Exorcizing Austria’s Demons

Book review: Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

In 1967 the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) was awarded a prize from a German institution. He later wrote a short essay about the experience. The essay is vintage Bernhard, and here is how it begins: “In the summer of nineteen sixty-seven I spent three months in the Lung Disease Hospital that was and is attached to the Steinhof Insane Asylum in Vienna, in the Hermann Pavilion which had seven rooms with either two or three patients, all of which patients died during the time I was there, with the exception of a theology student and me. I have to mention this because it is quite simply essential for what follows.”

What follows is much like what precedes it. One of the deceased men, a former policeman by the name of Immervoll, used to come to Bernhard’s room to play Pontoon every day; he would invariably beat him at Pontoon until Bernhard beat him at the game of life. The theology student survived, but not his theology — Bernhard had managed to talk the student out of his Catholicism. The environs were of a piece. There were thousands of Russian cranes flying above the hospital, blotting out the sky and shattering the eardrums of all the patients with their shrieking cries. On terra firma one saw an army of squirrels picking up sputum-filled paper handkerchiefs discarded by the lung patients, and racing with them to the trees. The famous professor Salzer went around the hospital to mutilate patients with the “best of intentions” and send them to their graves before their time.

While waiting for his turn, Bernhard found out he had won the prize of the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry. The name alone is worth a chuckle. But there was nothing comical about the 8,000-mark prize, which couldn’t have come at a better time for Bernhard. It cost a lot of money to have your lungs mutilated by Dr. Salzer, and Bernhard was up to his ears in debt. Fortunately — and despite Dr. Salzer’s best intentions — he survived the ordeal and made his way to Regensburg to collect his check. While there, Bernhard met the poetess Elisabeth Borchers, who was to share the prize with him. During the ceremony, their names got mixed up, and the laureates were announced as “Frau Bernhard and Herr Borchers.” Later the Cultural Circle of the Federal Association of German Industry sent Bernhard a Jubilee Book that listed the names of all the prizewinners throughout the prize’s history. There was only one name that was missing, and you can probably guess whose it was.

Bernhard did not live a happy life, but consider the cards he was dealt. Things went wrong practically on Day 1. He was born out of wedlock in the Netherlands, where his mother had fled on account of an illicit pregnancy. As Bernhard recounts in Gathering Evidence, his literary gem of a memoir (and the essential Bernhard text), he was a chronic bedwetter as a child; his mother’s way of dealing with the problem was to hang out his stained bedsheet outside the window for the whole town to see. At one point Bernhard was sent off to a home for maladjusted children in Thuringia, where he was made to walk around shouting “Heil Hitler!” and where his only friend was a boy who was doubly incontinent. Bernhard developed lung problems in his youth and suffered grievously at the hands of doctors; Gathering Evidence contains a harrowing description of how an inept doctor managed to induce pneumothorax in his patient. No one who has ever read the memoir will forget Grafenhof, the dreadful sanatorium where Bernhard had to be incarcerated — there is no better word for it — in his late teens. His health problems would plague him throughout his life and lead to an early death at age fifty-eight.

As a writer, Bernhard was preoccupied with death, and it is the central theme of Extinction, his last novel. Franz-Josef Murau, its first-person narrator, is a scion of a powerful Austrian landowning family and its intellectual gadfly. He lives in a plush exile in Rome (“My wonderful Rome!”), where he spends time cavorting with artists and bohemians, and giving German lessons to his bright and well-off student Gambetti. The idyll is disturbed when he learns his parents and older brother have been killed in a car accident. A “reserve heir,” Murau must now reckon with the prospect of having to travel to Wolfsegg, the family’s Austrian estate. This reckoning takes up the first half of the book, which is one long diatribe against Murau’s family, Wolfsegg, and Austria in general. By the time the second half of the book begins, Murau has made it to Wolfsegg — together with his diatribe. He takes control of the funeral and the family’s latifundium while continuing to find fault with everything under the sun.

