Few present day novelists writing in German make such compulsive reading as Thomas Bernhard…. Few evoke such powerful and haunting images of people and the landscape they live in, and in a language which is individual, direct and new without any attempt to be clever or to hide an insufficiency of content behind a smart playing about with words.

Thomas Bernhard writes of a predominantly rural Austria evidently still suffering from the traumatic experience of two world wars, of its reduction from a multinational empire imbued with fine traditions to a small, almost isolated, inward-looking state festering in the mountains and forests of Central Europe. No direct mention is made of the catastrophes, but they are implicit in the introspective sickness of many of his characters. The introspection exists too in his language which so often turns violently in on itself like a whirlpool. Few writers have managed to convey obsessive violence so directly. (p. 343)

Bernhard's Austria of the 1960s is a land which has withdrawn in on itself; it is a prison, mental home or hospital of hopeless cases. Austria is in the final state of decay and the people of that country are the victims of that decay. In his speech in 1968 before the Austrian Kultusminister he speaks of 'das Dämonische in uns' as being 'ein immerwährender vaterländischer Kerker, in dem die Elemente der Dummheit und der Rücksichtslosigkeit zur tagtäglichen Notdurft geworden sind'. He adds: 'Wir bevölkern ein Trauma, wir fürchten uns, wir haben ein Recht, uns zu fürchten, wir sehen schon, wenn auch undeutlich im Hintergrund: die Riesen der Angst (…) wir sind auch nichts und verdienen nichts als das Chaos'. Even abroad, whether in London or so far away as New York, says the Prince von Saurau in Verstörung, the sickness of their homeland still haunts them. The inevitable consequences are disease, insanity and death…. Frost is set … [in a] cold dark landscape: forests descending into a gorge, isolated from the outer world, claustrophobic, a place where one is alone with one's own fantasies and obsessions. Austria becomes as it were a microcosm of the decay and disintegration of Europe as a whole, lost in the rain and cold…. In Das Kalkwerk, also set in isolation, the cold and 'Finsternis' are still as strongly present. The disintegration of Austria is brought home in the recurrent theme of the breaking up or falling apart of houses and estates handed down by families through the generations. These estates in their peculiar isolation at times exert a seductive and destructive influence on their owners, as Hochgobernitz in Verstörung or Ungenach in the short story of the same name. It is hard, sometimes impossible to escape from them, just as it is impossible for most of Bernhard's characters who go abroad to escape from Austria, to stay away. They will come back expecting to fulfil their life's ambitions there, but find instead destruction…. In Austria the lower classes tend to be mentally deficient, criminal or physically ill while the higher echelons become insane. (pp. 344-45)

In contrast Bernhard often writes of the English-speaking world as a sort of refuge from the dangers of his own country: one of the half-brothers in Ungenach appears to find safety from his past in the USA…. (p. 345)

The Englishman in Midland in Stilfs, on a visit to this lonely Austrian village, remains untouched by the morbidity of the life there, where the half-wit Roth blows up chickens with a bicycle pump until they burst. The visit of the Englishman Midland makes them happy; he is described as an 'Enthusiast'; he is 'ausgestattet mit den Kennzeichen einer Welt, die wir seit vielen Jahren nicht einmal mehr vom Hörensagen kennen'. Bernhard treats Midland with a gentleness, warmth and light humour unapparent in his attitude to other characters.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his essay on Verstörung, 'Konfesionen eines Besessenen' (Literatur der kleinen Schritte, Munich 1967) attacks Bernhard's aggressive attitude to his fatherland as extraordinarily one-sided and finds that it goes beyond bounds to become monotonous, especially when accompanied by such general aggression in other directions. His later novel Das Kalkwerk, however, shows a considerable toning down of this aggression and thereby gains in verisimilitude…. Urs Jenny in a short article 'Österreichische Agonie' (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7-8 Dec. 1968) rightly points out how Bernhard reflects the disintegration of the country in the disintegration of families: parents commit suicide and a son dies of epilepsy (Amras), or father and son after him slowly become insane in the confines of their inheritance (Verstörung).

