Paper Machines Are Ghastly
I read newspapers every day; I
miss them if I don’t. But I don’t read
them; I just browse them. I don’t read
any books at all—just newspapers, because they gather together everything that
really makes the world go round.
Well, then, so those are all
just reports from the press agencies or idiotic correspondents that get paid
next to nothing; of course that’s pretty much the lowest rung, these people who
have been writing about the same old trash for twenty years, and who know
exactly—like the Salzburger Nachrichten, for example—exactly what’s
coming out of Berlin or wherever.
So of course they only need to
read Salzburg newspapers; my relatives read these papers, so they only know
about an abominable, good-for-nothing Bernhard, because that’s all that’s ever
in them about me, if at all.
Just look at the people who
write about me. They’re just mediocre,
loutish clowns, and tasteless ones to boot, who haven’t the faintest clue about
what they read and describe. Not a clue
about the world they actually live in.
When it gets hot they take off their coat, sit there with their fat
bellies and suspenders, sweat like pigs; they’re completely vulgar; they guzzle
one bottle of liquor after another; fraternize with every Tom, Dick, and
Harry. They’re a nasty gang. Whether they’re in Germany or some other
place.
Of course I can’t express
myself here anymore. Where the hell am I
supposed to write anything off the cuff here in Austria, when you know what the
newspapers are like? Die Presse,
for example, is a newspaper that’s subsidized by the State; it puts itself at
the service of every government. So you
can’t submit anything to them anymore; and then if they do agree to print
something by me, as, I don’t know, a protest or something like that, it’ll just
get cut, completely. Of course you can’t
send anything to the Kurier or to the Kronen Zeitung; that makes
no sense. So I can’t give anything I’ve
written to any of them.
But that’s the way it is with
newspapers: if you write a letter from Portugal to a newspaper, it’s a
shambles. They never put in where the
letter is from, and then they leave out what it’s about. It makes no sense at all. And then if you take the roundabout route,
through Germany, that’s also pointless. Die
Zeit has become a…newspaper, I have to say it’s like a boys’ magazine,
where vulgarity triumphs; it’s all very difficult.
And Der Spiegel, it
really just the biggest…They’re people who in terms of schillings are swimming
in billions and have absolutely no idea of what to do with them. The editors- -in-chief there make five times
as much per year as the president of this country, and yet they’re always
stirring up the poor, the people, they’re always against the higher-ups. And they themselves have got their decrepit
wives and their thatched-roofed villas crammed full of Cézannes and Mirós. Pasty-complexioned types who bore themselves
in their straw sandals there on the beach.
It’s all so gruesome. It’s really the essence of awfulness!
Take a look, for example, at Le
Monde. People think it’s really
something. And what is it: pure
guff! And the people who work there are
every bit as stupid. Of course it isn’t
any better just because it’s French. And
the only writer at the Corriere della Sera is that booby, the Boy Booby
they call him, that idiot. He was a nice
little boy fifteen years ago, but now he’s simply impossible. What a load of
trash he scribbles; none of it’s any good at all, you just can’t put out stuff
like that.
There are the famous night
scenes. These people sit there for an
hour-and-a-half; there’s a philosopher and a pseudophilosopher, or most often
two pseudophilosophers, and they have on a turtleneck sweater and a tie. It’s pretty much pointless, because it’s all
scripted beforehand and inane. And they
just talk incessantly and talk and talk.
When you read what’ve been published as conversations in the Süddeutsche
Zeitung over the past three decades—nobody
gives a hoot about a word in any of those conversations.
And books? They’re just for workers in paper factories;
they’ve got a job, so for them there may be a point to them. Of course they’ve got a terrible life and
lose all their limbs. At fifty they’ve
usually got no legs anymore or they’ve lost five fingers. Paper machines are really ghastly. Well, so there’s at least some point to
that. Then the families can still get
something into the bargain. I actually
live next to two paper factories; that’s how I know the way things are in them.
THE END
Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit
Thomas Bernhard (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), pp. 106-109.
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2017 by Douglas Robertson
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2017 by Douglas Robertson