A Translation of "Ich beschimpfe überhaupt niemanden" (Thomas Bernhard Silently Interviewed by Kurt Hofmann)

I’m Not Going to Badmouth Anybody At All

Nobody is objective enough to be able to size another person up in any way.  Whenever somebody does that, he’s doing it out of interested motives: either he praises the other person out of a need for self-preservation or he disparages him.  It’s always a matter of diplomacy.  If you were to ask Pollini, “Signore Pollini, what do you think of Mr. Benedetti-Michelangeli?” he’d either give you a box on the ears or simply find it shocking.  You can’t answer a question like that.

Only when you’re really old, like Rubenstein, for example, can you say, “Everything but what I do is a pile of shit.”  And I’m also totally convinced that he is absolutely the best.  And so he can say that without breaking a sweat.  And once he’s said it three times, it’s completely indisputable that he still leaves all the young people trailing in the dust and is better than them.  But then he dies and somebody else is just as good as he was.

Of course as a young person you want to be published everywhere.  So you write and write and force open publishers’ doors and want to get printed in every newspaper.  When I started I was of course obsessed with things like that.  I entered every prize competition; I certainly tried to win the Trakl prize five or six times, but it always ended up going to [Gerhard] Amanshauser or whoever.  Of course I also went to the Youth Culture Week, and ten of Amanshauser’s poems were read there along with a ten-line one of mine; it was always nothing but degradation and rivalry, and then you want to get into print, and then, good Lord, I can still remember, I was so proud when a poem made it into the Münchner Merkur; at the time I thought, “This is really a pinnacle.  I really think it is.”  I sat down in the Mirabellgarten, I opened up the paper; I was really fascinated first of all by the poem, because I thought, “This is the best poem, not that’s ever been written—that would be an exaggeration—but of my time”; that’s what I thought.  “And in fact everybody who’s walking by me now knows that I’m the one who wrote this great poem.  This is happiness for example.”

I did that, sure, I certainly did it for ten years intensively, greedily in fact; I was game for anything back then, at the beginning, in my age of poetry, and then when I hit forty, it was over.  I traveled pretty much everywhere, and did radio, and Lord knows what all else I did.  And of course it was also my livelihood.

Suddenly it all horrified me, because I said to myself, “I can’t take this anymore.”  If you take a good look at them, you’ll see that of course they’re always the same thing.  I read aloud something that I’m already horrified by myself and that already hasn’t got anything whatsoever to do with me anymore, because of course it’s all behind me now.  And because even by then I didn’t need the money very badly any longer, and what’s more I live—of course I don’t spend very much money; of course I don’t lead the kind of life people like that normally live, I don’t do that, of course I hardly really need anything—so there wasn’t any reason for it anymore then and it was over.  And as for the prestige, that turns sour really early on; it went off right away.  It went off really quickly, and that whole phony business with those prizes and the brouhaha, it’s all truly ghastly.

It was even that way with the Büchner Prize; it really was nothing but atrocious, and even though it was twenty years ago, it’s still atrocious.  People don’t understand this, and so despite it they invite you through your publishers, or directly, to go here or there, to do this or that, and then I say no, and for years I’ve been saying no to my publishing firm; they don’t understand it, because they’re naturally all the same in that they crave all of that and are happy to get it and go running after every merit badge.  Horrible.

It’s really not only shameless and vicious but also idiotic on the part of these people to go flocking to all that when they know beforehand what it amounts to.  Namely something totally atrocious.  In any case, you obviously can’t form an opinion of any piece of literature just by listening to somebody read a passage from it.  It’s a total waste of time, because that’s not something you can take in acoustically at all.  You can take it in, but you can’t form an opinion of it.  And just think of the creatures who sit through it.  The whole thing is pure idiocy.  But of course such things have always existed, and they rise to the surface and then vanish again.  And what are a hundred thousand schillings? That’s really an insult as well.  I’d say that—why not?—that they should give out a million schillings; that’s how much a young writer should get from them.  Then he’d either be finished or he’d actually get something out of it.  That’s small change for a national government.  Our government, which throws billions out the window, could easily shell out some money for such things twice a year.  Of course that’s nothing, a hundred thousand schillings, right?—after all, [Marcel Reich-]Ranicki makes that much in a month.  He gets more, actually, namely a hundred and ten thousand schillings.  That’s just ridiculous.  And what sort of people are they, anyway?  He goes to the festival with his wife and she wears a long evening gown and he talks about literature there and then listens to Cosi fan tutte.  He waxes enthusiastic over a glass of wine at the Moser Wine Bar and thinks it’s simply grand.  Of course it’s all idiotic.