But the parallel exists for Bernhard in the workings of nature itself: nature is obviously and fundamentally a destructive and self-destructive force whose end is death, total annihilation, 'Finsternis'.

His characters feel with more than one sense the dark forces: what they hear and smell haunts them. Strauch, the degenerating sometime painter in Frost, continually hears the barking of dogs, which without reason attack human beings in the streets and yards, while the rivers 'atmen den Geruch der Verwesung ihres ganzen Flußlaufes auf'…. For Saurau the identification between the decaying world outside him and that within is almost complete, a process, 'in dem alles vernichtet wird, um dann endgültig zu sein'. Later he remarks, 'dieser Vorgang ist immer ein von innen ausgehender, sich nach außen vollziehender'. A mind which sees the process going in this direction is introverted to the point of dangerous imbalance.

Because the 'normal' state of nature is 'Finsternis' and 'Chaos', it is natural that man too should move towards that state. Natural too therefore that disease, madness and crime are end-products of nature whereas health, sanity and temperate living are unnatural. People are violent, objects of fear rather than of love. Many of his main characters suffer therefore from paranoia. Sometimes this violence is expressed by insane laughter: one thinks of Höller and his nephew in Das Kalkwerk who disturb Konrad by their 'unheimliches Gelächter', or of the father in Amras who laughs as he poisons himself. There is a suppressed violence in this laughter, a laughter which often presages an act of violence or is suspected by those who hear it as portending such an act.

Jens Tismar ('Thomas Bernhards Erzählerfiguren', in Über Thomas Bernhard Edition Suhrkamp Nr. 401) points out that, because Bernhard's characters live in a relationship to nature rather than to a consumer society, they are thus the first to be struck by violence, which has its origin in nature. Those who live closest to nature are least protected against it. Man is stripped of the sophistication a city civilization allows him and is at the mercy of the power that ultimately governs him. The state is the first attempt of man to mitigate the destructive forces of nature, but soon the state becomes party to this decay and destruction.

It is common in Bernhard's prose work to encounter men engaged in study of some sort which will reach fruition through being written down, through a personal act of creation; an attempt, one would think, to assert oneself against the inevitable destruction of the personality. This attempt, particularly convincing and moving in the case of Konrad in Das Kalkwerk, is usually a failure, and it is not so much a case of artistic creation as the desire of an ordinary man to lend some point to his existence—a desire which is not fulfilled because of the conditions in which men live and because of the almost universal inability in the ordinary man to preserve 'Furchtlosigkeit vor Realisierung, vor Verwirklichung'…. Men usually fail and nature takes its course.

Bernhard's minor characters are generally the rural proletariat: Fleischhauer, Furhmänner, Holzhauer, Wasenmeister or Forst- and Gutsverwaler. These characters are so often described in a way which suggests they are capable of acts of violence and are manifestations of the violent natural world in which they live and work. Even their names, at times, have a ring of violence: Höller, Zehetmayer, Henzig, Krainer. One is often reminded of Samuel Beckett (and in other facets of Bernhard's writing too) whose choice of names is as peculiar. His women characters contribute to the feeling of inevitable decay and destruction: the step-mother in Ungenach, the Wirtin in Frost and most of all Konrad's wife in Das Kalkwerk, whose persecution of her husband is partly responsible for his downfall.

Bernhard is a writer with obsessions, and nowhere are these obsessions more obvious than in the style itself. Words are repeated over and over again, and acquire thereby a certain violence as well as conveying the effect of reported gossip. Words such as 'total', 'verheerend', 'lächerlich', 'tatsächlich', 'tagtäglich', 'nurmehr' and the constant driving of the language into the superlative give a relentlessness to his narration. (pp. 345-48)

These obsessions are one of the main contributions to the violence and directness of his language, obsessions expressing an obsession: progress towards the absolute—death. Schmidt-Dengler writes of the 'Prozeß der Verabsolutierung' in Bernhard ('Der Tod als Naturwissenschaft neben dem Leben, Leben' in Über Thomas Bernhard Edition Suhrkamp Nr. 401); some like Jens Tismar are reminded of Kleist. The violence comes through with his frequent use of blunt unsophisticated words of a concrete character: Kopf, Schädeldecke, Dummkopf, Hirn and his use of powerfully evocative compounds: Geschlechtergestank, Zeitungswahnsinn, Maschinenwahnsinn, Denkgebäude, Kopfmüll. This directness recalls Nietzsche as well as Kleist, and there is evidence, in Verstörung at least, for a preoccupation with Nietzsche.

