Literatur Kompakt: Thomas Bernhard by Axel Diller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literatur Kompakt: Thomas Bernhard by Axel Diller Jinsong Chen Axel Diller, Literatur Kompakt: Thomas Bernhard. Baden-Baden: Tectum Wissenschaftverlag, 2021. 238 pp. For decades, Thomas Bernhard, both as a man and as a controversial writer, has been widely discussed in literary studies. Due to the scandals he repeatedly provoked during his lifetime, Bernhard was stigmatized as a Nestbeschmutzer and an enfant terrible because of his vocalized disrespect for his country. His works were criticized by many. For instance, Peter Handke once described his books as "criminal concoctions" ("sträfliche Machwerke"); others accused Bernhard of self-plagiarism, pointing to similarities in content and structure, as well as the interchangeability of content that revisited the same motifs and themes, to suggest that the writer essentially wrote only one novel over the course of his life. In his newly published book Thomas Bernhard, Axel Diller undertakes a comprehensive examination of Bernhard's biography and literary works, concluding that Bernhard was one of the most successful Germanspeaking authors of the 20th century (204). For Diller, the performance and achievement of a writer should be judged independently of his personality. In his defense of Bernhard, Diller examines the nature and poetic construction of his prose and dramatic texts, confirming that Bernhard discovered and developed a unique literary language. Precisely because of this artistic language, Bernhard's works cannot be dismissed as "Schmähschriften eines mittlemäßigen Schriftstellers"; rather, they represent one of the great "Ausnahmeleistungen" of German-language literature since 1945 (5). The book consists of seven chapters, including an extensive bibliography, a list of figures, and an index. The introduction poses the question "Nestbeschmutzer oder Weltliterat?," which helps Diller justify and underscore Bernhard's undeniable canonical status as a "(post)moderner Klassiker" (10) in world literature, a judgment that is echoed in the concluding sentences of the final chapter where he discusses the reception of Bernhard's works (204). A helpful five-page chronological table constitutes an independent chapter (II). Placed before the three main chapters (III–V), it summarizes Bernhard's life and lists all of his works and their publication dates. The third chapter, "The Life and Works of Thomas Bernhard," occupies nearly half of the book. Drawing on Bernhard's biographical quintet, Diller extends the poeticity of Bernhard's autobiographical writings, a typical poetic [End Page 100] design of Bernhard's that prioritizes the poetic over the factual. In other words, Bernhard's prose works—both autobiographical and fictional—are intended to describe his life not with factual accuracy or precision but rather in a programmatic narrative style that helps him convey central themes that he deems important, such as isolation, death, loneliness, war, illness, anxiety, and suicide. Over the next chapters, armed with Bernhard's uniqueness of language and traumatic life experiences, Diller proceeds to examine Bernhard's dramatic and prose works. In order to demonstrate that Bernhard's works, informed by his unique literary language, are poetically and rhetorically "regelrecht virtuos" (14), Diller uses three dramas (Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige, Der Theatermacher, and Heldenplatz) and four fictional prose works (Frost, Das Kalkwerk, Holzfällen, and Alte Meister) to highlight Bernhard's dramaturgical and narrative techniques, such as exaggeration, intensive monological dialogues, and shrewd use of the comic and the absurd. Meanwhile, using the "all the world's a stage" approach, Bernhard cast artistically or philosophically active "Geistmenschen" who are isolated from their society, marked with illness, and suffering from a modern version of postwar Weltschmerz. While having no help to function within the power system in place and, therefore, unable to achieve perfection or self-realization, they deal with the loss of identity, self-extinction, and self-destruction through suicide and wrestle with loneliness and language skepticism. This exemplifies Bernhard's critique of the meaninglessness of art and of philosophy. While taking into account the techniques, content, and the structure that define Bernhard's poetry, Diller also pays attention to the linguistic quality of his writing process. This can especially be seen in his attention to the poetic and linguistic nature of his prose and dramatic texts. This is in part the result of Bernhard's preoccupation with music. A trained musician himself, Diller revealed his...