“A Destructive, Horrible Guy”
Now that I have returned
from Portugal, where at the invitation of the Goethe Institute I delivered some
lectures on my own work at the Universities of Lisbon and Coimbra and had some
discussions with some students, it is beyond my personal power and more
precisely the power of my brain, a brain that is ever mindful of the
accountability of Austrians living abroad, to withhold from our chancellor and
the broader [Austrian] public that portion of my traveling experiences involving
the Austrian embassy and in particular the Austrian ambassador to Lisbon, Weinbeger,
and I am quite simply duty-bound to share with you the following facts and
circumstances:
At the end of my first
lecture, the director of the German Goethe Institute in Lisbon, the
distinguished and quite rightly world-famous translator of Latin-American and
hence Portuguese and Spanish literature Curt Meyer-Clason, was invited along
with me to a supper-party at the house of an Austrian family living in Lisbon,
a supper-party that the Austrian ambassador was also supposed to attend. Shortly before my lecture Mayr-Clason
suddenly shared with me the news that Weinberger the Austrian ambassador would
not fulfill his function as a guest at this party if I, and in this matter
the ambassador had quite clearly been heard to say, “if this destructive,
horrible guy,” was going to be present, and it was very politely suggested
to me, probably for fear that the ambassador might [resort to more] coercive [methods],
that because the hosts were an Austrian family living in Lisbon I would do
better not to appear at this supper-party, and so as a matter of course I did
not appear at that supper-party.
At this moment it dawned
on me within the precincts of the university that the German Goethe Institute’s
and the German embassy in Lisbon’s solicitude to inform the Austrian embassy of
my residence in Lisbon and of my lectures in Lisbon through a number of very
polite printed and unprinted invitations and leaflets had been exploited quite
definitely by the Austrian embassy and unmistakably by the Austrian ambassador
towards the end of ridding themselves of my personal presence by brusquely
rebuffing me, by bringing me in contempt within the Austrian colony in Lisbon and
throughout Portugal and snubbing me; meanwhile, the Austrian ambassador had
publicly let it be known that I was “a destructive, horrible guy,” even though
I have never met the Austrian ambassador to Lisbon and even though I am certain
this ambassador has to this day not read a single line written by me. Weinberger the ambassador has also spoken of
me in terms akin to “this destructive, horrible guy” in communications
to the representatives of the German Goethe Institute and of the German
embassy, and hence to my hosts, who had been under the impression that the
Austrian embassy in Lisbon was in some fashion interested in Thomas Bernhard, communications
that at the very least must be described as indiscretions.
The day after my exclusion
from the aforementioned supper-party and after the Austrian ambassador had made
full and abundant use of the opportunity to bring me in contempt among the
Austrians and Germans in Lisbon, I was invited by the German ambassador Caspari
to a panel discussion at his private residence outside Lisbon with Cunhal,
Soares, and the former king [of Italy] Umberto; hence [I received this
invitation] at the very moment at which, by the most remarkable coincidence
imaginable, suddenly and not unwittily in the eyes of Meyer-Clason who had been
apprised of it, the Austrian ambassador in the course of bringing my personal
presence into contempt had for his own purposes consistently and unremittingly replaced
my actual name Bernhard with the admittedly not unattractive name Bernfeld. Here, as they so often do, the Germans enjoyed
a good laugh at our expense. My experiences
with representatives [of the] Austrian [government] in foreign countries have
for many years now been exceedingly grotesque, and hence hardly ideal, but I
ask myself today, at the end of this otherwise so highly and uncommonly
fruitful trip, why these experiences must invariably be so exceedingly
awful. The snubbing of my person in this
case when, to say nothing of invitations from other German sources, I had been
very cordially addressed in invitations from the German ambassador not as a
“destructive, horrible guy” but quite simply as Thomas Bernhard, is
naturally tantamount to a snubbing of the people at the German Goethe Institute
and at the German embassy at Lisbon.
In all humility and
naturally also in all perplexity, I ask myself whether the remit of an Austrian
ambassador in a foreign country, let us say Lisbon, vis-à-vis Austrians living
in that foreign country, can really be not to render himself useful to them or
quite simply to leave them in peace, but rather to bring them into contempt,
and what is worse into public contempt, and to make Austria abroad into a source of inexhaustible [and] endless
but [ultimately] depressing sport.
Thomas Bernhard
Ohlsdorf
[1] Editors’ note: First
published in Die Presse, Vienna June 2, 1976 .
The editors appended the
following note to the letter: “The author has sent an identical letter to the
chancellor of the republic, Dr. Kreisky.
The Eds.”
This letter provoked a
letter to the editors of Die Presse (June 5, 1976) by Trudy Lenz, a
letter that inter alia states “As both the ambassador, Dr. Weinberger, and the
director of the German Cultural Institute were guests at our house the evening
after Th. Bernhard’s lecture at the University of Lisbon, I presume that the
supper-party Mr. Bernhard was ostensibly both invited to and uninvited from was
ours. I was most astonished to learn
that Mr. Bernhard felt uninvited, as no actual invitation of any kind was ever
sent [to him] by us. […] Until the very
moment he entered our house, Dr. Weinberger knew nothing of the identity of the
other guests, and therefore could not possibly have exerted any influence on
the choice of those guests […] I shall continue to take an interest in the work
of Thomas Bernard as a representative of contemporary Austrian literature, but
I [must] add that I find his behavior [both] disappointing and disconcerting in
a grown man and a writer worth taking seriously […]”
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 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).
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