The primary attraction of Bernhard is no doubt his individual and compulsive style, the extraordinary gift he has, like Kleist, of capturing the reader in the first phrases and taking him through, almost breathless, to the end of the work. In no work is he more successful than in Das Kalkwerk, his most achieved work so far. The sentences are long and intertwined: separable prefixes are often left too long before they appear. His style is compulsive: it reads like a newspaper report of local gossip about a crime committed in the area. This means that much is in reported speech and therefore in the subjunctive—practically the entire Das Kalkwerk is so. One feels confronted by a long pent-up confession to which one feels the obligation to give complete attention.

His first novel Frost won the special attention of Carl Zuckmayer who in Die Zeit (21 June 1963) wrote a most favourable criticism (Ein Simbild der großen Kälte). He called it 'eines der aufwühlendsten und eindringlichsten Prosawerke … seit Peter Weiß". It is a novel which describes the collapse of every relationship to the human world, a complete laying bare of the remains of a soul. It concerns 'die Verfrostung des Malers Strauch' and resembles a terrifying fairy story. The novel is, in its own words, 'Expeditionen in Urwälder des Alleinseins'. A medical student is sent by an Assistenzarzt to observe his brother, a painter, who has burnt all his paintings, and in the village of Weng is undergoing a process of mental disintegration. He is to make his report and send it to the brother. The brother himself does not go, a sign of the estrangement already in the Strauch family.

Apart from his striking style Bernhard's most impressive achievement in Frost is his evocation of this mountain village. Very soon one is immersed in the dark landscape—the cold, smells, rough labourers, slaughter-houses, a bird crushed to death, the barking of dogs, the uncouth inn where they lodge. A greater part of the text is made up of Strauch's monologues and the interpolations of the student seem at times detrimental to the flow of the text. At times the student is occupied with moral questions; this element has disappeared by his later novels. ('Aber eine Stimme, die einfach unüberhörbar ist, sagt mir, daß Selbstmord Sünde ist.') This makes Frost as a whole too long because it interrupts the single-mindedness which gives his later work its power.

Strauch extracts a perverse enjoyment from his mental disintegration: he relishes telling the young man of his decline and compares it to the decline of the state, thereby revealing his megalomania…. He seems worn-out physically, sees no point in striving, in exertion; once one has achieved one's aim the effort shows itself to have been worthless. He make himself the centre of interest, talks unremittingly of his hallucinations, sickness and festering in Weng. His last contact with the outer world is through newspapers, which Zuckmayer calls 'ein letzter, kindlicher Versuch der Kommunikation'.

His relationship with other people in the valley is paranoid. His suspicions of the Wirtin know few bounds, indeed they show a strange fascination with her. (pp. 348-49)

He lacks the 'Fiurchtlosigkeit vor Realisierung' that Konrad lacked. Instead he indulges his fantasy and this will lead him to his end. The main failures of Frost are its length and failure to work out thoroughly, as Bernhard does in Das Kalkwerk, the disintegration of the main character.

The absolute and final cold deprives everything of life. This is Bernhard's most telling image; the frost freezes the violence of movement, takes everything to its death: animals are frozen to death in the ice, brought down the river with their limbs torn asunder. Strauch too has the cold inside him and outside; finally he disappears, presumably destroyed by the frost. 'Der Frost is allmächtig … besitzt alles', says Strauch…. (pp. 349-50)

The novel is not without its short humorous episodes, however. This weird humour grows out of the fanaticism of the text, out of the exaggerated and constantly occurring extremes of expression. It is dependent on the total immersion in the text that Bernhard is capable of obtaining from his readers. After about twenty pages of subjection to Strauch the painter tells of the authoritarian upbringing by his grandparents.

