About Thomas Bernhard

# The incurable Austrian wound: Bernhard, Peymann, and the Burgtheater as battlefield

Thomas Bernhard’s relationship with Claus Peymann was the most consequential artistic partnership in postwar German-language theater — a nineteen-year collaboration that turned Austria’s most prestigious stage into a tribunal for the nation’s unexamined conscience. When Peymann died on 16 July 2025 in Berlin-Köpenick, aged 88, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) the obituaries rightly framed him as the man who had brought Bernhard’s corrosive genius to theatrical life. But the fuller story is one of mutual dependence between a playwright who despised his country and a director who weaponized that contempt within the very institutions that embodied it. Between them, they produced the greatest theater scandal of Austria’s Second Republic, shattered the postwar consensus of comfortable amnesia, and demonstrated that publicly funded culture in the German-speaking world could function as what Adorno might have recognized as determinate negation — art that refuses the reconciliation its society demands.

Their partnership began in **1970** when Peymann directed the world premiere of *Ein Fest für Boris* at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) Bernhard’s first professionally staged play. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) It ended only with Bernhard’s death on **12 February 1989**, [Thomas Bernhard](https://thomasbernhard.at/das-leben/zeittafel/) three months after their culminating provocation, *Heldenplatz*. In between came at least **fifteen world premieres** [World Socialist Web Site](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/26/yjvt-j26.html) across four decades of German and Austrian theater — from the early Salzburg provocations through the Bochum years to the explosive Burgtheater tenure. That Bernhard trusted no other director with his work was not incidental; [oe1.orf.at](https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/268684/Claus-Peymann-ueber-Thomas-Bernhard) it was constitutive of both men’s artistic identity.

## How a Bremen pacifist found his Austrian Übertreibungskünstler

Peymann arrived at Bernhard’s work already primed for confrontation. Born in 1937 [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) to a father who was a committed National Socialist and a mother who secretly listened to Allied radio, [World Socialist Web Site](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/26/yjvt-j26.html) he absorbed what he called the pacifism of the *Nachkriegszeit* “with the skimmed milk of the postwar period.” [Leopoldstoeger](https://leopoldstoeger.com/germany-celebrity-deaths/) His theatrical breakthrough had come in **1966** with the premiere of Peter Handke’s *Publikumsbeschimpfung* at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) [VIENNA.AT](https://www.vienna.at/claus-peymann-is-dead/9555797) — that founding gesture of postwar experimental theater in which the audience becomes both subject and object of critique. The move to Bernhard’s work four years later was less a departure than a deepening: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) where Handke’s early plays deconstructed theatrical convention abstractly, Bernhard’s texts aimed their fury at specific historical formations — **Catholic-National Socialist Austria**, [Grokipedia](https://grokipedia.com/page/Thomas_Bernhard) the provincial *Bildungsbürgertum*, the entire apparatus of cultural self-congratulation that the Salzburg Festival and the Burgtheater represented.

What made their working relationship irreplaceable was partly a matter of sensibility and partly of infrastructure. Peymann assembled and maintained an ensemble of actors — **Bernhard Minetti**, **Gert Voss**, **Kirsten Dene**, **Traugott Buhre**, **Branko Samarovski** — who followed him from Stuttgart to Bochum to Vienna, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) forming the permanent instrument on which Bernhard’s monologues and tirades could be played. Bernhard wrote roles *for* these actors: [Google Sites](https://sites.google.com/site/germanliterature/20th-century/bernhard) the play *Minetti: Ein Portrait des Künstlers als alter Mann* (1976) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) was literally named for its star; [ZVAB](https://www.zvab.com/buch-suchen/titel/minetti/autor/thomas-bernhard/) *Ritter, Dene, Voss* (1986) carried the surnames of its three performers in its title, [ORF](https://ooe.orf.at/stories/3019259/) [Google Sites](https://sites.google.com/site/germanliterature/20th-century/bernhard) a gesture of almost aggressive intimacy between author and ensemble. The dramaturg **Hermann Beil**, Peymann’s indispensable collaborator from Stuttgart through Berlin, [Dieter Wunderlich](https://www.dieterwunderlich.de/Bernhard_Claus_Peymann.htm) served as the crucial mediating intelligence, and appeared as a character in Bernhard’s three *Dramolette* — those extraordinary short plays in which Bernhard satirized and celebrated Peymann simultaneously: *Claus Peymann kauft sich eine Hose und geht mit mir essen* (1986), *Claus Peymann verlässt Bochum und geht als Burgtheaterdirektor nach Wien* (1986), *Claus Peymann und Hermann Beil auf der Sulzwiese* (1987). [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) [Suhrkamp Theater Verlag](https://www.suhrkamptheater.de/stueck/thomas-bernhard-claus-peymann-verlaesst-bochum-und-geht-als-burgtheaterdirektor-nach-wien-tt-101277) These are love letters disguised as mockery — or the reverse. In the second *Dramolett*, Bernhard gives Peymann the line: *”Das Theater ist meine Leidenschaft Bernhard / nichts als das Theater.”* [E-CIBS](https://e-cibs.org/2025/09/24/claus-peymann-1937-2025-by-matt-cornish/) It reads as both diagnosis and confession.

