The Writings of Scriptor Adorans

Book in the spotlight: Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard

No one acquainted with Thomas Bernhard’s fiction will ever suspect its author of having been a happy person. Bernhard’s typical narrator is corrosively caustic, stridently vituperative, and all-around misanthropic; and he has a very low opinion of the human race, especially the part of it that is wedged into the small Alpine country the narrator calls home. He is much like Bernhard himself, and if the Austrian state pinned medals on writers for being anti-Austrian, Bernhard would have been its most decorated citizen. It bestowed prizes and awards on him instead, but it did not seem to do so out of any great love for the recipient. Bernhard showed the side of Austria the country didn’t want the world to see, preferring to hide it behind Straussian waltzes, rich coffee concoctions, and idyllic postcard views. He exposed the ghosts and demons lurking behind its glittering, if somewhat tired, facade of old imperial charm, and jabbed his finger at the stains on its past. He denounced what he believed was Austria’s intractable Catholic-Nazi identity and subjected his fellow countrymen to incessant contumely. He announced to all and sundry that something was rotten in the state of Austria, and those Austrians intent on keeping the rot a family secret wished he had been somewhere else. Bernhard might have wished he had been somewhere else too – he was the writer who forbade the publication of his works in Austria for seventy years following his death. It is all too easy to say that Bernhard was Austria’s most controversial author of the second half of the 20th century. He was a lot more than that, and perhaps he was something else entirely. Gathering Evidence, a collection of five autobiographical volumes concerned with Bernhard’s early years, reveals a man who was less Austria’s nemesis than an ontological outcast.

The memoir is Thomas Bernhard writ large. Free of the kind of ponderous aggrandizement of one’s childhood and its environs that is the bane of the genre, Gathering Evidence shows how Thomas Bernhard became Thomas Bernhard. Ostracism was already a leitmotif even before his birth in 1931. He was conceived out of wedlock; the father quickly absconded; and the mother, who lived in a backwater where news traveled fast, fled to the Netherlands to avoid a scandal. She returned to Austria a bitter woman and, confronted by grinding poverty, she took it out on the little boy who reminded her of her lover. As related in the first volume, Bernhard was whipped on the slightest pretext, and constantly reminded he was both unwanted (“You are all I needed! You are the death of me!”) and worthless (his mother dispatched her son to the town hall to collect the pittance he was owed as a fatherless child with the words, “This’ll show you how much you’re worth”); when this maternal pedagogy, barely mitigated by his beloved grandfather, caused him to develop a chronic bedwetting problem, his mother would hang the soiled bedsheets outside the window for the townsfolk to see. Nor was the family hearth the only place to reject Bernhard. His troubled childhood unfolded in tandem with the rise of the Nazis and the Anschluss. As Bernhard’s family shuttled between Austria and southern Germany in search of some means to survive, he found himself a misfit wherever the family alighted. In Austria he was shunned because he was a bedwetter; in Germany, at least until the Anschluss, because he was Austrian; in schools everywhere, as an academic underachiever too different to be accepted even by the blockheads. Teachers caned him with an uncanny consistency on both sides of the border; a prefect punched him in the head; a violin teacher rapped his fingers with a bow. When his family mistakenly (or not) sent him to a home for maladjusted children in Thuringia, Bernhard’s only friend was Quehenberger, a deformed boy who suffered from rickets and was doubly incontinent, and with whom Bernhard marched through the Thuringian forest as the boys were forced to shout, “Heil Hitler!” These were scars that would never heal.

Death was a constant companion throughout. Bernhard’s eccentric grandfather, an anarchist freethinker and a frustrated writer with a penchant for losing manuscripts to starving goats, liked to hold forth on the joys of suicide when taking his grandson out for a walk. Bernhard’s grandmother dragged the boy along on trips to mortuaries to observe the deceased. At age four Bernhard liked to play in cemeteries, first with a friend, then alone after the friend died and disappeared into the cemetery; he also developed a morbid fondness for attending requiem masses. This relationship with death, maintained on a first-name basis, led the young Bernhard to believe that “as many people as possible should die as often as possible.” At times he literally prospered when others around him perished – the sexton responsible for tolling the parish church bell for fallen German soldiers in the town of Traunstein, a man appropriately named Pfenninger, had arthritis and paid Bernhard five pfennings to toll the bell for him. People around him had a tendency to end their lives, and Bernhard himself spent a good chunk of his formative years contemplating suicide. Death was magnified when the bombs started to fall during Hitler’s “total war.” Bernhard was living in a boarding house in Salzburg, and destruction was everywhere; there are vivid descriptions of a bomb falling on the dome of the central cathedral, of Bernhard stepping on a child’s severed hand, of frantic civilians fainting in bomb shelters, and of rows of corpses stretched out after yet another air raid. 

