Bernhard, Thomas - Hans Wolfschütz (essay date 1980)

Hans Wolfschütz (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: “Thomas Bernhard: The Mask of Death,” in Modern Austrian Writing: Literature and Society After 1945, edited by Alan Best and Hans Wolfschütz, Oswald Wolff Ltd., 1980, pp. 214–35.

[In the following essay, Wolfschütz traces Bernhard’s literary career and investigates the thematic and formal consistency found in his poetry, novels, and plays.]

Thomas Bernhard’s early prose collection Ereignisse (Events, written in 1957) takes the form of a sequence of anecdotally-fashioned episodes each presenting a variation on that most central of concepts in modernist writing, the intrusion of ‘Schrecken’ of terror and horror, into everyday reality. In such a moment of shock the victim inevitably looks at his own existence and his relationship with the world about him in a new light, as, for example does the painter in one of Bernhard’s episodes; at work on his scaffolding high...

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