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Ladataan... Heldenplatz (1988)Tekijä: Thomas Bernhard
German Literature (281) Ladataan...
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Highly controversial in Austria, this play concerns a Jewish professor who returns to Vienna after the Second World War and discovers that his fellow Austrians are as anti-semitic as ever. Heldenplatz is the square in Vienna where the Austrian-born Hitler made his first speech after the Anschluss. Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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Google Books — Ladataan... LajityypitMelvil Decimal System (DDC)832.914Literature German literature and literatures of related languages German drama 1900- 1900-1990 1945-1999Kongressin kirjaston luokitusArvio (tähdet)Keskiarvo:
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When Claus Peymann, director of the Burgtheater, commissioned Bernhard to write a piece for the 1988 "year of reflection" on the 50th anniversary of the Anschluss, he presumably expected to get something controversial, but in the event both Bernhard's piece and the reactions it let loose must have exceeded his wildest dreams. In the run-up to the première on 4 November 1988, various journalists got hold of sensational excerpts from the text and held them under the noses of political leaders, who almost without exception reacted in precisely the way intended, calling for censorship, deportation, withdrawal of subsidies, etc., and generally giving the rest of the world the impression that Austria was precisely the philistine nest of intolerant old Nazis that the Kurt Waldheim scandal had made everyone suspect it was already.
The right-wing press gleefully fanned the flames, and the whole thing turned into a major scandal, with the Burgtheater under police protection and all sorts of outrages threatened. As the Austrian critic Sigrid Löffler pointed out in the Spiegel, it can't have made the attackers any more comfortable with themselves when they actually saw the play and understood the context of the leaked lines - they are spoken by the members of a family of returned Jewish exiles driven to desperation (and in the case of the absent central character of the play, Professor Josef Schuster, suicide) by the continuing and unrepentant antisemitism and hatred they find in modern Austria: the play ends with the louder and louder roaring of Hitler's Heldenplatz audience in the background.
In the event, the first performance was a triumph, despite the hecklers and wavers of Austrian flags, and the news footage shows a jubilant Bernhard (who was already very frail and died a few months later) taking curtain calls with the cast.
As always, the energy and conviction of Bernhard's language is magnificent and overwhelming. This is a play you could quite easily read for the sheer pleasure of the text, whether or not you care about Austrian politics or agree with the attitudes expressed by the characters. Moreover, it's not really a play about actual politics, but rather about the way our perception of the social and political reality around us can have extreme effects on our moral and emotional state. And I think that's what makes it more than a bit of obsolete Waldheim-bashing.
Reading it now, 28 years later, you can only reflect on how we can see the kind of political and popular Stumpfsinnigkeit Bernhard talks about gaining more and more ground every day. Without, so far, the imminent global catastrophe Bernhard's characters expected, although perhaps we've lost a lot more on the way than we're aware of.
I was struck by the way Bernhard also makes it clear - in what he probably knew was his final message to the public - that literature is not actually capable of expressing the real awfulness of reality:
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