Bernhard was appalled by the horrors of the war but, in view of his Austrophobia, the reader wonders if a part of him wouldn’t have preferred to see Salzburg razed to the ground. Bernhard’s Salzburg is not the baroque city of Mozart, The Sound of Music, and snow-dusted mountain peaks in the background. It is, the newspaper excerpt serving as an epigraph to the second volume reports, the suicide capital of Austria and one of the suicide capitals of the world. For Bernhard, this statistical fact is all one needs to know about Salzburg, “the so-called Mozart city where minor ailments could rapidly become deadly diseases.” Salzburg is a lot like Austria itself: conveniently forgetful, meretricious, and adept at concealing that it is the child of a marriage between Catholicism and Nazism. Like some other institutions whose hospitality Bernhard would later enjoy, his Salzburg boarding house exemplified this noxious brew. Run by a Nazi SA type who boxed Bernhard’s ears whenever he saw him, it fostered a harsh penal climate that drove its youth to despair and madness; the administration hypocritically pretended to be shocked every time one of the institution’s charges killed himself. When the war ended and the Nazis were defeated, the boarding school received a hasty makeover: the room where the boarders were stuffed with ideological indoctrination under the watchful eye of Hitler’s portrait on the wall was converted into a chapel where they could take communion under the watchful eye of Jesus on a crucifix; instead of shouting “Heil Hitler,” they now sang hymns. The Nazi SA type who had lorded it over the boarding house was gone, but the soul-crushing system remained in place. 

Everybody suffered at the boarding house, but not everybody suffered equally – sensitive, delicate souls who wouldn’t have fared well in places more clement were pushed to the brink. Bernhard – a sensitive, delicate soul if there ever was one – sought refuge in a shoe closet, where he played a violin and considered ways to do away with himself. The experience of the boarding house explains Bernhard’s fervent opposition to authority, but there were other sources of inspiration. His colorful grandfather had been a committed anarchist in his youth, a background that rubbed off on the grandson. An anarchist streak runs through the memoir, and it is not always confined to Austrian society. Bernhard regards society – any society – as a body that always oppresses its weakest. This starts with the family (“Wherever three are gathered together, there is always one in the midst who is mocked and ridiculed”), is amplified in schools, and reaches its crescendo at the societal level. It is the nature of society to torment and ostracize those who are unable to defend themselves and, however familiar with ostracism, Bernhard is not only thinking of himself. At another tyrannical Salzburg institution – a grammar school this time – there was a certain Pittioni, a talented geography teacher mercilessly pilloried by everyone for his ugliness, as well as an unnamed crippled boy confined to a wheelchair and condemned to ridicule because of it. But Bernhard does not make for a good anarchist. He proclaims that “human beings do not like freedom” and have no idea what to do with it. Anarchists, on the other hand, believe in people’s ability to govern themselves, a tenet that presupposes people’s desire and ability to be free. The contradiction is obvious but irrelevant. It is futile to search for signs of ideological consistency in the bleak terrain of Bernhard’s prose; he was not an anarchist but a loner with a hypertrophied sensitivity to his personal freedom and any encroachments on it.