Peymann understood something about Bernhard’s prose rhythms that more cautious directors missed: that the apparently unrelenting negativity — the famous *Übertreibungskunst*, the art of exaggeration — was simultaneously deadly serious and hilariously comic. The key to staging Bernhard was never to play him as mere denunciation but as a kind of demonic vaudeville, the rage of a mind that cannot stop performing its own disgust. Stage designer **Karl-Ernst Herrmann** [Observatorial](https://observatorial.com/news/entertainment/1441553/claus-peymann-is-dead-mourning-for-the-early-director-of-the-vienna-burgtheater-and-berlin-ensembles/) created [Observatorial](https://observatorial.com/news/entertainment/1441553/claus-peymann-is-dead-mourning-for-the-early-director-of-the-vienna-burgtheater-and-berlin-ensembles/) the spare, almost abstract visual worlds that let Bernhard’s language do its claustrophobic work. [news.ORF.at](https://newsv2.orf.at/salzburgerfestspiele16/stories/2352730/)

## Salzburg’s two minutes of darkness

The Salzburger Festspiele was Bernhard’s first and most sustained theatrical battleground, and the pattern established there — passionate courtship, deliberate provocation, furious rupture, eventual return — became the template for his entire relationship with Austrian cultural institutions. Bernhard had grown up in and around Salzburg, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) attending school at the Johanneum (first under Nazi, then Catholic administration — an experience he treated as definitionally Austrian), [Salzburg Altstadt](https://salzburg-altstadt.at/de/magazin/thomas-bernhard-salzburg) studying at the Mozarteum, and eventually settling nearby in Ohlsdorf. He listed his profession in his passport as *Landwirt* — farmer. His relationship to Salzburg was what he himself called a *Haßliebe*: “Everything about me is connected to Salzburg. But it can only be a love-hate relationship, because I am a living person.” [Salzburg24.at](https://www.salzburg24.at/news/oesterreich/thomas-bernhard-besondere-beziehung-zu-salzburg-99553144)

The defining Salzburg scandal came in **1972** with the premiere of *Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige*, [Salzburger Festspiele](https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/history/26-july-30-august-6) directed by Peymann [Salzburger Festspiele](https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025_07_17_pa-nachruf-peymann.pdf) [Salzburger-landestheater](https://www.salzburger-landestheater.at/de/seiten/das-notlicht-ein-skandal.html) with **Bruno Ganz** in the cast. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) Bernhard’s stage directions demanded **total darkness** — including the extinguishing of emergency exit lights — for the final two minutes. [Salzburger-landestheater](https://www.salzburger-landestheater.at/de/seiten/das-notlicht-ein-skandal.html) Fire regulations were cited; the lights stayed on. [Salzburg Altstadt](https://salzburg-altstadt.at/de/magazin/thomas-bernhard-salzburg) [Stifterhaus](https://www.stifterhaus.at/stichwoerter/thomas-bernhard) Peymann erupted. [Magnoliamusic](https://www.magnoliamusic.at/der-ignorant-und-der-wahnsinnige/) The actors refused to perform a second show. Every subsequent performance was cancelled. [nachtkritik.de +2](https://nachtkritik.de/portraet-reportage/thomas-bernhard-und-salzburg) Bernhard fired off one of the great telegrams in literary history [Salzburger Festspiele](https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025_07_17_pa-nachruf-peymann.pdf) to Festival President Josef Kaut: **”EINE GESELLSCHAFT DIE ZWEI MINUTEN FINSTERNIS NICHT VERTRÄGT KOMMT OHNE MEIN SCHAUSPIEL AUS”** [Salzburger Festspiele](https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025_07_17_pa-nachruf-peymann.pdf) [Sn](https://wiki.sn.at/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) — “A society that cannot endure two minutes of darkness can do without my play.” [Salzburg Altstadt +2](https://salzburg-altstadt.at/de/magazin/thomas-bernhard-salzburg) The line operates on at least two levels: literal (the lighting dispute) and metaphorical (Austria’s refusal to confront the darkness of its past). That Bernhard likely intended both is what makes him Bernhard.