For fifteen years I’ve been throwing away everything that has a veneer of officialdom or anything like that.  I read through it because I find it interesting, and then I throw it away and naturally I don’t reply to any of that stuff either.  It really astonishes me that even though I’ve been throwing everything away for ten years, stuff still keeps coming.  It’s thinning out overall, but I still keep getting naïve direct invitations.  They’re clueless: “we’d like such and such, and we’ll pay you this much, and please get in touch with us”…I think to myself, “How wretched can these things get?”

I don’t pay any mind whatsoever to any of it anymore.  I chuck it all into the trash can.  I’m constantly getting invitations to go to conferences in Santander, in Salamanca or Madrid or wherever; it’s all just atrocious.  It’s a meeting of mediocrities whenever these kinds of people meet.  They stuff their faces for eight days straight; they have a chauffeur-driven car at their disposal; they’ve booked a suite at the Palace Hotel.  So they can afford to wait a good long time for a reply from me.

They really don’t believe—it’s really quite bizarre—they can’t imagine that anybody wouldn’t be dying to go someplace for free for eight days.  The very idea of somebody picking me up at the airport—somebody I find repulsive to begin with, and who I have to walk around with afterwards (of course I’ve plotted this all out in advance), and whose wife is patiently waiting for us and has cooked a dinner for me in advance—it’s simply ghastly, and you really can’t pay a person enough to put up with it.  Because once you’re there you’re trapped, and you’re being led around everywhere, and you’re knackered for weeks afterwards.

Take for instance the P.E.N. Club.  Of course I have nothing to do with it; of course I’ve never been to anything having to do with it without leaving straight-away.  So the P.E.N. Club, what’s the deal with it?  I was supposed to have dinner there with [Hilde] Spiel; she was staying with some acquaintances of mine, and I was staying with them too; then they told me that Spiel was on her deathbed.  On Sunday I was at the Kobenzl; I was getting up to leave after dinner, and she walked in as fresh as a daisy with her children and grandchildren.  So I think it’s a pretty strange world.  In America for a couple of weeks, then she was in Bled, where there was another stupid P.E.N. convention.  Of course it’s a moronic organization in any case.  They’re just a bunch of busybodies who spend a week in some nice place twice a year; it’s completely pointless.  And subsidized by the State; they get their five-star beggar’s cot.  It’s all atrocious.

But I’m not interested in other people anyway.  I really couldn’t care less about any of them.  I’m basically just not a clubbable person.  I just can’t participate in such things and such schmoozing-sessions.

You won’t ever find me at any of these gatherings, like the P.E.N. Club conventions, where there are hundreds of attendees.  Because of course it’s all nonsense and because it makes no difference whether these people drink and eat themselves under the table in Moscow or in New York.  Or in the Philippines or in Nicaragua.  They’re all horrible people who can’t deal with being on their own.     

So they get themselves invited somewhere!  At the moment it’s fashionable.  Because then the first thing on their mind is always: “And Umberto Eco has already said yes.”  Who else have they got anyway?  Norman Mailer.  It’s insufferable, because you can’t just travel to someplace; what the hell are you going to do there?  It’s so ghastly, gruesome, that this is their world.

I haven’t accepted a single prize in fifteen years.   But most of them are quite shrewd, because they ask you in advance.  But then again it’s stupid, because then they try to find somebody else.  Of course honor is a stupid concept anyhow.  It only means anything if you’ve got no money or you’re young, or if you’re old and you’ve got no money.  When you’ve got an income you can live on, as I have, you really don’t need to accept any prizes.  Of course honor isn’t worth a damn; of course it’s just nonsense.  I don’t know of anybody who doles it out who isn’t horrible.  When I picture Canetti standing at the top of that flight of steps in his tie and tails, and the king sitting there with his licked-clean dinner plate in front of him—nobody paid any attention to the poor weenie’s speech.

