The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

First published:Das Kalkwerk, 1970 (English translation, 1973)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: c.1970

Locale: An abandoned lime works near Sicking in Upper Austria

Principal Characters:

• Konrad, an eccentric scientist who is working on the definitive work on the sense of hearing
• His Wife (nee Zryd), a cripple and Konrad’s chief experimental subject, whom he murders
• The Narrator, an obscure insurance salesman who gathers information about the Konrad couple
• Fro, and
• Wieser, estate managers who provide much of the information about the Konrad couple

The Novel

During the night of December 24, an eccentric scientist named Konrad murdered his crippled wife at their residence, an abandoned decaying lime works in Upper Austria. He used a carbine that she kept strapped to her wheelchair. After dragging the body around, searching for a way to dispose of it, he propped her up in her wheelchair again and left the house. A few days later, the police found him cowering half-frozen under the rotting planks of the lime works’s manure pit, his shoes “bloated with liquid manure”; he was arrested and brought to the Wels district prison to await his trial.

The greater part of the novel, of which 230 pages are written in one continuous paragraph, tries to shed light on the circumstances of the monstrous crime and the bizarre personal lives of the Konrads. A faceless narrator, an insurance salesman who frequents the local taverns to peddle his policies, gathers information in order to piece together the Konrads’ story. Since the narrator’s “evidence,” however, consists of little more than a mass of hearsay and gossip gathered at the taverns, the reader is presented with conflicting versions. It is second-and third-hand information at best, gained principally from two estate managers, Fro and Wieser, who frequently report statements attributed to Konrad himself.

The picture that emerges is one of a man on the brink of madness. He is totally obsessed with his life’s work, The Sense of Hearing, which is to become a definitive study. After decades of unremitting brain work, he claims to have the entire book in his head but is unable to commit it to paper. He has awaited the auspicious moment when everything would come together just once so that he could write it in one continuous flow. At propitious moments, however, he is invariably disturbed by something, as though everything and everyone were in conspiracy against his writing.

After years of continuous and torturous worldwide travels with his crippled wife, he became convinced that the abandoned lime works, which had been in the family for centuries, was the only place where he could possibly live and do his scientific work. Hence, he moved heaven and earth to possess it, paying an exorbitant price to his nephew, who for decades had taken a sadistic delight in Konrad’s desperate efforts to acquire the property.

It was accessible only from the east. To the north, it was surrounded by water, on the south by ramparts of rock. By planting the tallest-growing thickets he could find, Konrad succeeded in hiding the estate from view. By installing countless bars and locks, he turned it into a heavily barricaded fortress to protect himself and his wife against burglars and, in general, against what he called outsiders. He was intent on severing all ties to the outside world, a world which in his view was merely marking time anyway. In particular, he sought to flee the destructive consumer society “with its chronically irritating and ultimately ruinous effect on everything in the nature of intellectual effort.” So it came about that for five years Konrad and his wife lived in almost total self-imposed isolation in what resembled a dungeon or a prison.

At the lime works, which his wife detested, Konrad continued to conduct hearing experiments to fill up the time until the moment arrived, as he confidently and unwaveringly believed it would, when he would finally write his book. He subjected his wife to an excruciating series of hearing experiments, sometimes for seven to eight hours a day. He produced copious notes on his experiments but usually destroyed them immediately so that no one could deduce his methods from his notes. His wife started to suffer from pains in her ears which gradually spread to her whole head as he intensified the experiments. When they were not busy with the exercises, they tormented each other in many different ways. For example, when she wanted him to read aloud from Novalis, her favorite Romantic poet, he deliberately read to her from his favorite, the Russian anarchist Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin, whom she detested. She, on the other hand, took a malicious pleasure in sending him down from her second floor room to the basement every few minutes for a glass of cider, insisting that he bring her each time only one glass, which she then proceeded to pour out.

For decades they had lived off a sizable inheritance, but in time the capital dwindled and Konrad, behind his wife’s back, sold off nearly all of their possessions and incurred enormous debts. Shortly before the murder, he owed at least two million to the bank, and a forced auction of the lime works was imminent. He lived in constant fear that the man from the bank might come knocking on the door, so he no longer opened the door and no longer left his room. After months of neglect, he came to look like a derelict, filthy from top to bottom.

Initially, Konrad had thought that if he could just get a few sentences down on paper, then the rest of the book would gradually write itself, but at the peak of concentration it always fell apart. The more obsessed he became, the more impossible it became for him to write his book. Toward the end, he welcomed any distraction at all; nothing was too trivial or too insignificant to take him away from his task. He wore himself out brooding over the most absurd notions, all pretexts for not writing, for not facing the fact that he was simply unable to write his book. Just before the murder, he must have realized that there was no ideal moment or place to write the book, that he had fallen victim to a mad dream like thousands before him. He would never write the book, not at the lime works, in prison at Stein, or in the mental institution at Niederhardt.