The relationship was patched up — it always was — and *Die Macht der Gewohnheit* followed in 1974 [Stifterhaus](https://www.stifterhaus.at/stichwoerter/thomas-bernhard) (directed by Dieter Dorn, Peymann being temporarily *persona non grata*), [Stifterhaus](https://www.stifterhaus.at/stichwoerter/thomas-bernhard) then *Am Ziel* in 1981, [Wien Geschichte Wiki](https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Claus_Peymann) and then the two great late Salzburg premieres. [Wien Geschichte Wiki](https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Claus_Peymann) **Der Theatermacher** (1985) was Bernhard’s most self-reflexive provocation: the former *Staatsschauspieler* Bruscon tours provincial Austrian inns with his family, performing his self-written *Rad der Geschichte* while railing against the stupidity of rural life, the persistence of Nazism, and the impossibility of art. [Blogger](http://christianschacherreiter.blogspot.com/p/thomas-bernhard-der-theatermacher.html?m=1) [Salzburger Festspiele](https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/history/26-july-01-september) Bruscon demands absolute darkness for his play’s finale — the *Notlicht* must be extinguished [Wikipedia](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Ignorant_und_der_Wahnsinnige) — and when the village fire chief agrees without objection, his visible disappointment at the absence of scandal is the play’s cruelest joke. [Thomas Bernhard](https://thomasbernhard.at/das-werk/drama/die-stuecke/der-theatermacher/) Peymann announced he would release **800 live flies** during the performance for atmospheric authenticity; the Salzburg establishment panicked. At the premiere, the flies turned out to be plastic. [NZZ](https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/aktuell/salzburger-festspiele-zwei-minuten-finsternis-ld.111082) The following year, *Ritter, Dene, Voss* (1986), with its eponymous cast, completed Bernhard’s late Salzburg cycle before both he and Peymann moved to the larger stage of the Burgtheater. [Stifterhaus +2](https://www.stifterhaus.at/stichwoerter/thomas-bernhard)

## Heldenplatz and the self-fulfilling prophecy of Austrian rage

Peymann’s appointment as *Intendant* of the Burgtheater in **1986** [UTP Publishing](https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/md.38.3.378) [Duesseldorf](https://emuseum.duesseldorf.de/people/30165/claus-peymann) — succeeding Achim Benning [Wien Geschichte Wiki](https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Claus_Peymann) [VIENNA.AT](https://www.vienna.at/claus-peymann-is-dead/9555797) — was itself a provocation. A German leftist, a *Piefke* in Viennese argot, [nachtkritik.de](https://nachtkritik.de/nachtkritiken/oesterreich/wien-niederoesterreich/wien/theater-in-der-josefstadt-wien/bernhard-mittagstisch) now ran Austria’s *Königsbühne*, the institution the Viennese called simply *die Burg*. [ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265705237_The_Scandal_Maker_Thomas_Bernhard_and_the_Reception_of_Heldenplatz) Founded in 1741 [Royal E Cars Tours](https://www.royal-ecars.com/burgtheater) under Maria Theresa, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgtheater) elevated to “German National Theatre” by Joseph II in 1776, [Theater Datenbank](https://www.theatre-architecture.eu/en/db/?theatreId=323) and housed since 1888 in its Semper-and-Hasenauer palace on the Ringstraße [Theater Datenbank](https://www.theatre-architecture.eu/en/db/?theatreId=323) (with ceiling paintings by the young Gustav Klimt), the Burgtheater was not merely a theater but [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgtheater) a condensation point of Austrian identity — a *moralische Anstalt* in Schiller’s sense, where artistic decisions became state affairs debated in parliament and tabloid press alike. Peymann would stage **252 productions** over thirteen years, including **51 world premieres**, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) bringing in directors like Strehler, Tabori, Zadek, Wilson, and Schleef, and championing contemporary Austrian dramatists — Bernhard, Handke, Jelinek, Turrini [Wien Geschichte Wiki](https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Claus_Peymann) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) — with a systematic intensity that transformed the institution. [Duesseldorf](https://emuseum.duesseldorf.de/people/30165/claus-peymann)