I’ve already been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize for literature but by the Germans, not by anybody here.  Again it’s especially interesting, of course, that the president of the German P.E.N. Club has nominated me twice, because they apparently haven’t been able to find anybody else out there, and then afterwards, well, he’s had no luck.  But of course I’d be happy to win it so that I could then not accept it, but you can’t turn down something you haven’t been offered.

They’re just a bunch of pathetic clowns.  What the hell can you say about them?  Absolutely nothing, because you know them of course.  Of course that stuff plays a role everywhere.  I can’t show up there and find fault with stuff, and I push my way through, and then [Gert] Voss is sitting there in tie and tails—reportedly, I’ve only heard about it, not seen it—at the opera ball, in one of the boxes; stuff like that is just off-limits.  You really can’t have anything to do with it.

Or picture to yourself a prize award ceremony in Bolzano.  So the author accepts the prize and is just standing there on stage, then I made a speech, and then, this is the most shameless thing that’s ever been done anywhere, they hosted a banquet for five hundred people, so I didn’t show up—this is all documented, you’ll get an even better picture of it there—and I thought to myself, “How ghastly.”  Everybody there was bowing and collecting their measly checks; horrible.

I’m not going to badmouth anybody at all.  But of course almost all writers are pure opportunists.  They either hang to the right or to the left; they march this way or that and so on, and that’s how they make a living.  But it’s simply unappetizing.  Why shouldn’t one say that?  One of them works with his illness and with death and wins his prizes, and the next one runs around campaigning for peace and is basically a vulgar, stupid lummox.  What’s the big deal?

Whenever you open a newspaper nowadays, you almost always read something about Thomas Mann somewhere in it.  He’s been dead for thirty long years, and it keeps coming back, non-stop; it’s really insupportable.  What’s more he was a petit-bourgeois writer, an abominable, unintellectual writer who wrote exclusively for petit-bourgeois types.  Of course only petit-bourgeois types are interested in a milieu like the one he describes.  Of course it’s unintellectual and moronic.  Some fiddling professor who travels to some place, or a family in Lübeck, great!  But it’s really nothing more than Wilhelm Raabe.  You’ll always find something about Thomas Mann, be it in Le Monde or somewhere else.  To think of the things the guy actually wrote about politics!  He was completely uptight and a typical German petit-bourgeois type.  With a golddigger of a wife.  That for me is the usual mix you get with German writers.  Whether it’s Mann or Zuckmayer, they always have wives in the background.  They’ve always made sure that they’re sitting next to the president of the republic at every stupid sculpture exhibition or bridge opening.  What business do writers have being there?  They’re people who always make deals with the government and the powerful and sit on either their right or on their left.  The typical German-speaking writer.  When long hair is fashionable, they have long hair, when short hair is, theirs is short.  When the government in power is left-wing, they run to the left, when it’s right-wing, they run to the right.  It’s always the same.  Of course not one of them has ever had any character.  Except for the ones who’ve died young, for the most part.  If you’ve died at the age of 18 or 24, it’s obviously not all that difficult to maintain a good character.  Of course it’s only later on that it gets difficult.  That’s when you get weak.  Until you’re 25, when nobody needs anything but an old pair of trousers and when you run around barefoot and are content with a sip of wine and water, it’s not so difficult to have a good character.  But later on!  Then not one of them has got one.  By forty they’ve already become completely paralyzed and have been absorbed into political parties.  And the coffee that they drink with breakfast is paid for by the government, and so is the bed they sleep in, and even the vacation they take.  The government of whatever country they’re from pays for all that stuff.  So of course they haven’t got anything of their own anymore.1

Heidegger as well; the guy was just impossible; he had no sense of rhythm or anything else.  He learned some tricks from a couple of writers, and he milked them to the very end.  What would he have been without them?  He was a philistine, a fatso.  It’s nothing new, it’s a classic example of somebody who unscrupulously eats all the fruits of other people’s labors, and who overstuffs himself, thank God.  As a result he feels sick and he drops dead.

Or take the fact Ria Endres and types like her are totally unfeminine; of course I can’t do anything for them.  A woman who is genuinely natural, meaning like everybody’s idea of a woman, would never write and talk such bilge.  She wouldn’t get so worked up about something like that either.  Of course she’s got to get completely weird and wrongheaded and wrongly educated and screwed up so she’s capable of becoming a German professor.  Of course you only become one of those when you’re already stark raving mad and spastic and are looking for a way out.  Of course people don’t become German professors because they love literature or art but because all the other possibilities like being a chauffeur or a baker or a locksmith are completely out of their reach.  Or because they’re bone idle or too proud to work at jobs like those.  It’s nothing but a last resort, isn’t it?  One that’s of no use to anybody and is completely vacuous.  But it also leads to a pension, quite an early one at that.

