Dung dumping at the Austrian National Theatre: Thomas Bernhard's work that confronted the country with its Nazi past

“Everything is much worse now than fifty years ago,” says a character in

Heldenplatz (Heroes' Square)

.

Everything was worse, Thomas Bernhard himself believed, because in 1938 it was not yet possible to know where the

Anschluss

(the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich) was leading, while in 1988, when he wrote the work, they already knew and the country denied its implication.

And this was not said in public.

At that time, historical responsibility had not yet been officially addressed and the thesis prevailed that Austria had been Hitler's first victim.

In 1988, the centenary of the Burgtheater, the Austrian National Theatre, was commemorated, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the

Anschluss

, and its director, Claus Peymann, commissioned Bernhard to create a work.

The writer rejected him with fine irony (he proposed that he put on an alternative

performance

: place posters in Aryanized establishments in the Nazi period with the legend

This business is free of Jews

), but he soon thought better of it and agreed.

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A play scandalizes Austrians

Before the premiere, passages from the drama were leaked (“Austria, six and a half million feeble-minded people and rabid lunatics.” “There are more Nazis now than in 1938.” “Being Jewish in Austria means always being condemned to death.”) and a local tabloid launched a campaign against the work that unleashed the biggest cultural scandal since World War II.

The passages were maliciously presented as Bernhard's personal opinions, not parts of a dialogue, because no one had seen

Heldenplatz.

But it didn't matter, it was Bernhard.

Between believing—because it was an act of faith—the tabloid press or one of the most important German-language writers of the 20th century with a biting anti-Nazi critical conscience, none of the politicians who entered the scene doubted it: the tabloid.

The actress Birgit Minichmayr in a moment on 'Heldenplatz'.Matthias Horn (Matthias Horn)

The country's president, Kurt Waldheim, called for the play to be canceled because it was “a gross insult to the Austrian people” uttered by a playwright who had “abused the freedom of art.”

Vice-Chancellor Alois Mock considered it “unacceptable to pay for such a work with public money.”

Former chancellor Bruno Kreisky came out of his retirement in Mallorca to express that the defamation of Bernhard could not be tolerated, and Jörg Haider, leader of the far-right party, paraphrased the satirist Karl Kraus to accuse the director of the Burgtheater: “Get this guy out Villain of Vienna!

Vienna's Heldenplatz was the place where a crowd of thousands cheered Hitler after the

Anschluss

.

There resides, in a wing of the former imperial palace, the head of state, at that time Kurt Waldheim, who had been elected two years earlier in a controversial campaign: it was revealed that he had lied on his resume and that he had been a member of the SA and Wehrmacht intelligence officer in a unit commanded by a war criminal.

A file that Waldheim had hidden when he was appointed Secretary General of the UN and that when it was made public in Austria did not prevent him from being elected president.

Paradoxically, the angry reaction was proving Bernhard right in his denunciation of moral corruption.

The result was that the work premiered on November 4, 1988 with all the paper sold and under the protection of riot police.

Protesters and counter-protesters gathered on the Ringstrasse, and a far-right militant in favor of Waldheim deposited a load of horse manure at the gates of the Burgtheater.

At the end of the performance, muffled boos were heard with 32 minutes of applause.

Today the scandal, not just the work, has its own subject at the University of Vienna.

It is also study material for a historical-critical edition of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).

Its head, Konstanze Fliedl, asked about the origin of the controversy and the possibility that there is a blind spot in the story, says: "There has always been the suspicion that the publisher Suhrkamp and the director of the Burgtheater promoted the 'scandal' .

I disagree.

The contemporary context (the Waldheim affair of 1986, the animosity against Claus Peymann and against Bernhard himself, who throughout his career had been a malicious critic of Austrian society) must be taken into account to understand that 'patriotic' resentments ', anti-liberals, anti-socialists and even anti-Semites found a very welcome solution by demonizing Bernhard's work.

Branko Samarovski at 'Heldenplatz'.Matthias Horn (Matthias Horn)

36 years later, a new production of Heldenplatz

is finally presented

at the Burgtheater.

On the superb rotating stage, a gigantic neon glows in Gothic letters with one of the invectives that Bernhard heard on the street: “They should kill you!”

The adaptation was announced without political noise but with the uncertainty of discovering how much director Frank Castorf had risked in his reading.

The Berliner did not disappoint, and that is why the boos heard at the

premiere

sounded like a tribute along with the bravery and the applause (eight minutes).

It is the expected quota of spectators who do not accept that Bernhard's

Heldenplatz

becomes Castorf's

Heldenplatz

.

In the preview he already commented that he felt like Mick Jagger in the face of criticism.

Castorf, a pillar of the scenic avant-garde and transgression from his productions in the GDR, an intellectual who naturally quotes Marx and Trotsky, fought against the cultural uniformity of Berlin after the fall of the Wall at the head of the Volksbühne.

His version is a free interpretation that lasts five and a quarter hours, a middle ground—in case we are looking for a sense of balance—between his usual seven-hour adaptations of Dostoevsky and the three long hours of Peymann's original version.

He takes the plot to New York, plays the Ramones, Nina Simone and the rapper Bibiza, and fuses Bernhard's dramaturgy with texts by Thomas Wolfe and John F. Kennedy, who visited Germany when the snake's egg was incubating.

From Kennedy he rescues his secret diary, the record of his travels through Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany and of his doubts about the charm of tyrants.

Castorf subtly avoids political cabaret, but his work warns of the threat from the heirs of Nazism.

“Fascism,” says the German director, “does not always have to look like the fascism we know.”

As usual in his performances, the video is key.

He already used it in the theaters of the GDR to avoid censorship with last-minute screenings and he is developing it now, with a camera operator who records live, to show different narrative planes of the staging.

A giant screen goes up and down on stage during the play, turning the Burgtheater into an ephemeral cinema.

Franz Patzold and Birgit Minichmayr in Frank Castorf's version of 'Heldenplatz'.Matthias Horn (Matthias Horn)

Everything takes place with a black and white photograph as a backdrop where a crowd raises its arms during a Nazi Party demonstration, and which underlines the original plot of

Heldenplatz

, a three-act drama about the mourning of Professor Schuster's Jewish family. , who fled from Nazism in '38 and committed suicide fifty years later in Vienna convinced that nothing had changed.

Thomas Bernhard was very ill when he wrote the play, he died three months after the premiere.

Then the final big controversy was revealed.

As the character who breaks the fourth wall, the writer launched his latest offense: in his literary will he decreed that none of his works could be performed, printed or published in Austria during the 70 years of his copyright. .

After a decade, his famous Suhrkamp editor, Siegfried Unseld, lifted the ban in a decision accepted by the writer's brother and heir.

He was always considered an heir to Kafka.

And like him, he also has the will of him betrayed.

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