Volume 37, Number 14 · September 27, 1990
The Comedian Of Horror
By Robert Craft
BOOKS BY THOMAS BERNHARD DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Gathering Evidence: A Memoir
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock
Knopf, 340 pp., $19.95
Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock
University of Chicago Press, 106 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Histrionics: Three Plays
by Thomas Bernhard. (A Party for Boris; Ritter, Dene, Voss; Histrionics), translated by Peter Jansen, by Kenneth Northcutt
University of Chicago Press, 282 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The President and Eve of Retirement
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Gitta Honegger
Performing Arts Journal Publications, 215 pp., $16.95
The Lime Works
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Sophie Wilkins
University of Chicago Press, 241 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Gargoyles
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston
University of Chicago Press, 208 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Correction
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Sophie Wilkins
University of Chicago Press, 271 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Concrete
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock
University of Chicago Press, 156 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Woodcutters
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McClintock
University of Chicago Press, 181 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Old Masters: A Comedy
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Ewald Osers
Quartet Books, 156 pp., $23.95
After the ructious reception of Thomas Bernhard's Heldenplatz (Heroes' Square) at the Vienna Burg-theater in November 1988, just three months before the author's death, President Kurt Waldheim denounced the play, in which he is called a liar, as a 'crude insult to the Austrian people.' It tells the story of a Jewish professor who left Austria in 1938 when the Nazis annexed it, returned fifty years later, and, finding the attitude toward Jews unchanged, committed suicide. In the play, the professor's brother characterizes Austria as 'a nation of six and a half million idiots living in a country that is rotting away,…run by the political parties in an unholy alliance with the Catholic Church.' The statement expresses one of Bernhard's major themes.
Review, 9161 words
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