I was very fond of Bachmann; she was just a clever woman.  A rare combination, no?  Most women are stupid, but tolerable and in certain circumstances charming, even clever, but rarely.

Sure, she experienced quite a lot of things and was acquainted with quite a number of milieus, from the top to the bottom of the social scale, from the bottom to the top, and you pick up a certain idea of things from that.  You’re only ever the final product of what you’ve been through, what you’ve experienced and seen.  And the more intensively you’ve looked at something, the farther you’ve withdrawn from it, logically speaking.  Seeing more means running farther away.  Because it keeps getting more dangerous.  The clearer a thing becomes, the more abhorrent it becomes.  And then you just take to your heels; it makes no difference whether you’re running away from literature or people or even nature—that’s the way it is.  When the lens is a bit unfocused, you prefer to stay put.  The moment you make anything clear to yourself, you just instinctively withdraw.  So it’s just not true that when you get closer to something it all gets clear and bearable and cozy; actually, the exact opposite happens.  It’s probably some self-preservative instinct on nature’s part.  Otherwise it would just pack up and shut down.  Of course we don’t know what it is.  The collective wisdom of all the Nobel Prize winners put together: if you put everything they’ve all thought together in a blender and press the button, you end up with a heap of drivel.  Nothing worthwhile comes out of it.  Apart from some old people with a sash around their neck and a ribbon on their lapel and some tasteless villa somewhere and tons of invitations to chancellors’ and presidents’ offices; that’s the only thing that comes out of it.  And fancy dinners.

Or take Freud.  I was a witness when the works of Freud were sold in London to Fischer Publications for 100,000 deutschmarks.  That’s my connection to Freud.  Right, so a hundred thousand deutschmarks; then they made a couple of million off of them.  And they immediately fired the guy who wangled them the contract, so he doesn’t have a position at that publishing house anymore.  Nobody would pay such a sum for them now.  There are other fashion plates around now; now they’re called Popper and whatnot.  They last for eight, nine years, and then others come along.

Freud himself was a real weirdo.  My aunt went to school with Freud’s daughter.  She could tell you lots of stories about how she was always pulling the wool over her old papa’s eyes.  He was a relatively good writer, meaning not an especially good one, with a forceful imagination, and he set in motion something that humankind got hot and bothered about in its usual way for a couple of decades.  But it’s not any more significant than what everybody else has [come up with]…  

1. The text of this entire paragraph is substantially identical to a passage in Werner Wögerbauer's 1986 interview with Bernhard.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2017 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), pp. 93-105.

A Translation of "Konfessionen eines Besessenen," a Review of Thomas Bernhard's Verstörung by Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Confessions of an Obsessive

Whatever story Thomas Bernhard happens to be telling, it is always the case history of an illness.  He is one of those writers whose persistent and obdurate attention is principally devoted to those who are imperiled or already lost, to people who are being sucked by the undertow towards the abyss.  His tableaux are populated by psychopaths and neurotics, criminals and madmen, murderers, suicides, and the dying.  The personnel of this epic are gloomy and menacing; the world delineated here is uncanny and depressing.

But unequivocal though Bernhard’s predilection for the macabre and the suffocating is, the motives by which he is actuated are apparently legitimate.  He is fascinated by the darkest regions of our existence precisely because it is there—and only there—that he hopes to find the answer to the most decisive questions.  Certainly, he wallows in morbidity and also frequently in repulsiveness, but the pathology is plainly intended to render the human condition visible and the abnormality to point up the dubiousness of the things we are accustomed to regard as normal.

So Bernhard shines his flashlight into the suburbs of existence in order to determine its focal points, in order to grope his way towards them or at least furnish a hint as to their location.  He knows that in literature it is often the eccentric detour that leads to the center.  In other words: he puts extremity on display not despite but because of its exemplary significance.