While denying others the ability to make good use of freedom, he knew how to make use of it himself. Gathering Evidence opens with Bernhard helping himself to his stepfather’s bike to skip out of town, and his young years were an unremitting quest to be free – free from oppression but also from the conventional way of life that proves too restrictive for extraordinary minds thrust into it by circumstances. He was a rebel, but not in a pedestrian sense. Too sophisticated to scatter his talent in political activism, Bernhard staged his revolt by going “in the opposite direction,” a turn of phrase introduced in the third volume. Going in the opposite direction meant flunking out of grammar school and getting a job in a grocer’s cellar in the Scherzhauserfeld Project, Salzburg’s skid row. The grocer’s cellar was his way to escape “the rules of the bourgeois social apparatus, an apparatus designed to destroy human beings”: institutional abuse, arbitrary rules, and suicidal thoughts. In the grocer’s cellar, Bernhard found himself among fellow outcasts. The grocer, a man named Podlaha, was a failed musician from Vienna who knew his Bruckner and his Brahms, and he is explicitly referred to as an outsider. Podlaha’s customers were, to a man, Salzburg’s rejects, banished to the Scherzhauserfeld Project out of sight and out of mind. They were Salzburg’s forgotten and downtrodden; not even their wartime anti-Nazi sensibilities were of much help during Austria’s postwar denazification period. In such a milieu, Bernhard ought to have felt at home. But one cannot escape the theme of one’s life. Bernhard did not belong in the cellar either, and the environment nearly drove him to tears. He would retreat to the storeroom, put off by the “general coarseness and brutality of the customers” and the short-tempered Podlaha. Still, he tried his best. He began to take singing lessons as a palliative, and soon set his sights on a career as an opera singer. But it was not to be. His aspirations were cut short by a new attack on his autonomy; only this time, the attack, by virtue of being internal, was more direct, more literal, and more dangerous.

Some people believe that one’s name prefigures one’s destiny. If so, Thomas Bernhard’s phthisic initials intimated the chronic lung problems that would plague him for most of his life and end it at age fifty-eight. According to Bernhard, they began when he caught a cold while unloading a truck full of potatoes. There may have been genetic reasons as well – his grandfather had also experienced lung trouble – but the exact etiology is not terribly important. The cold turned into a serious bout of influenza that was not properly treated, and Bernhard ended up in a geriatric unit he called the “death ward” on account of its dismal life expectancy. Conditions in the ward were so miserable few patients received visitors, and those who did come to visit never returned. The wretched men had been ejected from society and were, for all intents and purposes, slaves to medical staff and their own wasting organisms. In a situation that would repeat itself later, Bernhard found himself a double outcast: first, as an outcast among the healthy, from whose world he had been removed; second, as an outcast among the dying, since he was too young to be in the death ward. Faced with the dichotomy of life and death, he felt it was incumbent upon him to choose between the two; leaving his life in the hands of the doctors would have been tantamount to relinquishing his freedom. The title of the fourth volume (“Breath: A Decision”) is to be taken literally – by opting for his life, Bernhard fought for the freedom to breathe. 

What happened next was tragicomic and helps understand Bernhard’s loathing of what might be called the expert class. His refusal to die earned him a stay at a convalescent home where, far from convalescing, Bernhard was exposed to tuberculosis. This was not the last instance of negligence he experienced at the hands of doctors. Later a careless doctor distracted by lunch plans accidentally collapsed his lung, and there would be other incidents as well. (Bernhard’s loved ones were similarly aggrieved – a surgeon supposedly misdiagnosed his grandfather’s condition, an error that led to the man’s death, and his mother’s cancer treatment was also botched up). In Bernhard’s view, doctors are like teachers, but where the latter maim the soul, the former maim the body. The result of his sojourn at the convalescent home was a ticket to Grafenhof Sanatorium, the subject of the last volume. Grafenhof was a ghoulish place no reader will forget; even Bernhard’s description of his approach to Grafenhof sounds like a journey to a concentration camp. Grafenhof’s patients were “permanent outcasts from human society”; they were considered to be contagious and were prohibited from leaving the sanatorium. The chief physician was a Nazi who had been allowed to stay on because of a labor shortage, and he ran the place like one. There was a clear social hierarchy; the strong elbowed out the weak; all signs of individualism were quashed. Yet again, Bernhard was a double outcast: from the standpoint of the world outside Grafenhof, he was one of the “lepers,” but as routine testing failed to confirm the presence of tuberculosis in his body, the other patients eyed him with suspicion. He was not abused; instead, his status as an outsider turned him into an observer, a role he would later assign to his narrators. This experience also shaped his ambivalent feelings about the masses. On the one hand, Bernhard expresses solidarity for their plight (“. . . outcasts, people who had been deprived of their rights”); on the other hand, he is aware of what the masses can do to those who don’t fit in. In a vignette almost straight out of Nabokov’s “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” a tubercular jurist detested by the Grafenhof staff for his socialist views was viciously tormented not only by the Nazi-led medical staff and the Catholic sisters of mercy, but also by the working-class lads with whom he had been placed and who relished their abuse of the dying man. Bernhard absolves them of responsibility, pleading ignorance on their behalf, but the misanthropic tenor of his writings suggests he had no illusions on that account.