But the event that defined the tenure, defined Peymann’s career, and arguably defined the cultural politics of late-twentieth-century Austria, was the premiere of **Heldenplatz** on **4 November 1988**. Peymann had commissioned Bernhard to write a play for the Burgtheater’s centenary [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) — which fell, with almost unbearable historical irony, in the same year as the **fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss**, [Wikipedia](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(Drama)) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) during the presidency of **Kurt Waldheim**, whose wartime Wehrmacht service had been exposed two years earlier. [Thomas Bernhard](https://thomasbernhard.at/das-werk/drama/heldenplatzskandal/) [Google Sites](https://sites.google.com/site/germanliterature/20th-century/bernhard/heldenplatz) The collision of these dates was the kind of overdetermination that Bernhard’s work had always insisted upon: [eNotes](https://www.enotes.com/topics/thomas-bernhard/criticism/bernhard-thomas/christine-kiebuzinska-essay-date-fall-1995) that in Austria, every celebration conceals a crime.

Bernhard initially refused the commission, proposing instead that placards reading **”Dieses Geschäft ist judenfrei”** be placed on every formerly Aryanized shop in Vienna’s inner city. He then wrote *Heldenplatz* [Thomas Bernhard](https://thomasbernhard.at/das-werk/drama/heldenplatzskandal/) — a play set on the day of the funeral of Josef Schuster, a Jewish mathematics professor who emigrated to Oxford after the Anschluss, returned to Vienna [Austrian Academy of Sciences](https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/research/literary-studies/research/authors-editions/thomas-bernhard-heldenplatz) at the city’s invitation, [Google Sites](https://sites.google.com/site/germanliterature/20th-century/bernhard/heldenplatz) took an apartment overlooking the very square where Hitler addressed [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) 300,000 jubilant Austrians on 15 March 1938, and, concluding that “now everything is worse than fifty years ago,” threw himself from the window. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) [Austrian Academy of Sciences](https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/research/literary-studies/research/authors-editions/thomas-bernhard-heldenplatz) His wife Hedwig is haunted by the phantom sounds of the 1938 crowd cheering [Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/heldenplatz) — the *Heldenplatzgeschrei* — which she hears whenever she enters the dining room. [WordPress](https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/heldenplatz-by-thomas-bernhard-review/) In the final scene, surrounded by trunks labeled “to Oxford,” she collapses dead onto the dinner table. [Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/heldenplatz) The play’s characters deliver Bernhard’s most concentrated assault on Austria: **”There are now more Nazis in Vienna than in 1938″**; [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) [WordPress](https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/heldenplatz-by-thomas-bernhard-review/) the country is “a brutal and stupid nation, a mindless, cultureless sewer”; [Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/heldenplatz) scratch any Austrian and you find a mass murderer.

The text was supposed to remain secret until premiere night. [Impfservice Wien](https://www.stadt-wien.at/kunst-kultur/buehne/burgtheater-thomas-bernhard.html) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) On **7 October 1988**, the *Kronen Zeitung* — Austria’s highest-circulation tabloid — published excerpts under the headline **”Österreich, 6,5 Millionen Debile”**, [Wikipedia +2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) attributing characters’ dialogue directly to Bernhard as personal statements. [Project MUSE](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499531/summary) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) The political reaction was instantaneous and ferocious. President Waldheim called the play “a crude insult to the Austrian people.” [eNotes +2](https://www.enotes.com/topics/thomas-bernhard/criticism/bernhard-thomas/christine-kiebuzinska-essay-date-fall-1995) Vice-Chancellor **Alois Mock** declared state subsidies should not fund such *Österreichbeschimpfungen*. [ORF](https://orf.at/stories/3088162/) [Austrian Academy of Sciences](https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/heldenplatz-forscherinnen-entschluesseln-entstehung-von-thomas-bernhards-skandalstueck-1) FPÖ leader **Jörg Haider** — quoting, with characteristic bad faith, Karl Kraus — cried: **”Hinaus mit diesem Schuft aus Wien!”** [eNotes +2](https://www.enotes.com/topics/thomas-bernhard/criticism/bernhard-thomas/christine-kiebuzinska-essay-date-fall-1995) Even former Chancellor **Bruno Kreisky**, [University of Innsbruck](https://www.uibk.ac.at/literaturkritik/zeitschrift/935764.html) phoning from Majorca, insisted the play should not be allowed to proceed. [World Socialist Web Site](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/26/yjvt-j26.html) [eNotes](https://www.enotes.com/topics/thomas-bernhard/criticism/bernhard-thomas/christine-kiebuzinska-essay-date-fall-1995) Six Burgtheater actors walked out of the production. [eNotes](https://www.enotes.com/topics/thomas-bernhard/criticism/bernhard-thomas/christine-kiebuzinska-essay-date-fall-1995) [Project MUSE](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499531/summary) A farmer dumped a wagonload of manure before the theater entrance [Impfservice Wien](https://www.stadt-wien.at/kunst-kultur/buehne/burgtheater-thomas-bernhard.html) — unwittingly echoing a line in the play about Austria being “a huge manure pile.” [eNotes](https://www.enotes.com/topics/thomas-bernhard/criticism/bernhard-thomas/christine-kiebuzinska-essay-date-fall-1995) The *Kronen Zeitung* published a photomontage of the Burgtheater in flames. [ORF +3](https://orf.at/stories/3088162/)

