Through Salzburg with Thomas Bernhard
The comic artist Nicolas Mahler has repeatedly dealt with the life and work of Thomas Bernhard in recent years. In 2014 Mahler adapted the play The World Improver, followed in 2015 by the comedy Old Masters. Last year “The Incorrect Biography” was published, which graphically reproduced the life of the hyperbole artist. Mahler recently got another Bernhard book off the ground: “Thomas Bernhards Salzburg” shows forays through a city, behind its perfidious facade “everything artistic has to die out”.
Thomas Bernhard described his relationship with the city of Salzburg and the state of Austria as a love-hate relationship. In interviews, in his books and plays, but also in his acceptance speeches, this Austria appears again and again as Martyrdom as an almost inexhaustible wound that, it seems, made the Austrian tirelessly continue to write. From Austria he wrote against Austria. An ambivalent relationship, the inner turmoil of which can be found in the monomaniac tirades. Bernhard describes his relationship to the city of Salzburg most clearly at the beginning of his four-volume autobiography. Under the title “The Cause” he negotiated the reasons for his “feelings for or against Salzburg”, as he explained in a conversation with the writer Rudolf Bayr. The “preferences or cramps against or for this city”. Narrated along the lines of his own childhood and youth, Bernhard contrasted the sometimes kitschy, touristy image of the city with an image of simple-mindedness, meanness and meanness. “Everyone knows what everyone writes about, that the city is beautiful. But there is something else behind this beauty,” Bernhard said in an interview.
“In the opposite direction”
The comic artist Nicolas Mahler has Thomas Bernhard’s paths through his “hometown” in the book “Thomas Bernhards Salzburg” artistically processed. This correspondence was suggested by the Salzburg Museum, which was initiated as part of the im February opening permanent exhibition “Salzburg unique – history(s) from city and country” was looking for exciting approaches. Nine of the drawings honored in the book are now on display in the museum, where the book presentation also took place on July 21st.
There are a total of 33 drawings that guide readers through the city of Mozart. At certain stations for Bernhard, the author’s equally destructive and creative perspective is incorporated using quotations. We start at the Klausentor, climb the Mönchsberg, cross the festival park, leave behind the Landestheater and the Mozarteum and walk out into the notorious Scherzhauserfeldsiedlung, where Bernhard completed his commercial apprenticeship and, as the autobiographical volume “Der Keller” says, in the opposite direction has gone.
Culture has won
In a conclusive epilogue, the head of the Salzburg Literature Archive, Manfred Mittermayer, sheds light on an aspect that was also well received in “Die Cause”. Mittermayer the effects of Bombing in 1944, which had disastrous effects not only on the city but also on Bernhard himself. In the Salzburg post-war period, marked by death and destruction, by people fleeing and poverty, Bernhard made his first experiences with extermination and annihilation as a child. We know that other experiences of this kind soon followed.
Mittermayer also walks through “Thomas-Bernhard-Straße”, which was named after him in 1996 on the edge of the Scherzhausfeldsiedlung. In another district of Salzburg, such an attempt was rejected in front of the residents. The contempt for the “nest polluter” was too great.
It is questionable whether Bernhard himself would have been enthusiastic about a street in Salzburg being named after him. In a conversation with Bayr, he had spoken disparagingly about the confiscation of artists by the city. You can only do something like that with people who can no longer defend themselves, i.e. who have already died.
Nicolas Mahler (Illustrator), Thomas Bernhard (Author) – “Thomas Bernhard’s Salzburg”; Residenz-Verlag; 96 pages; €15