Er sei als Kind bei seinen Großeltern aufgewachsen. Streng gehalten in Winterzeiten. Da habe er oft tagelang stillsitzen und Wörterzusammensetzungen auswendig lernen müssen. Als er in die Schule eintrat, wußte er mehr als der Lehrer….

                                                (p. 350)

The inevitable conclusion of his avid learning as a young child necessarily leads to knowing more than the teacher, but this is a conclusion unexpected at the close of a Bernhard thought: one expects disaster, destruction or something equally 'verheerend'.

In Verstörung he has weeded out many of the longueurs and interpolations of Frost and has managed to concentrate more on the central theme. Nevertheless, the form of the work has still not the straightforwardness of Das Kalkwerk: Marcel Reich-Ranicki still finds parts monotonous and finds the attempts at psychology spurious. Bernhard's fine command of prose seduces him into unnecessary excursions. The first part of the novel, where the doctor visits various patients on his way to von Saurau, and where the narrator, his son, records the unhealthy state of their own family, seems redundant after one has read the long exhaustive monologue of the Fürst, even if it is seen as a preparation for the ultimate encounter with the person of highest social standing in this area, and also the sickest.

Nevertheless, considered as an intermediate stage between Frost and Das Kalkwerk, Verstörung shows a clarification of Bernhard's intentions after Frost without sacrificing the dark imagery of the first work, and, at the same time, it contains some of the continuity so remarkable in Das Kalkwerk.

The doctor's student son has returned home from his university studies to be taken by his father on his rounds. They visit patients, all of whom are in stages of acute physical or mental suffering. There is no relief. The doctor's own family too in the person of the daughter, is the victim of disorders. The characters isolate themselves in a landscape which itself is isolated. Contact with the outer world is broken off: the industrialist has shut himself up in his house and allows no pictures, no reading matter to enter it. He writes perpetually and destroys what he has written; the miller in the gorge, 'der unter der Haut verfault', has two sons and a Turkish workman who are haunted by a cage full of screeching exotic birds …, the young Krainer boy, crippled and insane, is kept in a cage in his bedroom, his body is disintegrating and emits a horrific stench—'was er sprach, war genau so verkrüppelt wie er selber'—. At last father and son reach Hochgobernitz which overlooks the gorge and much of the surrounding countryside. The Fürst is engaged in an endless monologue which, we gather, will end in suicide, the direction taken by his father before him and perhaps by his son after him. He speaks of decay and corruption of the state, of Europe, of the world, of the self-destructive violence of nature itself, of his vain relationships with other men inside and outside his family, of his son, who is at the moment studying in London, but still under the spell of Hochgobernitz. Family relationships again play such an important rôle in Bernhard's work: the closest, most natural relationships are the most dangerous, the most destructive, almost as if they pose problems that the characters, and even perhaps the author, are afraid to tackle. They eventually take refuge in a world of unending fantasy, and in a world of ultimate chaos; Saurau: 'Ich habe den Eindruck, als wäre es in jedem Augenblick natürlich, daß die Welt auseinanderbricht'…. He adds: 'Die Menschen sind nichts anderes als eine in die Milliarde gehende ungeheuere auf die fünf Kontinente verteilte Sterbensgemeinschaft.' Suffering is having to endure the waiting for chaos. As with Strauch the only contact he has with the outer world is through newspapers; the only visitors allowed into the castle are the newspaper deliverers. He wishes for no contact, he is preparing for the absolute end. One is reminded of Kasack's 'immer später ist Einsamkeit'.

The ending of the novel is loose, hardly an improvement on the ending of Frost. One has to wait for Das Kalkwerk for Bernhard to achieve a satisfactory conclusion. Das Kalkwerk is free of the gratuitous images of the earlier novels. We know the final catastrophe from the first page, and Bernhard, by making it a murder instead of supposed suicide, presents an act artistically and psychologically more consistent with the violence and aggression latent in his style. Das Kalkwerk must rank as one of the finest and most worthwhile German novels of today through its single-mindedness, its most individual style, and, in places, its crazy humour.