What happened on premiere night, under heavy police protection, was the **greatest *Theaterskandal* of Austria’s Second Republic**. [Austrian Academy of Sciences](https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/research/literary-studies/research/authors-editions/thomas-bernhard-heldenplatz) Some 500 demonstrators — including, as photographs later confirmed, the young Heinz-Christian Strache, future FPÖ leader and Vice-Chancellor [SN.at](https://www.sn.at/kultur/theater/bernhards-heldenplatz-skandal-kultstueck-153140878) — gathered outside. [ORF](https://orf.at/stories/3088162/) Inside, the sold-out audience experienced a performance [Austrian Academy of Sciences](https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/heldenplatz-forscherinnen-entschluesseln-entstehung-von-thomas-bernhards-skandalstueck-1) stretched from three-and-a-quarter to four-and-a-quarter hours by catcalls and disruptions, followed by **thirty-two minutes of tumultuous curtain calls** mixing cheers and boos. [ORF](https://orf.at/stories/3088162/) [Tagblatt-wienerzeitung](https://www.tagblatt-wienerzeitung.at/_wzo_daten/media/heldenplatz/theater.html) The visibly ill Bernhard appeared on stage with the cast — his last public appearance. [SN.at](https://www.sn.at/kultur/theater/bernhards-heldenplatz-skandal-kultstueck-153140878) [Wikipedia](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(Drama)) Peymann later recalled: “For the already death-marked poet Thomas Bernhard, the premiere triumph was a last great, blissful gift.” [Wikipedia](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(Drama)) [Thomas Bernhard](https://thomasbernhard.at/das-werk/drama/heldenplatzskandal/) *Heldenplatz* ran for over 120 performances [SN.at](https://www.sn.at/kultur/theater/bernhards-heldenplatz-skandal-kultstueck-153140878) [Wikipedia](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(Drama)) before more than 127,000 spectators — the most-performed production of Peymann’s entire directorship. [ORF](https://orf.at/stories/3088162/) As Michael Frank wrote in the *Süddeutsche Zeitung*: “At the moment Austria is exerting itself to bring about the greatest possible agreement between reality and Bernhard’s grotesque texts.” [Wikipedia](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(Drama)) The scandal *was* the proof. The reaction *was* the play’s argument made flesh.

## The *Nestbeschmutzer* and his posthumous emigration

Bernhard had been rehearsing this confrontation his entire career. The **Staatspreis für Literatur** ceremony on **4 March 1968** established the template: [Deutsche Biographie](https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118509861.html) accepting the prize money (25,000 schillings, pragmatically earmarked for farmhouse renovations), he delivered a speech declaring Austria “a perpetual national prison” populated by “apathetic” and “pitiful” citizens, whereupon Education Minister Theodor Piffl-Perčević stormed out, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) reportedly slamming a glass door so hard it shattered. The **Grillparzer Prize** ceremony of 1972 produced a different kind of humiliation: nobody recognized Bernhard at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and he refused to identify himself, [The New York Review of Books](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/02/10/darkest-comedian/) insisting the Academy President come fetch him personally. [The New York Review of Books +3](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/09/27/the-comedian-of-horror/) In *Meine Preise* (written 1980, published posthumously 2009), Bernhard described receiving a prize as “nothing other than having one’s head pissed upon” — while candidly admitting he accepted them for the money. [The Chronicle](https://www.chronicle.com/article/thomas-bernhard-literary-prize-fighter/)