The novel has all the standard Bernhard ingredients: mordant wit, gallows humor, and a misanthropic narrator who dislikes people, Austrians above all. Bernhard must have been Austria’s most anti-Austrian writer. Much of what he wrote about his fellow countrymen was untempered and often offensive, and Extinction is dripping with Austrophobia. Modern Austria is an anticultural cesspit: its government is ghastly; its architecture, barbarous; its media, vulgar and sensationalist. And the people! There are no natural mothers left in Austria, even in the remotest Alpine corners of the country; Austrian mothers are artificial mothers, and they give birth to artificial children. But it’s not just modern Austria Murau has a problem with; the boils on the Austrian body have deep roots in the history of the nation. Modern Austria, Murau says, is the ugly child of Catholicism and National Socialism. Catholicism made Austrians brainless; National Socialism took care of the rest. In Austria Catholicism is balanced with National Socialism; the country is sometimes more Catholic and sometimes more National Socialist, but it is never entirely one or the other. As for Austrians, “By nature, the Austrian is a National Socialist and a Catholic through and through, however hard he tries not to be . . . If we talk to an Austrian . . . we soon have the impression that we’re talking to a Catholic . . . or else we have the impression that we’re talking to a National Socialist — but in the end we have the impression that we’re talking to an out-and-out Catholic National Socialist, and we are soon very revolted.”

Many Austrians were not especially pleased to read this sort of thing, and they reciprocated. The acceptance speech Bernhard gave upon receiving the Austrian State Prize in 1967 prompted the culture minister and other members of the audience to walk out of the room. Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz, written in the 1980s, caused such a brouhaha that when it premiered, the Burgtheater had to be put under police protection; indignant Austrians left obscene messages targeting the author in public places, and Bernhard himself was physically attacked by — this, too, is straight out of a Bernhard text — an umbrella-wielding elderly lady while boarding a bus. But, however unbalanced his portrayals of Austria, Bernhard touched a raw nerve — he reminded Austrians of things they would have preferred to forget. Things like the wartime past of Kurt Waldheim, who became president in 1986, the year Extinction was published. Or the enthusiastic and widespread domestic support for the Anschluss. Or the number of Austrians in the SS and concentration camp administration, where, historians say, they were disproportionately represented. And who wanted to be reminded that Hitler was an Austrian export?

The Wolfsegg family estate is located in Upper Austria. That is also Hitler’s birthplace. The symbolism is obvious, and Murau drags the skeletons out of the family’s closet. Murau’s mother, a provincial upstart lucky to have married a Murau, was a “hysterical National Socialist.” Murau’s father, an unimaginative nincompoop and milquetoast, was “blackmailed” into becoming a Nazi, but the reader is not persuaded, and Murau does not really believe it either, admitting that his father eventually became a Nazi “not just by blackmail but by conviction,” profiting handsomely from the Nazi regime. A few Gauleiters, who had dispatched people to Nazi camps during the war, were lifelong friends. After the war, Wolfsegg became a safe haven to a number of Nazis on the run; his father put them up in the Children’s Villa, a Florentine structure on the estate originally used as a miniature theater for children. The Nazi flag was removed from Wolfsegg hours before the Americans arrived, and as the Muraus were entertaining the new masters and toasting Eisenhower, their “lifelong friends” were entertaining themselves a few hundred yards away at the Children’s Villa, well provisioned with food and drink. The rise of National Socialism turned Wolfsegg into a Nazi place, and the National Socialist period is the most dreadful Murau has ever known, one that “can’t be glossed over or hushed up, because it’s all true.” Now that his parents are dead, gargoyles from the past reappear. The list of guests at the funeral includes two ex-Gauleiters, former SS officers, and members of the Blood Order. Murau dreads this merry company, but there is nothing he can do — they are already on the invitation list.

Wolfsegg is a microcosm of Austria — or Murau’s Austria. Like Austria, it is Catholic (the estate has a chapel, ecclesiastical dignitaries have come here all the time, and Murau’s mother had an unseemly love affair with an archbishop), and it is also National Socialist, in part out of conviction and in part out of opportunism. Like Austria — which, postwar, cast itself as one of Hitler’s victims — Wolfsegg integrated itself into the new order, editing certain segments of its past out of the collective memory. Like Austria, it has not purged itself of its unsavory elements, who have managed to acquire a thin patina of respectability — the ex-Nazis at the funeral are doubtlessly modern Austria’s upright citizens. And it was probably like that in real life. It is poignant that not only did Kurt Waldheim become president the year Extinction came out, but Jörg Haider was named leader of the Freedom Party, a political movement whose first two chairmen were former SS officers. Haider himself, heir to an estate that had once belonged to an Italian Jew and was controversially acquired during Nazi rule, made a number of remarks that didn’t pass the smell test (incidentally, like Murau’s family, Haider would be killed in a car accident, though in very different circumstances). So much for successful denazification. The past is bound to be a revenant when it is not taken stock of, and Murau sees only one solution: Austria needs to be destroyed, root and branch. While Murau cannot will Austria out of existence, he can consign Wolfsegg to extinction, and this is exactly what he proceeds to, though in a peculiar kind of way.

