On My Exit [1]
The election of
Scheel, the former president of the Federal Republic, to an honorary membership
of the Academy for Language and Literature was of course for me only the last
and definitive reason for breaking with this Academy for Language and
Literature, [an organization] that in my opinion has not the slightest thing to
do with either language or literature and whose right to exist every rational
thinking person obviously must deny. For
years I have speculated about the potential significance of this so-called
Darmstadt-based academy, and I have always been compelled to conclude that any
sort of significance cannot be derived from an association that in the final
analysis was chartered merely for the dubious purpose of promoting the preening
self-regard of its self-conceited membership, an association that convenes
twice a year for an orgy of self-adulation, where at great cost to the State it
devours and imbibes sumptuous victuals and beverages served up with
high-bourgeois pomp in first-class Darmstadt hotels, for the sake of shooting
the breeze about its stale, boring literary pap for a bare week. A writer or poet is a ridiculous enough
figure to begin with, a figure whose presence is at best barely tolerable in
any ordinary social setting, and how much more ridiculous and unconscionable is
an entire horde of writers and poets and characters who fancy themselves
writers or poets, all assembled in a heap!
Basically all these state-funded, traveling title-bearers come together after
a year of mutual collegial acrimony for the sake of boring each other to tears
for yet another week in Darmstadt Germany
Now, the Academy
for Language and Literature (the most absurd designation in the world!)
annually publishes a yearbook; perchance there is some significance to this
publication at least? But every time and
time and again in this yearbook nothing is published but so-called essays that
have gathered a layer of dust even before they’re set in type, essays that, as
I said, have nothing to do with either language or literature, and indeed have
pretty much nothing to with intellectual matters of any sort, because they
issue from the jammed-up typewriters of mindless gossips, of brainless
busybodies, as we would say in Austria.
And what apart from these wearisome concoctions is [to be found] in this
academic yearbook? A long list of every
possible and impossible honor these intellectual earthworms have “experienced”
in the year that has just elapsed.
Mention should also be made, lest we forget, of a hypocritical “death
roll” [filled] with abashed obituaries playing out a hand of deceased-members
poker, with each notice being more embarrassing and moronic than its
predecessor. It is too bad that this
yearbook is printed on an expensive kind of paper that is extremely unsuitable
for use as tinder in my furnace at Ohlsdorf.
For this reason I have always had enormous difficulties every time the postman
dumps his load of rubbish on to my doorstep.
But somebody
will say that the Academy
of Language Germany
To the Academy
for Language and Literature—which I deem the most dispensable thing in Germany
and in the entire rest of the world, and which is certainly more detrimental
than useful to poets (if there are any!) and writers (if there are any!), as
well as to Mr. Scheel, I wish nothing but the best. Upon the death of one of its members, the
Darmstadt-based academy (for language and literature!) always automatically dispatches
a black-bordered death notice with an always unvarying obituary text (a text whose
linguistic and literary value is debatable).
Perhaps I too will someday be subjected to such treatment, and the
academy will send out a notice in which it pays tribute not to one of its
honorable members but rather to itself.
Th. B.
[1] Editors’ note: First published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
December, 7, 1979.
The newspaper prefaced
the text with the following leader: “The ostentatious exit of the author Thomas Bernhard from the German Academy for Language and Literature (in Darmstadt) has
caused quite a sensation even outside literary circles. The academy has responded here at length to
Bernhard’s explanation (see the F.A.Z.
of November 28). Yesterday Bernhard,
writing from Crete, sent our editorial office the following counter-reply. In it he substantiates his exit more substantially,
lending credence to the supposition that […] the election of Ex-president
Walter Scheel as an honorary member was merely a pretext for [that] exit.”
THE END
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2014 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons. Herausgegeben von Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth. Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles. Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt : Suhrkamp, 2011).
Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons. Herausgegeben von Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth. Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles. Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](