him - I believe - as such
much more effective than critical cultural discourse could ever
be. By confronting an audience of habitu?s with their own mode of
smug cultural judgements, those speakers cannot be marginalized
as „others“. By mixing excited talks on highbrow issues with
topics of trivial middle-class everyday life, like a visit to Caf?
Sluga, Bernhard’s persons behave as one’s own uncanny self.
As you probably know, Heldenplatz
connotes not only a cultural scandal, but also a turning point in
Austrian post-war politics and Austrian identity. One of Bernhard’s
provocative sentences focused on the profound crisis aroused by
the Waldheim affair. In the play, Professor Schuster calls the
then Austrian President a liar, repeating the accusation at that
time that former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had not told
the whole truth in his wartime memoirs. There is no need to tell
this story - which I assume is well known to this audience - once
again. What I want to stress is that for the first time after
1945, the self-image of Austria as a nation of culture was
questioned in multiple ways. Austrians were confronted with
involvement in, and responsibility for, a violent, aggressive and
criminal past that till then had so easily been associated with
„German-ness”and thus put at a (safe) distance. Furthermore,
Austrian Catholic conservatives, who could claim having opposed
the „Anschlu?“ in 1938 and had become the unquestioned
Austrian „State Party“, now displayed attitudes confirming
the worst that Thomas Bernhard had to say about anti-urban
Catholic elites in his novel Ausl?schung. Michael Graff, a
prominent lawyer and party secretary-general, together with today’s
leader of the conservatives in Parliament, Andreas Khol,
pointing to the World Jewish Congress, invented the phrase of „those
obscure powers from the East Coast“ wishing to dominate
Austrian politics. In defense of Kurt Waldheim, he proclaimed the
later President and, as it turned out, SA member and information
officer in the Balkans, „not guilty, unless he had killed 5
Jews with his own hands“. Even though Graff was forced to
resign immediately afterwards, Austrians were subsequently split
into two different and before unknown camps - one camp pushing
narcissistic culture to its nationalistic extremes, and the other
one being accused by the former as anti-patriots. So in 1986, for
the first time in modern Austria, party loyalties within the
dominant two-party system were overthrown by mere resentments.
The year 1986 marks yet another
fundamental change in Austrian politics. It is the year the short-lived
experiment of a Social Democratic-Liberal coalition government
failed, and the reform-oriented party leadership of the Austrian
Freedom Party was eliminated by a putsch on the part of its right-wing
opponent J?rg Haider. The shock for the political establishment
came when Freedom Party doubled its votes in the same year up to
9.7 percent, even though extremist and anti-Semite undertones had
accompanied the election of Haider as party leader. Those events
had forced the Social Democrats to break up the coalition
government and to turn back to the Conservatives as partners.
Chancellor Vranitzky, a former banker whom Franz-Josef Murau in Ausl?schung
harshly attacks as an uninspired technocrat in the coat of
socialism, proclaimed Haider’s „Ausgrenzung“, or exclusion,
because of some evidence of his alliance with ex-National
Socialists inside the Freedom Party’s networks. But the
Austrian consensus aimed at keeping right-wing extremists out of
government, often using very sophisticated means, did not work
any more. In 1989, after a spectacular electoral success in
Carinthia, the national-Catholic faction of the Conservative
Party there made Haider Governor of the federal state, only to
turn him out again after his reference to „the proper
employment policy“ of the Nazi regime. In the meantime,
elections at the national level in 1990 had ended with another
sensational success for Haider’s Freedom Party, at the cost of
Conservative Party.
I will not go on enumerating the facts,
with which you are probably familiar. In order to arrive at a
more structural perspective, which might offer some context for
reading Thomas Bernhard, we must face the fact that the Austrian
Freedom Party does no longer represent a historic Fascist group,
but a particular variation of the European neo-populist movement.
By neo-populism, we understand anti-liberal political movements,
with quite different programs, that organize and represent
changing resentments against the political establishment, whilst
operating within the institutional framework of contemporary
democracy. We can of course hardly talk about neo-populism
without considering dramatic shifts which have taken place in the
European media system and the system of cultural representation,
characterized by the fall of national monopolies in the field of
electronic communication and the emergence of a dominant popular
culture. Regulated by the market, news and symbolic goods more
than ever have to fit into codes and concepts of dramatization,
confrontation, simplification and innovation. Replacing
traditional ties between the rank and file and the party
leadership by effective articulation shaped according to the
rules of media communication, parties like the Danish Progress
Party or Umberto Bossi’s Italian „Lega Nord“ were able to
adapt their issues to new topics circulating outside the frames
of traditional party politics. The fact that organizational ties
between populist leadership and the electorate are usually very
weak even enables them to quickly shift to the opposite of former
positions. This happened for example with the Freedom Party’s
former strong support for European unification, replaced in the
early 1990s by a similarly fundamental opposition to Austria’s
integration into the European Union. Today, taxation, migration,
conversion of the welfare state and national autonomy are the
main topics of European neo-populists. Some critics argue that
populist campaigns might force democracies to cure their
bureaucratic deformations. But, to put it bluntly, neo-populism
is not on participation, but on the power of articulation and its
abuse.