The **Holzfällen** confiscation of **1984** escalated the feud to the juridical realm: police seized copies from Austrian bookshops after composer Gerhard Lampersberg [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) recognized himself in the novel’s thinly veiled portraits. [eNotes](https://www.enotes.com/topics/thomas-bernhard/criticism/bernhard-thomas/christine-kiebuzinska-essay-date-fall-1995) The ban was lifted when Lampersberg withdrew the suit; the novel sold **60,000 copies in six weeks** and became Bernhard’s greatest commercial success. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) The pattern was always the same: provocation, outrage, attempted suppression, and the proving through suppression of exactly what the provocation had alleged.

Bernhard’s **will**, [The New York Review of Books](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/02/10/darkest-comedian/) notarized two days before his death, was his final and most absolute performance. It prohibited the publication, performance, printing, or public recitation of **any of his works** — published or unpublished — within the borders of Austria for the full duration of international copyright law, [Konfrontacje](https://konfrontacje.pl/en/kontekst/thomas-bernhard-god-honour-nation/) approximately seventy years. [Wikipedia +2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) The language was unambiguous: “I emphasize expressly that I do not want to have anything to do with the Austrian state.” [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) He called it his *posthume literarische Emigration*. It was the logical endpoint of a lifelong project: if Austria would not confront itself, then it would be denied access to the artist who had most relentlessly demanded that confrontation. As Adam Kirsch observed: “No deathbed reconciliation could have ensured the Austrians’ attention as lastingly as this parting slap.” [The New York Review of Books](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/02/10/darkest-comedian/)

The ban was **lifted in 1999** by Bernhard’s half-brother and literary executor, [Impfservice Wien](https://www.stadt-wien.at/kunst-kultur/buehne/burgtheater-thomas-bernhard.html) **Dr. Peter Fabjan** [The New York Review of Books +2](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/09/27/the-comedian-of-horror/) — a decision that overrode Bernhard’s explicit wishes, timed conveniently to the tenth anniversary of his death. [DOKUMEN.PUB](https://dokumen.pub/thomas-bernhard-the-making-of-an-austrian-0300089996-9780300089998.html) Austria reclaimed its *Nestbeschmutzer*. The Ohlsdorf farmhouse became a museum. [Encyclopedia](https://en.wiki2.click/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) The collected works appeared in twenty-two volumes. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard) [Suhrkamp Verlag](https://www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/the-correspondence-fr-9783518419700) Gitta Honegger’s mordant summary is exact: “Austria has officially reclaimed its nasty problem child as a national treasure alongside that other ungrateful son of Salzburg, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” [The New York Review of Books](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/02/10/darkest-comedian/) The domestication Bernhard foresaw — and tried to prevent from beyond the grave — proceeded precisely as he predicted. Peymann himself railed against it: “This trivialization process, where some state governors or art ministers now adorn themselves with Bernhard and pull his teeth — that would have driven him mad.” [oe1.orf.at](https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/268684/Claus-Peymann-ueber-Thomas-Bernhard)

## The director who donated for Gudrun Ensslin’s dental work

Peymann’s capacity for institutional provocation was not merely borrowed from Bernhard; it was his own. The defining scandal of his pre-Vienna career occurred during the **Deutscher Herbst** of 1977, when RAF terrorism reached its apex with the murders of banker Jürgen Ponto and industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. **Gudrun Ensslin’s mother, Ilse**, had written to approximately sixty-five prominent Germans requesting donations for dental treatment for RAF prisoners at Stammheim [Rimini-protokoll](https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/peymannbeschimpfung-hoerspiel) — the state covered only a fraction of costs. Peymann, then running the Stuttgart Schauspielhaus, contributed [taz.de](https://taz.de/Doku-ueber-die-RAF/!5399460/) around **100 Deutschmarks** and posted Frau Ensslin’s appeal on the theater’s internal bulletin board, [Rimini-protokoll](https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/peymannbeschimpfung-hoerspiel) adding in his own hand: “Those wishing to donate can give the money to Frau Noack!” — his secretary. Some 600 DM was collected.

