Ein nationalsozialistisch-katholisches Syndrom: Zugänge zum Werk von Thomas Bernhard by Josef P. Mautner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ein nationalsozialistisch-katholisches Syndrom: Zugänge zum Werk von Thomas Bernhard by Josef P. Mautner Samuel J. Kessler Josef P. Mautner, Ein nationalsozialistisch-katholisches Syndrom: Zugänge zum Werk von Thomas Bernhard. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021. 135 pp. In this compact yet powerful book, literary scholar and Catholic theologian Josef Mautner reveals the many ways that the novels of Thomas Bernhard revolve around the themes of National Socialism and Austrian Catholicism. For Mautner, the "National-Socialist-Catholic-Syndrome" is a way of describing the submerged, semi-subconscious, yet deeply powerful interplay of two totalizing ideologies on the formation and individual identities of mid-twentieth-century Austrians. As has been noted in numerous books and reviews of Bernhard's writings, National Socialism, though almost never overtly mentioned, saturates the very atmosphere of his works, while Austrian Catholicism, especially in [End Page 102] its more provincial or parochial varieties, forms both the foundation of his assumptions and receives the harshest of his ire. What Mautner adds to this story is an argument concerning the ways the two ideologies become inextricably tied up once National Socialism develops and takes hold in Austria, and what that union looks and feels like on the bodies, minds, and souls of Austrian youth. As Mautner writes, "Nationalsozialismus wie Katholizismus sind für [Bernhard] Ideologien, die den Menschen in seiner Individualität nicht gelten lassen, ihn vielmehr 'eingemeinden', zum 'nützlichen' Teil eines Kollektivs machen wollen" (8). Mautner continues: "In diesem Sinne möchte ich versuchen, die Verknüpfung von Katholizismus und Nationalsozialismus in Thomas Bernhards Werk als die krank machende Verbindung von zwei Symptom-komplexen darzulegen" (9–10). Mautner then spends much of the introduction discussing the relationship between author and reader, specifically the way that Bernhard plays with the uncertainty of narrative and the relation of fictive elements in the text: "Immer wieder warden die LeserInnen bezüglich der Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehungen im Text verunsichert" (16). But he ends the introduction on a personal note. Mautner writes about how, earlier in his life (he was born in 1955), he had kept a distance between himself and Bernhard, mainly on religious grounds, but then slowly came to realize both the biographical and intellectual similarities between their two lives, andthat they shared a consternation at some of the more worrisome elements undergirding Austrian society. Bernhard, born in the Netherlands in 1931, lived in both Austria and Germany during the Nazi years before spending the remainder of his life in and around Salzburg. Mautner, two decades his junior, was likewise born into a family with a Nazi past and spent his youth in Catholic boarding schools in Salzburg. In reflecting on these shared boyhood experiences, Mautner came to recognize Bernhard's distinctive agglomeration of Catholicism and National Socialism. "Ich verbrachte meine Kindheit in einer nationalsozialistisch geprägten Familie und anschließend acht Jahre in einem katholischen Internat. […] Im Wechselspiel zwischen Familie und Internat musste ich erfahren, wie gerade im Bereich der Erziehung und Schulbildung diese beiden—scheinbar gegensätzlichen Welten—dieselben Muster und Strukturen ausbildeten" (22). It isn't an easy biography to have. But it does provide Mautner with the kind of empathetic insight that makes him a uniquely thoughtful and interesting reader of Bernhard. [End Page 103] Following the introduction, Mautner's work is divided into three main chapters. Chapter One focuses on Bernhard's early writings, including his first poems and his debut novel, Frost (1963). In these pages, Mautner argues that what began for Bernhard as "Gottesverzweiflung"—but was , Mautner believes, in many ways a deep, meaningful religiosity—can be seen as already afflicted by and critical toward the "syndrome." Though Bernhard's early poetry was received positively and understood as Christian, Mautner senses a break in the early 1960s, between an often-overlooked collection of Bernhard's poems entitled "Frost" and the debut novel a few years later of the same name. Mautner argues that Bernhard's decision to transform his prose style in that period—from one that imitated or derived from biblical and ecclesiastic liturgy to the modernist narratives with which we are all more familiar—marks a decisive shift in Bernhard's feelings about his place in...