All over the EU, with the only exception
of Austria, an elitist compromise still excludes neo-populists
from government. We may ask why Austria left that European
consensus last year. I cannot go too much into history, but it
should be noted that Austria never had something like a liberal
democracy. Austria’s political system depended on
institutionalized corporatism. Industrialists’ and trade-unions’
representatives lacking democratic legitimization were considered
politically more powerful than official government. In fact, up
to the 1980s, those two extra-parliamentarian powers not only
decided on economic policies, technology and education, using
their expertise and strong lobbies in parties and Parliament, but
on top of it were in control of leading newspapers and the
electronic media. The historic class compromise for which Austria
stood was based on a huge sector of state-owned industries and a
state-owned banking system. This represented a genuine postwar
phenomenon, after Nazification and German war economy left an
expanded heavy industry and financial sector without legitimate
owners. In the early 1980s, one fifth of Austrian industry and
the leading banks were still owned by the state, but were ill
equipped for the new conditions of post-Fordistic production,
technological conversion and the new role of financial capital.
Trade unionists and industrial bureaucrats represented a kind of
pseudo-bourgeoisie, totally devoted to economic growth and
commercial activities. It was the lack of bourgeois culture, the
publicly demonstrated lack of taste and aesthetic sense that
forced Thomas Bernhard to call those up-climbers Ausl?scher
and new barbarians. But within a decade, the material fundaments
of corporatist politics and culture entirely changed. Caused by
severe economic problems and disastrous forward transactions,
state industry had to go public starting in 1985. Downsizing of
enterprises, layoffs, de-qualification and privatization point to
a sharp break in industrial relations. The fall of the Iron
Curtain in 1989, usually regarded as a common European
achievement, intensified anxiety and xenophobia, as uncertainty
on the new labor markets grew, and rumors spoke of some hundreds
of thousands of labor migrants from all over Eastern Europe
risking to invade Austria within a foreseeable future. Next came
globalization and the demand for new methods in public management,
especially a reduction of public debt, a stop to deficit spending
and monetarization of public services. Later, in 1994, after
Austria, by way of referendum, joined the European Union for
good, autonomous decision-making was restricted by common neo-liberal
European politics. Finally, political and military neutrality,
the fundament of Austrian state identity since 1955, has been put
on the agenda, as the question is being asked as to whether
European integration requires Austria to join the NATO or not.
To conclude: Austrian identity today is
radically questioned by social, economic, political and cultural
change caused by globalization and European integration. While
technical data concerning the rate of unemployment, economic
growth or technological innovation point to rather successful
politics of change, ideological structures reflect an image of a
widespread identity crisis. The rise of a modern multiple
identity is blocked by an enforced neo-folkloristic culture and
proto-racist emotions. This is not simply a consequence of
material threats, but indicates a structural deformation of
institutions and mentalities. To mention just one example: The
most widely discussed issues in public safety politics at the
moment are organized crime and drug traffic. Police officers,
hand in hand with politicians of the Freedom Party and the
boulevard press, shaped this issue by attacking migrants,
especially Black Africans, as a dominant threat, enforcing the
adoption of new surveillance techniques and the lowering of human-rights
standards. They even cooperated in police raids against Nigerian
dealers by evidence arranged for the press in order to stimulate
racist campaigns and put pressure on politicians. In his recent
autobiography, the former head of the Austrian police overtly
confirms - without eliciting much criticism, or facing any legal
and political consequences - that he betrayed the Minister of
Internal Affairs by passing material to the opposition Freedom
Party and to the boulevard press. It was just, as he writes, a
compensation for the minister’s lack of respect towards a high
civil servant like him. Episodes like these signify the strong
theatrical mind that rules politics and political speech acts,
the fascination of instantaneous superficial effects and the
ignoring of uncontrollable political constellations provoked
thereby.
The public management of change brings
us back to Heldenplatz and the continuity of cultural
scandals in Austria. The reaction to events like the one I
mentioned just before signifies the state of a non-modern culture,
with little or no differentiation between the realms of art,
politics, private life, and so on. Austrian identity and the
Austrian nation were not constructed on modern principles, but on
phantasmagoric anthropology. As Friedrich Heer put it
emphatically in 1946: the Austrian mind is nothing but the
representation of „THE“ human on the stage of world history.
To quote a famous Viennese law professor who as an opponent of
Claus Peymann did intervene 40 years later in the debates on Heldenplatz:
The problem with Heldenplatz, he wrote, is the replacement
of the Austrian-type actor, and his genuine representation of
eternal human qualities, by German actors, who obey fashion and
abuse theatre for contemporary comments on societal problems.
Maybe, by the way of negative dialectics, he thus touched exactly
upon the point at which Thomas Bernhard aimed - namely the
destruction of the pseudo-divine aura of the art and the state
that had taken place under their common Austrification after 1945.
This still remains his legacy.