Johannes Kleinstück (Die Welt, 29 Oct. 1970) refers to the remoteness of the narrator, 'der sich aufs Hörensagen verläßt und an der Grenze des Verstehbaren stößt'. This is important: the narrator in Bernhard's novels has become increasingly distant from his subject: in Frost the student confronts Strauch directly, in Verstörung the father is the intermediary, in Das Kalkwerk the narrator quotes reports of observers, Fro and Wieser, who themselves are mere shadows in the text. The remoteness is reinforced by the constant use of the subjunctive and makes the extremes to which the text goes seem more plausible.

Kleinstück also refers to the dominant obsessiveness of the narration to the exclusion of other factors:

geklärt wird dadurch nichts, wir wissen nicht, ob sich die Konrads hassen oder lieben, ob sie in hassender Liebe aneinander gekettet sind, wir tun keinen Blick in ihr Inneres, wir wissen nicht einmal, ob sie so etwas wie ein Inneres besitzen.

He is, I think, wrong to expect these factors; they are the very factors which Bernhard does not investigate as this would detract from the central preoccupation of the novel: the remoteness of the lives of two people, whose life, as reported, has turned into a series of ritualized obsessions, and whose relationship ends with an act of violence, itself obscure in detail.

Like Johannes Kleinstück, Gudrun Tempel (The Times, 4th February 1971) sees Das Kalkwerk as a totally nihilistic work. This view is not consistent with the text: Konrad's life and work failed, not because life and work must, in themselves, fail, but because he lacked certain qualities, which Thomas Bernhard defines as necessary in order to avoid failure: 'Furchtlosigkeit vor Realisierung (…) Furchtlosigkeit einfach davor (…) die Studie auf das Papier zu kippen'…. Das Kalkwerk is less nihilistic, more positive in utterance than Frost or Verstörung.

From the first page the reader is thrown into the whirlpool of the language, taken up in the reports of Fro and Wieser on Konrad, who 'am Ende der knoradschen Ehehölle' shot to death his crippled wife. The reports, sometimes contradictory or fragmentary, trace the helter-skelter existence of the Konrads up to the day of the killing. They have moved from place to place through many parts of the world seeking somewhere to rest, where Konrad can at last apply himself to his studies on the human hearing. They end up buying, at an extortionate price from a nephew, a disused limestone works which had fascinated Konrad as a child. He had always wished to return there, and once there he sets about isolating himself. He plants high shrubs round the works and forbids the snowplough to clear the path to it in the winter. Isolated he tries to complete his studies, yells words at his wife from various distances to find her threshold of hearing, and tests his own very sensitive hearing. However, the interruptions are continual: despite everything visitors arrive and his wife claims constant attention. His work is never completed, never even properly started. He is driven more and more to distraction, loses his sense of reality and kills his wife, hoping for peace at last. This is Bernhard's first thorough-going study of a person, and perhaps because of this his study has a validity greater than in the previous novels: he deals with a central human problem: the inability of an ordinary man to create for himself and the distraction which results from his frustration. This matter is conveyed in a language whipped up to greater and greater extremes of expression, constant repetition of such emphatic words as tatsächlich, selbstverständlich and nurmehr, and the working out of obsessions. Here everything seems part of the whole; there are no excrescences in the text.

The novel ends with one of Bernhard's finest and most committed passages. Konrad is a prisoner of the law, his life has disintegrated. Bernhard comments on his failure and on the qualities necessary to avert it…. (pp. 350-53)

With Das Kalkwerk Bernahrd seems to have gone as far as possible in the direction he has taken in his work since 1963. Two short stories, published in 1971, Der Wetterfleck and Am Ortler, add nothing new. After his latest novel it is hard to see where Bernhard can go next. (p. 353)

D. A. Craig, "The Novels of Thomas Bernhard—A Report," in German Life & Letters, Vol. XXV, No. 4, July, 1972, pp. 343-53.