The Characters

Since the narrative provides conflicting information assembled by an obscure narrator from many different, often unreliable sources, it is treacherous to make any definitive statements about the central characters, Konrad and his wife. Even Konrad’s extensive self-revelations, reported by Fro and Wieser, that constitute a sizable portion of the novel are highly contradictory. Konrad, depending on whose testimony one is to believe, is a genius, a madman, or a fool. He himself likes to think of himself as a brilliant scientific philosopher. Similarly, it is unclear whether his crippled wife is cared for or shamelessly used by her husband

As far as Konrad is concerned, it is safe to say that he is a misanthropical monomaniac who has totally lost himself in what was to become a major “medico-musico-metaphysical-mathematical” study. Much of the novel reflects his convoluted, compulsive thought processes, which invariably return to his unrealized study. He tries to create favorable conditions for writing and, upon failing to write, tries to justify his inability to commit his thoughts to paper. He alternately blames his failure on interruptions from the outside world, on nature, on the lime works, and on his wife, but all these justifications are negated in time. The most likely cause for his foiled aspirations is mentioned at the very end of the novel, where Konrad is said to have lacked courage, decisiveness, intellectual audacity or, what was perhaps the most important quality of all, “fearlessness in the face of realization, of concretization.”

Konrad’s wife and half sister, whose maiden name is Zryd, is only referred to as Mrs. Konrad or the Konrad woman. Once a tall and stately beauty, she was almost totally crippled by an accident and, the reader is told, by decades of the wrong medications. She has for years pitted herself against her husband’s work, because she considered it nothing more than a delusion and told him so whenever he reached the point of utter defenselessness. In fact, one theory has it that Konrad killed his wife because she had once too often called him a fool, a madman or, her favorite expression, “a highly intelligent mental case.” Earlier, she had made every effort to sabotage their move to the lime works; she had even bribed the nephew into not selling the estate to her husband. Once at the lime works, she too exhibited compulsive behavior patterns. She set about knitting mittens for her husband, who loathed mittens, as she knew very well. She worked on them for months on end and had him try them on only to unravel them as soon as they were done. As time wore on, she simply sat in her chair, half asleep and in a state of deepest depression, unless she was subjected to his increasingly torturous hearing exercises. Over the years, she slumped over more and more in her wheelchair until her dependence on him was absolute.

The two central characters are caught in a beneficial yet destructive symbiotic relationship. As Thomas Bernhard put it so aptly, by marrying they moved “from the purgatory of loneliness into the hell of togetherness.” For years, they managed to save themselves from total despair only by lies. In some ways, they are exact opposites. She would like to live in her idyllic hometown, Toblach, and he prefers the isolated, dilapidated lime works. She craves contact with friends and relations, whereas he insists on severing all contact with the world. Yet they are very much alike in other ways. Both seem capable simultaneously of slavish obedience and the utmost cruelty toward each other. He, for example, threatens to withhold food from her, to prolong the exercises, or not to air her room in order to get his way. She nags him incessantly about his criminal record and prevents him from writing by demanding his constant attention. The true motive for the murder—if there is one at all—is not revealed.

The other individuals in the novel—for example, the rather obscure narrator, Fro and Wieser, the public works inspector, the forestry commissioner, and the handyman Hoeller—are minor figures whose main function is to provide conflicting information about the Konrad couple.

Critical Context

Thomas Bernhard, whose work defies easy categorization, is perhaps the most widely discussed and controversial Austrian author of the 1970’s and the 1980’s, comparable only to Peter Handke in stature and productivity. His oeuvre, highly original and always provocative, has found increasing acceptance. For the Lime Works, which now ranks as one of the finest experimental novels in postwar German literature, Thomas Bernhard was awarded the prestigious Georg Buchner Prize and the Prix Seguier. Critics link him with Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett and are quick to note the striking affinities to Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

If Thomas Bernhard’s numerous plays and prose works enjoy considerable popularity in spite of their decidedly depressing subject matter, it is largely because of their seductive language. Bernhard, an accomplished stylist and a trained musician, takes the German language to its limits. By working extensively with repetition, variation, modulation, intensification, and leitmotif, he has developed a distinctive, highly musical style that is very captivating. Words and phrases are repeated over and over; they are combined and recombined, varied and intensified, which gives his language its famed relentlessness and compulsiveness. The most distinctive feature, however, is the frequent occurrence of hyperbole. Bernhard’s world is no less extreme than his language. It is a cold and gloomy world of illness, suffering, pain, decay, anger, hatred, crime, failure, insanity, and above all else, death, from whose vantage point all human endeavor ultimately becomes ridiculous.

Bibliography

Craig, D.A. “The Novels of Thomas Bernhard: A Report,” in German Life and Letters. XXV (1970/1971), pp. 343-353.

Dierick, A.P. “Thomas Bernhard’s Austria: Neurosis, Symbol, or Expedient?” in Modern Austrian Literature. XII (1979), pp. 73-93.

Fetz, Gerhard. “The Works of Thomas Bernhard: Austrian Literature?” in Modern Austrian Literature. XVII, nos. 3/4 (1984), pp. 171-192.

Goodwin-Jones, Robert. “The Terrible Idyll: Thomas Bernhard’s Das Kalkwerk,” in Germanic Notes. XIII (1982), pp. 8-10.

Lindenmayr, Heinrich. Totalitat und Beschrankung: Eine Untersuchung zu Thomas Bernhards Roman “Das Kalkwerk,” 1982.

Rossbacher, Karlheinz. “Thomas Bernhard: Das Kalkwerk (1970),” in Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts: Neue Interpretationen, 1983. Edited by Paul M. Lutzeler.

Schwedler, Wilfried. “Thomas Bernhard,” in Handbook of Austrian Literature, 1973. Edited by Frederick Ungar.

Sorg, Bernhard. Thomas Bernhard, 1977.