When the *Bild-Zeitung* broke the story [taz.de](https://taz.de/Doku-ueber-die-RAF/!5399460/) months later, the reaction was volcanic. Minister-President **Hans Filbinger** demanded Peymann’s immediate dismissal. [Duesseldorf](https://emuseum.duesseldorf.de/people/30165/claus-peymann) Hundreds of hate letters arrived, including death threats: “You should be gassed, preferably with chlorine.” [taz.de](https://taz.de/Doku-ueber-die-RAF/!5399460/) Only the intervention of Stuttgart’s Oberbürgermeister **Manfred Rommel** [Duesseldorf](https://emuseum.duesseldorf.de/people/30165/claus-peymann) — son of the field marshal, and a man who understood something about the complexities of German guilt — allowed Peymann to serve out his contract. The resonances multiplied: Bernhard’s *Vor dem Ruhestand* (1979), premiered by Peymann in Stuttgart, dealt directly with the Nazi past of a politician modeled on Filbinger himself, [Wien Geschichte Wiki](https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Claus_Peymann) who was forced to resign in 1978 when his role as a Nazi-era naval judge came to light. In 2007, Peymann reprised the controversy by offering ex-RAF member **Christian Klar** an internship at the Berliner Ensemble. [Leopoldstoeger](https://leopoldstoeger.com/germany-celebrity-deaths/) Berlin’s CDU called him *untragbar* — unbearable. The word had followed him for thirty years.

The RAF episode illuminates something essential about Peymann’s position within the ecology of German-language theater. He operated at the intersection of publicly funded institutional prestige and radical political critique — the paradox at the heart of the *Regietheater* tradition. The state paid for the stage on which the state was excoriated. This was not hypocrisy but structure: the German and Austrian system of *Staats-* and *Stadttheater*, with their permanent ensembles and *Intendanten* who combined artistic and administrative authority, was designed precisely to sustain this tension. Theater as *moralische Anstalt* meant theater as a space where society could be confronted with what it preferred not to see — and the society that funded it could not then complain without confirming the critique.

## The Burgtheater as Austria’s permanent crisis

The broader significance of the Bernhard-Peymann collaboration lies in what it revealed about the function of theater in the German-speaking world — a function that has no real equivalent in Anglo-American culture. The Burgtheater is not the National Theatre in London or a Broadway house; it is [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgtheater) an institution whose artistic decisions are debated in parliament, whose *Intendant* is a figure of national political consequence, and whose repertoire choices are understood as statements about national identity. [UTP Publishing](https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/md.38.3.378) When Peymann programmed Bernhard, Jelinek, and Turrini alongside Handke, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) he was not merely curating a season; he was conducting a sustained argument about what Austria was and what it refused to acknowledge.

This tradition extends back through Brecht’s concept of theater as dialectical intervention, through Schiller’s *Theater als moralische Anstalt*, and in Austria specifically through a lineage of literary *Nestbeschmutzer* — **Karl Kraus**, [DOKUMEN.PUB](https://dokumen.pub/thomas-bernhard-the-making-of-an-austrian-0300089996-9780300089998.html) who exposed the Habsburg empire’s murderous operetta during the First World War; **Johann Nestroy**, whose comic subversions of Viennese complacency established the template; **Ödön von Horváth**, who dissected petit-bourgeois fascism in the interwar years. Bernhard stands in this tradition but radicalizes it: [ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41557521_Bewaltigungsinstrument_Anti-Heimatliteratur) where Kraus still believed in the diagnostic power of language, Bernhard’s monologues enact the impossibility of diagnosis, the circularity of a critique that can never be heard because the society it addresses is constitutively incapable of hearing it. The *Übertreibungskunst* — the art of exaggeration for which he was both celebrated and condemned [ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265705237_The_Scandal_Maker_Thomas_Bernhard_and_the_Reception_of_Heldenplatz) — was not rhetorical excess but epistemological method. Only by pushing every claim past the point of plausibility could the underlying truth be made visible.

