A Translation of "Junge Köpfe. Thomas Bernhard" by Thomas Bernhard

Young Minds [1]

Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was born on February 10, 1931 in Heerlen, Holland.  He is a citizen of Salzburg.  Time and again he revisits the landscape of his forbears, the Flachgau region.  He regards the time he spent in Vienna as wasted, inasmuch as while residing in that remarkable architectural achievement he was forced to associate with its inhabitants.  He views the Viennese not as loveable but rather as inebriated by their own inability to criticize themselves.  The pertinence of this observation extends to the town’s young and tenaciously senescent literati, dyed-in-the wool epigones who rot like living corpses in the coffeehouses.  Incapable of composing either a hymn or a thought, they lionize each other in the second-class seating section and in the column-inches of the world’s most smut-ridden, witless, and undistinguished newspapers.  The only female German-speaking poet of distinction he knows of is Christine Lavant.  He has yet to hear of a world-class living German male poet.  The absence of even a single decent critic in Austria infuriates him.  He finds Dodorer tedious, and the rest as insufferably smug as they are worthless.  He has resigned himself to living in the most beautiful country he knows of surrounded by producers of art and literature who are sixty to a hundred years behind the times.  He writes to avoid dying of boredom and frustration.  He keeps rereading the same authors—Péguy, Hamsun, Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, and Saint-John Perse, from all of whom—as from Góngora and Yeats—he has learned a great deal.

He toils away at his own work with energy, with tenacity, and with indifference to his enemies.  He has so far published four books that seem to him to be a good starting-point for his plans.  In early 1960 Samuel Fischer will be publishing the first volume of his Memoranda, which he plans to continue as a series of chapbooks.  The Mystery of Holy Week will be brought out at the same time by Otto Müller.  In the autumn of 1960 he will publish Twenty-eight Poems.

[1] Editors’ note: first published in Morgen.  Monatsschrift Freier Akademiker [Monthly Journal of Free Academicians], Vol. 15, October 1959, p. 5; the text is unsigned.  The Bernhard-authored books advertised in the portrait never appeared. 

A month later, on 7 November 1959, the following response to “Young Minds” appeared in Morgen:

“A letter from the Café Hawelka

Vienna, November 1959

To the editors of the Morgen, the Monthly Journal of Free Academicians:

It is seldom good form to address open letters to the editors of newspapers or journals.  But on this occasion, silence would be tantamount to criminal inertia.  In the first number of your fifteenth volume, you seem to be going out of your way to break with tradition.  Hitherto under the rubric of “Young Minds” you have presented in fair copy the career histories of several young personalities, and made possible some often-interesting encounters on our end.  But whether the latest acquaintance you have chosen to introduce to us is exactly a “nice person” is debatable to say the least.  Doubtless out of loyalty to Thomas Bernhard, you have indited sentences for which in our view the editors cannot have been responsible.

At the very outset we get a real “shiner”: “He regards the time he spent in Vienna as wasted, inasmuch as while residing in that remarkable architectural achievement he was forced to associate with its inhabitants.”  How memorably a certain significant leading light of the recent past—a figure who had yet to receive any accolades in these parts—dispensed maxims of a similar sort; he, too, felt more at home (because unrivalled) in a vapid provincial district [=“in einem ‘flachen’ Gau,” punning on the name of the “Flachgau region” that Bernhard says he “revisits” (DR)] than in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Vienna’s cafés.  Further on, the sentence: “Incapable of composing either a hymn (what does Bernhard mean by hymns?) or a thought, they lionize each other in the second-class seating section (?) and in the column-inches of the world’s most smut-ridden, witless, and undistinguished newspapers (does he think of even the Neue Freie Presse as one of these?).”

The extent to which Christine Lavant, whom we all deeply cherish, is actually well served by Bernhard’s clichéd plaudit remains to be seen.  As to the identity of this single world-class German male poet who is nowhere to be found—we suggest to Bernhard that he should look no farther than himself.   My, but how near to seek is greatness!

If we had read [no] further, you would still have been spared this letter, but what comes next is to put it mildly sheer chutzpa, as we say in our ever-so “rot-ridden” coffeehouses: “He finds Dodorer tedious, and the rest as insufferably smug as they are worthless.”  But who is this “rest” supposed to be: Felix Braun, A. P. Günersloh, George Saiko, Alexander Lerner-Holenia, or Herbert Eisenricht?

In early 1960 Otto Müller is expected to publish a poem called The Mystery of Holy Week.  What is this author of a prima-facie Christian poem thinking? How will we manage to take the Christianity of his poem seriously now that he has beaten the drum of invidiousness so insistently in your journal?

In the spirit of democratic freedom, we request your publication of this letter, so that the opinions expressed in it may be publicly known.

With sincerest regards,

Jeannie Ebner

H.C. Artmann

Gerald Bisinger

Elfriede Gerstl

Kurt Klinger

Thomas Bernhard was identified as the author of this portrait by Wieland Schmied (then editor of Morgen): on 22 July 1992 he sent Siegfried Unseld some texts by the “young” Bernhard and wrote in an accompanying letter, “[…] last but not least, from the Morgen a self-portrait of the poet—and the response from the Café Hawelka.”

THE END

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).