Moreover, his prose works evince a striking authenticity that we cannot help missing in many of our younger writers and that is unattainable by mere craftsmanship.  Bernhard is a storyteller who has no need to go looking for his subjects.  We are dealing here rather with a subject that has found someone to tell a story about it.  His works are diaries of a man bereaved, confessions of an obsessive—which, however, is by no means to say that they contain anything in the way of autobiographical elements.  

 

At the same time each of these prose texts owes its persuasiveness to its description of background detail, which enfolds the text’s characters and objects just as comprehensively as the localities and landscapes implicated in its storyline.  Whether he wants to be one or not, Bernhard is an Austrian national bard, one who is admittedly impelled to write not so much by love or introspective musings over life in the Tyrol or the Styrian valleys as by rage and disgust, if not outright loathing.  Bernhard’s aggressive relationship with his native environment is the sole and blatantly visible incubator of the extraordinary one-sidedness that determines his subject-matter and perspective as well as his choice of motifs and characters, of colors and tones, of literary devices.  But in literature as a rule one-sidedness is ascribable to one of two things: it can be rooted in a laudable impetus or it may have its origin in a kind of narrow-mindedness.  I believe that both ascriptions hold true for Thomas Bernhard: his one-sidedness strikes one as audacious one moment and simplistic the next.  It facilitates the severity and the idiosyncrasy of this epic, but unfortunately also sets narrow limits to it and often occasions monotony.  Thus, the very thing that makes his prose so valuable threatens to vitiate it at the same time.  His new book, the novel, Verstörung [Gargoyles], evinces this with almost appalling clarity.

The first-person narrator, a student who has come home for a brief stay, is taken along by his father, a country doctor in Styria, on a daylong series of house calls, because, he says, the young man “must become acquainted with human beings.”  His notes on the individual patients and the people connected with them, on their histories and destinies, fill the first part of the book.  Bernhard inaugurates the round-dance with a dying innkeeper’s wife who has been mortally wounded by a dipsomaniac for no conceivable reason; this episode is followed by portraits of various invalids who are almost all afflicted with horrifying physical or mental infirmities and are for the most part slowly wasting away; at the end we are presented with a depiction of an insane cripple which hardly scrimps with the unsettling details. 

This is all recounted in an impassive style that deftly and coherently employs indirect discourse, a style from which Bernhard manages to wrest a considerable amount of power: for from this pointedly referential, often depositionally formal mode of writing it is easy to gather that although the young commentator would like to contemplate the sufferers dispassionately, for all his cool objectivity he feels touched by their misfortune.  Many passages are signalized by a peculiarity that is a hallmark of good prose: in them distance and proximity are discernable at one and the same time.

So Bernhard’s epic art stands the test once again in several of the juxtaposed miniatures of the first part of the book, but only in those in which he contents himself with the depiction of the sensuously perceptible world and also places his trust in sober, reportorial observation.  When he tries to seek out the mental causes of the crimes and illnesses he describes, he comes up with motives that seem superficial and formulaic and make it evident that while psychology is undoubtedly his passion it is not necessarily his forte. 

When on the other hand he lets the facts and concrete situations speak for themselves, the characters and moods are immediately present, and local color and a sense of setting emerge almost spontaneously.  It then becomes apparent that he is capable of transforming inconspicuous details and trivial objects into discrete but telling indicators of a situation, and in particular of the hopelessness of that situation.  The succinct description of the bedroom of an irremediably doomed widow betrays more insight into her life than do all the exegetic remarks that are likewise served up to us. 

Nevertheless, this first part of Verstörung leaves behind a decidedly ambivalent impression.  At first blush it seems to me that such a colossal accumulation of dismal, perverse, and gruesome elements quite simply undermines the novel’s economy: anything displayed in such abundance fails to achieve its intended effect and occasions fatigue rather than shock.

In addition, Bernhard proceeds from a programmatic thesis that condemns his book to failure from the outset.  The country doctor who elucidates the world for our narrator states, “In point of fact there are more brutes and criminals in the country than in the city.  In the country brutality, like violence, is the foundation […] The crimes committed in the city, the urban crimes, are nothing compared with the crimes committed in the country […].”

To this opinion, which is stated in the novel’s first few pages, Bernhard has subordinated the whole of Verstörung, with a characteristic—and in this case disastrous—result: the individual tableaux,  sketches, and genre paintings are always intended to reinforce and exemplify these theses [(sic) on the plural number (DR)].  Thus Bernhard degrades his narrative art: he consigns it to a merely illustrative function.  Consequently, in certain stretches the book reads like a blood-and-soil novel turned on its head.  The genre whereby the praises of rootedness in the soil were formerly sung must now be made to promulgate examples of rootlessness.