Bernhard’s central concept — Austria as a **”Catholic-National Socialist”** formation — found its fullest articulation in *Auslöschung* (1986), where protagonist Franz-Josef Murau declares: “By nature the Austrian is a National Socialist and a Catholic through and through, however hard he tries not to be.” [Waggish](https://www.waggish.org/2005/thomas-bernhard-extinction/) This formula, the inseparable twinning of Catholicism and Nazism as Austria’s twin pathologies, runs through all the late work [Substack](https://eugeneehren.substack.com/p/exorcizing-austrias-demons) and reaches its theatrical apotheosis in *Heldenplatz*. It is a thesis that resonates with what W.G. Sebald — another German-language writer obsessed with unprocessed historical trauma — would explore through different literary means: the way the past persists not as memory but as somatic disturbance, as the phantom sounds of a crowd cheering fifty years ago that will not stop. Hedwig Schuster’s *Heldenplatzgeschrei* [ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265705237_The_Scandal_Maker_Thomas_Bernhard_and_the_Reception_of_Heldenplatz) is [WordPress](https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/heldenplatz-by-thomas-bernhard-review/) Sebald’s *Austerlitz* in compressed dramatic form — the body remembering what the nation has agreed to forget.

The *Anti-Heimatliteratur* that Bernhard’s work exemplifies — alongside Jelinek, Turrini, and in a more complex register, Handke — represents a specifically Austrian genre that scholars have identified as an indispensable instrument of *Vergangenheitsbewältigung*. [ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41557521_Bewaltigungsinstrument_Anti-Heimatliteratur) It was not until 1991, three years after *Heldenplatz* and two after Bernhard’s death, that Chancellor Franz Vranitzky first publicly acknowledged Austrian co-responsibility for Nazi crimes. [Cambridge Core](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E88459E0E13EAEF9810D6F48B3C01E6E/S009059922200040Xa.pdf/controversies-over-austrias-nazi-past-generational-changes-and-grassroots-awakenings-following-the-waldheim-affair-and-the-wehrmacht-exhibitions.pdf) [Tagblatt-wienerzeitung](https://www.tagblatt-wienerzeitung.at/_wzo_daten/media/heldenplatz/theater.html) The line from Bernhard’s provocation to that political acknowledgment is not direct, but neither is it coincidental. *Heldenplatz* did not change Austria, but it made the fiction of unchangedness harder to sustain.

## What remains when the *Übertreibungskünstler* is canonized

Peymann spent the last quarter-century of his life continuing to stage Bernhard [World Socialist Web Site](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/26/yjvt-j26.html) — *Einfach kompliziert* in 2011, *Die Macht der Gewohnheit* in 2015, [Burgtheater](https://www.burgtheater.at/trauer-um-claus-peymann) *Der deutsche Mittagstisch* in 2020, and a final *Minetti* at the Residenztheater Munich in 2023. [World Socialist Web Site](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/26/yjvt-j26.html) He said Bernhard sometimes appeared to him in dreams, and that “something of this monster remains awake in me.” [oe1.orf.at](https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/268684/Claus-Peymann-ueber-Thomas-Bernhard) His final production was Beckett’s *Waiting for Godot* at Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt [Mabumbe](https://mabumbe.com/people/claus-peymann-dies-at-88-trend-goes-viral/) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Peymann) — an apt closing gesture for a man who had spent his life waiting for a transformation that theater could demand but never deliver.

The question that Bernhard’s posthumous canonization forces us to confront is whether the critical function of his work survives its institutional absorption. Austria now celebrates Bernhard. The farmhouse is a museum. The collected works fill shelves. *Heldenplatz* was restaged at the Burgtheater in 2024 [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) by Frank Castorf. [Wikipedia](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(Drama)) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heldenplatz_(play)) The *Nestbeschmutzer* has been domesticated into a national treasure — exactly the fate his will attempted to prevent and his work relentlessly satirized. The *Theatermacher* Bruscon, raging against provincial stupidity in a village inn, is also Bernhard himself, raging against a country that will eventually hang his portrait in a ministry and call it culture.

Yet something does remain — what Adorno, in a different context, called the truth content (*Wahrheitsgehalt*) that outlasts the occasion of its production. The Bernhard-Peymann collaboration demonstrated that theater could function as genuine *Ideologiekritik* — not in the sense of correcting false consciousness, but in the more radical sense of staging the impossibility of correction within a society that has made unconsciousness its organizing principle. The thirty-two minutes of applause and boos at the *Heldenplatz* premiere [ORF](https://orf.at/stories/3088162/) were not the resolution of a cultural debate but the enactment of its irresolvability. That is what made it theater, and that is what no amount of posthumous celebration can neutralize entirely. Bernhard knew this. Peymann, who was there when it happened and who spent the rest of his life trying to make it happen again, knew it too.