Pathogenic Polemics: Heldenplatz and the "Bernhard Virus"

Abstract

This article traces the trope of "infectious" speech in scholarship on Thomas Bernhard, the literary reception of Bernhard's works, and the narrative dynamics of these works themselves. The author argues that the text of the play Heldenplatz and the ensuing scandal surrounding it represent the most salient example of this biologically inflected discourse, which casts Bernhard's language as at once irresistible and dangerous, as poisonous and salutary. In reframing fascist speech but directing its polemic thrust against the National Socialist past, Bernhard seems to interpolate the narrative dynamics of his texts onto the media, launching a literary "vaccination" of the Austrian public sphere that uncannily recalls the Nazi biopolitical imagination even as it inveighs against it.