Stylistically Extinction is a typical Bernhard novel. There are no chapter or paragraph breaks, although, as mentioned, the text is divided into two parts, possibly because of its length (at more than 300 pages, it is one of Bernhard’s longer works). Here, as in his other books I have read, Bernhard has a penchant for italicizing words that are not normally italicized and for which italics are uncalled for, perhaps for comic effect. Told in the first person, the story is not plot-driven. The event that underpins the story — usually someone’s death — takes place before the story opens, and the narrator reconstructs it for the reader’s benefit. The narrator himself remains aloof and detached, preferring to observe from the shadows. Extinction, in fact, has two narrators: Murau and Bernhard himself. The opening sentence of the novel contains the words “writes Franz-Josef Murau”; having thus introduced Murau, Bernhard retreats from the narration, like a deistic God that withdraws to let his creation proceed unimpeded. But this is a game. A few sentences later, Murau says he has given his student Gambetti a number of texts to read, including Thomas Bernhard’s Amras. Two-thirds into the book, Murau refers to Extinction, a book he is planning to write, which of course is the Thomas Bernhard novel we are reading. In the final sentence of the text, the author takes over again, with the words “writes Murau,” and the author returns to the narrative to inform the reader of Murau’s destiny.

In one of his award speeches, Bernhard said that everything was absurd when one thought of death — including death itself, apparently, which in Bernhard’s books is less macabre than ridiculous. Bernhard can be funny even apropos of topics people don’t normally laugh about. This is surely a good thing — without his sense of humor, the books would be intolerable and hopelessly bleak. But the humor succeeds only partially in mitigating his trademark contumely. Years ago, at the train station in Salzburg, I saw a man berating a washroom attendant. I am not sure what it was about, but the vituperative rant was so sustained I was certain he’d still be ranting by the time my train pulled into Vienna a few hours later. Murau is like that man from Salzburg Hauptbahnhof — you don’t want him anywhere near you. At a certain point in the text, the reader begins to suspect Murau’s dislike of Austrians extends to humanity en masse. Aside from his late parents and brother, about whom he has nothing nice to say, even though Wolfsegg money finances his idle lavishness in Rome, he also derides his two dirndl-wearing sisters. One of them is a spinster, while the other has recently married a philistine winemaker from southwest Germany (a “Baden gourmet”) just to spite her mother. There are cross-border shots at Belgian doctors (“well known as the world’s worst”) and German(ic) writers, including such giants as Thomas Mann and Robert Musil (“exponents of bureaucratic literature”). Murau professes to like common folk and makes much of his intimacy with the gardeners at Wolfsegg, but this is not very believable — the sight of one of the Wolfsegg cooks reminds him of his disdain “for these broad, rosy peasantish faces larded with stupidity,” and he is suspicious of their good nature. Even people Murau finds amiable turn out to have warts that are submitted to Murau’s merciless examination. Murau does have unconditional admiration for Uncle Georg, his intellectual godfather, but this is easy, since Uncle Georg is dead.

Murau is not just misanthropic; he doesn’t much like life itself. In Murau’s world, everything is in a state of decay and putrefaction. It is a world in which funerals draw more people than weddings, life is a perpetual danse macabre, and death is all-triumphant. Murau would retort that this is no recrimination — everyone and everything are condemned to extinction. Perhaps, but should the reader share the author’s morbid obsessions and his spiritual deformities? There are times in life when a book like Extinction might be salutary, if only as a reminder that life has a sunnier side; at other times, you’d do well to give it a wide berth. For all its bleakness, Gathering Evidence ends on a hopeful, life-affirming note. Extinction, as the name suggests, does not. It is a good choice for anyone interested in sampling Bernhard’s fiction, but most readers will be unlikely to return to it.