Naturally I wouldn’t dream of getting into an argument about the inhabitants of rural Styria with the author of Verstörung.  He knows his way around there; I don’t.  Moreover, he never gives one cause to doubt that his survey is sufficiently broad or deep.  But as a rule radical anti-idylls bear an embarrassingly close resemblance to idylls–namely in being at an equally far remove from reality.  And a social critic’s thesis-driven novel of ideas, even one that tries to elevate the world it depicts to the level of an allegory of our epoch, strikes me as an extremely dated literary anachronism.

But Verstörung has also got a second part.  The doctor and his son pay a visit to a certain Prince Saurau, who at the moment of their arrival is immersed in a conversation with himself, which he continues carrying on despite their presence.  His monologue, which is well over a hundred pages long, is registered by the narrator without commentary or anything else but occasional stage direction-like remarks.

This prince, who possesses enormous amounts of land, has plays staged in his “summer house,” is suffering from a mental illness, and is in the habit of carrying on “masochistic discussions” with himself for hours on end in a locked and bolted room; he can hardly avoid being stigmatized as conventional: such figures have been awfully popular since at least the days of Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Bernhard’s prince tells anecdotes about his mysterious and unabashedly sadistic son and about three men who have applied to him for a job; he reports on catastrophes that have already happened and on others that he expects to happen; he meditates on the State and on suicide.  Everything is sited—so he proclaims—“in a homogeneous, dim-witted agony.”  He says that in his entire life he has only ever “beheld invalids and crazy people,” in incidental connection with which it is striking that he expresses views that are quite similar to those of the by no means-insane doctor in the first part of the book.  From the very beginning, the prince declares, he has dreaded “being compelled to be suffocated by the stench of the world.”  He says that the “mass-political madness of the masses” (?) is not so ridiculous “that in the future it would still not be able to destroy everything.”  Or: “The common people are stupid and smell bad; this has always been true.”  From the doctor we heard: “The poor are doubly brutal, vulgar, and criminal.”

To be sure, the author of Verstörung has sound reasons for giving plenty of space to the prince’s pathological hatred and to his contempt of humankind.  The only problem is that he lacks the eloquence required for fulfilling such a function.  The almost fanatical authorial obsessiveness that is so often in evidence in Bernhard’s prose is completely ineffectual here, where the object is to substantiate the confessions of an obsessive.  The few illuminating formulations and intriguing insights contained in this endless monologue are regrettably drowned in an ocean of platitudes and in a welter of chit-chat that makes extraordinary and unconscionable demands on the reader’s patience.

At least Bernhard has been ambitiously keen to elucidate the mental condition of a madman with the help of his own expressions.  But even this attempt proves unproductive, to put it mildly.  “The interior of my head is literally an unimaginable wasteland”; “the noise of my head prevents me from doing anything”; “In my head there is a snarl of lines”; “Repose is spreading in my head and is going to smash it to pieces”—these assertions are simply not up to snuff.  Persistently iterated messages like these reveal nothing but that the realization of the intended effect exceeds Bernhard’s present powers.

It would be unfair to suspect the author to whom we owe the novel Frost and a few extremely remarkable novellas of wishing to relieve himself of aesthetic and intellectual responsibility with this monologue.  But this foray into the domain of the uncontrollable has caused the man who time and again has depicted people on the edge of the abyss to stumble into the proximity of a perilous abyss in his own right.

Art must “go too far in order to learn how far it is allowed to go.”  Although these memorable words, first spoken by Heinrich Böll in his Wuppertal speech, originally referred only to artistic freedom, they hold good for the validity of art in a much more general sense.  In his Verstörung Thomas Bernhard has gone too far.  Probably he had to.  Will he be capable of drawing the right conclusions from having done so?

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2015 by Douglas Robertson

             

Source: Über Thomas Bernhard.  Herausgegeben von Anneliese Botond [On Thomas Bernhard.  Edited by Anneliese Botond] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 93-99.   According to the bibliography in this book, Reich-Ranicki’s review was originally published in Die Zeit on April 28, 1967.