The historical past forms a particularly important backdrop for the first volume of Bernhard's autobiographical works, Die Ursache (The Cause; 1975). It spans the years from 1943 to 1946, which the adolescent Bernhard spent in his native Salzburg as a boarding-school student. The analytic intent of the author is to lay bare the origins of what has been called his catastrophic world view, his bitterness toward Austria and Salzburg, his anger at institutionalized education and religion, his uncompromising hopelessness and misanthropy. He is particularly incensed by the memories of the hypocrisy of this period, during which he witnessed the effortless transition from the fascist administration of his school to an equally authoritarian and repressive Catholic administration….

Suicide or escape are the inevitable alternatives toward which the tensions in Bernhard's life build in Die Ursache. Catharsis comes on the day when the fifteen-year-old youth decides to find employment rather than return to school. In Der Keller (The Cellar; 1976), the second volume of the trilogy, Bernhard depicts this decision as one for life over death. For the following three years as an apprentice in a grocery store, feelings of personal usefulness and satisfaction temporarily dispel the gloom of the previous ones. Bernhard sees this period as a return to the self from the alienating schoolroom and as an emergence from social isolation. He had earlier learned from his grandfather, a minor writer, the demands for solitude placed on the artistic and intellectual personality. His mentor during the apprenticeship years, the store's proprietor, teaches him the lessons of social intercourse with the inhabitants of Scherzhauserfeldsiedlung, an impoverished quarter of Salzburg. There is even a place during these years for emotions such as hope and happiness.

The final volume of Bernhard's autobiographical trilogy demonstrates what fragile and fleeting moments these are in human existence. For a motto to this book, Der Atem (The Breath, 1978), Bernhard chose a passage from Pascal: "Since men were unable to overcome death, misery and ignorance, in order to be happy they came to an agreement not to think of them." Bernhard, now eighteen years old, spends the greater part of the time recorded in these pages in a condition too near death to be able to ignore it. After he had contracted a dangerous lung ailment working at the grocery store, he delayed having it treated until it was almost too late. When he finally was taken to the hospital, he was placed in a room full of patients waiting to die. Death became for him an everyday occurrence during the extended period which he spent in this Sterbezimmer. (p. 603)

Bernhard was forty-four years old when Die Ursache appeared, relatively young to have begun an autobiography. His chief motivation, he explains, was the fear that a further passage of years would entirely erase the bitter subjective reality of the time and put the truth beyond reach…. He constantly reminds the reader of the unbridgeable distance which he already feels toward that truth. Working from scraps of memory and apparently without a diary, Bernhard brings our attention to the difficulty in merging his feelings as an adolescent and his present thinking into a written form that corresponds to his pat experience…. Another motivation underlying his turn to autobiography stems from an imperative that introspective writers have responded to for centuries: Know thyself. Calling on Montaigne as his spiritual model, he demands of himself a brutally honest self-inventory, finding among his thoughts some which he claims to be unpublishable…. The complementary formulation of this imperative appears in another passage, again under the spiritual auspices of Montaigne, in which he declares that his greatest fear is to be misunderstood (verkannt) by those who know him only by name…. To know one's self and to prevent this self from being "falsely known" are considerations present to some degree either explicitly or implicitly in all autobiographical writing.

Bernhard considers all of his writing as disturbance and irritation and himself as the perpetual Störenfried or disturber of the peace…. After returning in numerous prose and dramatic works in the sixties and seventies to familiar constellations of characters and landscapes, to basic themes and motifs, he may have foreseen an inevitable weakening of this effect. Before the three volumes of his autobiography began to appear, one critic suggested that he had reached a point at which only a direct articulation of his Leidensprozes, his process of suffering, unadorned by fiction and spoken in the first person, could return full credibility to his work. Bernhard's autobiographical works do indeed seem like a reply to this critic's suggestion. They function as an authentication, an existential basis of credibility to avoid the fate of the unheeded Cassandra, his ancestress in legend. (p. 604)