Like the boarding house in Salzburg, Grafenhof Sanatorium was a “Catholic National Socialist environment.” Like the boarding house, it serves as a metaphor for Austria itself. This theme, dear to Bernhard’s heart, recurs throughout his oeuvre. When Franz-Josef Murau, the narrator of the novel Extinction, says that Austrians are part Nazis, part Catholics, he acts as Bernhard’s mouthpiece. The birth of Hitler in Austria, Bernhard implies, is neither an aberration nor a coincidence, but a perfectly natural development. Austria is fertile soil for the men in charge of the Salzburg boarding house and Grafenhof Sanatorium, and it has no place for gifted minds, who are expelled abroad. This is surely hyperbole; Bernhard’s assertions that Austria cannot produce, let alone retain, great talent belie his own biography. Bernhard’s view of both Austria and Austrians seems highly unbalanced, not to say unhinged. But Bernhard wrote at a time when the Second World War was a living memory and not a mere historical fact, and when a man with as checkered a past as Kurt Waldheim could still become chancellor; and although the world, along with Austria, has changed enormously since then, the demons of history are notorious for their longevity. In Bernhard’s Austria memories of the past were always too close to home; “Alois Zuckerstätter,” the name of his troubled father who died in mysterious circumstances in Nazi Germany, almost sounds like “Alois Schicklgruber,” the name of Austria’s most infamous son. (Nor was Bernhard the only one to make the point. The remarkable Russian writer Friedrich Gorenstein – who was condemned to the one fate more terrifying to any writer than ostracism, namely, neglect – stayed in Vienna briefly in the early 1980s, just as Bernhard was busy wrapping up Gathering Evidence; he later wrote that there must have been something “traditionally baleful” about Austria that explained some of the darker chapters of its history.)

Yet Bernhard’s problem was not with Austria. Austria, to paraphrase an Auden poem, may have hurt him into poetry, but his attacks on the country are merely a function of his familiarity with the target. He was, like all of us, the victim of his historical circumstances, upbringing, and psychology. He would not have been much happier in America, Japan, or Russia – it would have only been a question of degree. It wasn’t Austria that ostracized Bernhard but the human condition itself; his tirades and rants were existential. “Life is nothing but a penal sentence,” he writes in Gathering Evidence, and “the world is a penitentiary.” If one also thinks that this is as good as it gets, there is no point in waking up in the morning. Bernhard continued to wake up for as long as his fragile health allowed him to, but his negation of life and the possibility of anything that could follow it left a dactylogram on his work. A human might not be the sum total of his beliefs, but an artist surely is. Bernhard believed in liberty; at Grafenhof, he set out to look for his “demons in freedom.” The inspiration to look for those demons came from Dostoevsky, by whom he was clearly influenced. Bernhard had the Russian writer’s eye for the grotesque, his ability to blend the comical with the dramatic, and his willingness to descend into the catacombs of the human soul. But he lacked Dostoevsky’s spiritual tremor, the prophetic depth of his vision, and, most important, his belief in redemption. He singles out Dostoevsky’s Demons as the book that showed him a way out of Grafenhof. But it did show him a way to a worthy place? Threatened with a return to Grafenhof after another health emergency, Bernhard rebelled, and he concludes Gathering Evidence with the words, “But I refused and never went back.” This appears to be a life-affirming ending. But negation alone cannot be life-affirming. What is the point of freedom when your “utmost admiration is for suicides,” who are supposedly superior to the living in every way? Bernhard’s memoir, a towering literary achievement written by a fecund mind but a malnourished spirit, never tells us.