Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard

First published:Die Ursache, 1975; Der Keller, 1976; Der Atem, 1978; Die Kalte, 1981; Ein Kind, 1982 (English translation, 1986)

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1931-1950

Locale: Salzburg, Austria, and Traunstein, Germany

Principal Personages:

• Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist and dramatist
• Johann Freumbichler, his grandfather, a philosopher, anarchist, and unsuccessful writer
• Herta Fabjan, his mother

Form and Content

Thomas Bernhard is best known as Austria’s most prolific contemporary playwright. His plays have been neither an unqualified popular success nor a critical one, but they have appeared regularly onstage and on television in Austria. His reputation as a novelist of considerable power and originality has been firmly established. His peculiar narrative voice, his individualistic manner of manipulating the German language, is a literary device which was developed to reflect an analytic, unemotional, joyless, and often bitter perception of life. His autobiographical writings are similar in both form and content to his novels, which contain autobiographical material as well. The English translation of the five autobiographical works collected in Gathering Evidence, while eminently readable, does not fully reflect the author’s syntactically complex style, which is marked by seemingly endless periods and a predilection for indirect speech.

Bernhard’s autobiography was originally written and published in five separate volumes over a period of seven years. The first four books deal with his life between age thirteen and age nineteen. The last is a record of his childhood, beginning at age eight with flashbacks to the time of his birth. In the English translation, however, the account of the author’s life up to age nineteen is presented in chronological order in one volume. The original volume titles appear, somewhat elaborated, as major chapter headings, and the title for the whole work, Gathering Evidence, is taken from the text itself, where Bernhard explains at one point that he has never ceased to gather evidence and that his whole life has been geared to finding out about his origin and his existence.

Bernhard was born in Heerlen in the Netherlands in 1931. Unmarried, his mother had moved from Austria to the Netherlands to conceal her pregnancy from her family. Forced to work as a waitress for her livelihood, she had to place her newborn son with a woman who took barely adequate care of him. When Thomas was about one year old, his mother acknowledged his existence, returned to Austria, and lived first with her parents and later with her husband, who was not Bernhard’s father but who had himself appointed his guardian. The couple eventually had two more children. From the time he first arrived at his grandparents’ house in Vienna, Thomas found the one and only stable element in his life—the unwavering love and support of his eccentric grandfather, Johann Freumbichler, a minor Austrian novelist who was a well-educated man with broad interests.

In the years immediately preceding World War II, the family left Vienna for a village near Salzburg, then moved to the small city of Traunstein on the German side of the border between the two countries which were soon to be united in the so-called Anschluss, when the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. Thomas attended primary school in Traunstein, where he came to see himself as a “troublemaker,” the label his mother had bestowed on him. In order to be enrolled in a secondary school, the academically unsuccessful teenager was sent to Salzburg and a boardinghouse for out-of-town students which was run first by a militant Nazi and later by the Catholic clergy.

In Salzburg, Bernhard experienced the horrors of air-raid shelters, wartime destruction, and the famine of the postwar period. His family returned to Salzburg in 1946, opting for Austrian rather than German citizenship. Frustrated with his studies and his family’s continuing economic struggle and disillusioned with what he perceived to be his grandfather’s pretentiousness, Bernhard quit school in 1947 and began a three-year apprenticeship as a grocer. After a while, his infatuation with the idea of serving the underprivileged gave way to a newly discovered enthusiasm for music.

This brief period of a relatively happy existence did not last long. In 1949, when his grandfather was suddenly stricken with a fatal illness and taken to the hospital, Bernhard also fell ill; he had to spend three horrifying years in hospitals and convalescent homes run by the welfare agencies in Austria. During this time, his mother died of cancer; she was buried by her family without Thomas’ knowledge. Gathering Evidence ends with the author’s continuing experience with disease and decay and his sense of total abandonment.

Critical Context

The autobiography of an important author may be as much an exercise in form and style as a work of fiction. In other words, two kinds of autobiographical accounts exist. One is told for its content: a series of major and minor events, often presented with a moral or informative intent. The other kind is told in accordance with the artistic aims of the author. Form and style take on importance in this kind of carefully constructed record. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1814; Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, 1908) belongs to the latter category, as does Gathering Evidence. Bernhard’s autobiographical writings have been said to be reminiscent of those of Maxim Gorky or Thomas Wolfe because of his “massive stubborn attempts to give a true account of his early years, without sparing himself or his readers.”

As a writer, Bernhard cannot easily be classified. His statement that everything he writes and does is a source of trouble and that he wishes it to be so, could be read as a commitment to social activism, placing him among the socially committed West German and Austrian writers of the post-World War II period. Yet in looking at all of Gathering Evidence and some of Bernhard’s other works, one finds little to substantiate such a view. In the political arena the author, if of interest at all, is considered conservative rather than left wing. According to Bernhard, wanting to irritate is an aesthetic concept, free of any commitment to movements and causes. His only commitment is to himself and to his struggle with the elusive ability to find and express the truth about himself. His search for the appropriate linguistic medium to convey this truth places Bernhard in a group of Austrian writers, among them Peter Handke, with a strong interest in the theories of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Bibliography

Abish, Walter. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XCI (February 16, 1986), p. 12.

Demetz, Peter. “Thomas Bernhard: The Dark Side of Life,” in After the Fires: Recent Writing in the Germanies, Austria, and Switzerland, 1986.

Elstun, E.N. Review in Choice. XXIII (May, 1986), p. 1396.

Gamper, Herbert. Thomas Bernhard, 1977.

Rettig, Ulrike S. Review in Library Journal. CXI (January, 1986), p. 78.