1. You finest town on Salzach’s shores In my heart you’ve always lain in spite of daily rain that pours and childhood’s bitter pain.

1Anyone reading these lines would hardly be likely to suspect that their author is Thomas Bernhard, the vehement critic of Austria and its people. But in fact it is the seventeen-year-old who is extolling Salzburg, the « queen of cities », in one of his earliest poems. And at that time (towards the end of the forties) his grandfather, the local author Johannes Freumbichler, wrote the appraisal « good » above his grandson’s text1.

2Nearly thirty years later, in his autobiographical book An Indication of the Cause (Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung, 1975), Bernhard says the same city is « lethal soil with its archiepiscopal architecture and its mindless blend of National Socialism and Catholicism » (GE 79)2. And he laments : « All I ever had from the city was torment : as a child and an adolescent I was never allowed any pleasure, happiness, or security » (GE 101). When this book was published by Salzburg’s Residenz Verlag in 1975, most of the city’s inhabitants were outraged, and a society for restoring the international reputation of the city of Salzburg was founded.

3In the Bernhard commemorative year of 2001, in a comprehensive special exhibit at the Carolino Augusteum Museum (Salzburg) in cooperation with the historian Sabine Veits-Falk, I tried to illuminate many of the various facets of what can thus be seen as the extremely contradictory relationship between Bernhard and his home town. In the following I will summarize once again what we presented then in pictures and quotations as Bernhard’s critical landscape of Salzburg. In the portions that concern the historical background of the autobiographical presen-tation, I am of course indebted to the research done by my partner on the curators’ team for the exhibit3.

42. Towards the end of the book An Indication of the Cause, Bernhard accounts for the extremely aggressive confrontation with his hometown of Salzburg that he has just spent many pages writing down, and he explains the motivation for the choice of the title that he gave to his text: « Whenever I arrive in the city today, I at once find myself in a mental or emotional state [...] which gives rise to instant depression or at least to instant irritation [...] and begin to wonder what is the cause of this mental or emotional state, this mental and emotional state » (GE 135).

5One of the reasons why Bernhard’s book provoked such strong animosity among so many at the time it appeared is certainly the fact that the author was consciously writing against an image of Salzburg like the one that had been built up especially in tourist brochures and the self-portrayals of cultural policy. The city’s beauty is by no means ignored in Bernhard’s work, but in its effects it is turned into its exact opposite : « It is the very beauty of the city and its landscape, a beauty of which everyone speaks – continually, thoughtlessly, and in quite impermissible terms – that constitutes the deadly element in this lethal soil» (GE 101).

6Right at the beginning of the book, the author states apodictically that the city is populated only by « two categories of people. Those who do business and those upon whom they prey […] » (GE 77). In what follows, the book makes it overtly clear that the narrator assigns himself to the second « category of people », the victims.

7These « victims » are already expressly addressed in the motto that is placed before the text. In contrast to his other works, which are usually introduced by a short quotation from a well-known author from our literary and philosophical tradition, here a brief notice from the newspaper Salzburger Nachrichten is reprinted. This report from May 6, 1975, states : « Two thousand people every year attempt to put an end to their lives in the province of Salzburg. A tenth of these suicide attempts are successful. This means that in Austria, which together with Hungary and Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world, Salzburg holds the national record » (GE 75). Incidentally, the original page from the newspaper (with the quotation marked by Bernhard himself) is preserved in the author’s posthumous papers.

8In a conversation with the author and then-director-general of Salzburg Broadcasting, Rudolf Bayr, Bernhard indicates that this fragment more or less fell into his hands while he was writing, as a legitimization from the present day of the portrayal that he had garnered from past experience. « That motto is the foundation of my book », Bernhard says ; it prevents the accusation, he continues, that the whole thing was merely made up, that the reality of Salzburg is nothing but bells ringing, happy people, and festivals and music4.

9The quotation is made particularly poignant, however, by the fact that one of the preferred sites for suicides, the so-called Humboldt Terrace in the Mülln section of Salzburg, of which Bernhard makes special mention in his book, also happens to be the site of the most lasting expression of Salzburg’s world-renowned beauty. A statement attributed to the famous naturalist and traveller Alexander von Humboldt was quoted for the first time in 1870 : « I consider the areas of Salzburg, Naples, and Constantinople the most beautiful on earth ». Although this utterance has never been verified, it has become the most-quoted expression of praise for Salzburg, and thus it can be read on a stone plaque on the very Humboldt Terrace that we have just mentioned5.

10Hence Bernhard’s motto can be read as an explicit counter-image to this remark attributed to Humboldt. But another of Bernhard’s commentaries, concerning another verbal cliché that one encounters again and again with reference to Salzburg, is likewise noteworthy – and here he uses a particularly malicious formulation. In the aforementioned interview he refers to the platitude that Salzburg is the « German Rome » and says : « Now that’s a marvellous epithet, it has everything in it: Rome, the Church, German, Nazi – everything. A wonderful juxtaposition »6. The contents of the book An Indication of the Cause are a perfect illustration of this polemical and malevolent interpretation.

113. An Indication of the Cause contains the description of Bernhard’s school years in the city of Salzburg at the time of National Socialist rule and the Second World War, and also in the immediate postwar era. The "Gymnasium" and the boarding school are recalled as an instrument of torture in which (beyond the historical break of 1945) an authoritarian pedagogical system prevailed, a fateful amalgamation of National-Socialist and Catholic ideologies. But also the air raids on Salzburg and the horrors of war endured with such intensity appear as an existential threat to the individual.

12Bernhard’s text is a passionate plea against forgetting those terrible events, written with the authenticity of personal experience – and from the subjective perspective of a young man who has been deeply wounded by the experiences of those times. He writes that « these shocking experiences are as vivid now as if they had happened only yesterday » (GE 95). Yet none of the others seemed aware any longer of the things that he had seen back then : « Time makes its witnesses forget » (GE 91).

[...] whenever I speak to people about what happened, nobody knows what I am talking about. In fact everybody seems to have lost all recollection of the many houses that were destroyed and the many people who were killed, or else they no longer want to know when someone tries to remind them (GE 95).

13It is striking that the memory of these times in Bernhard’s book is connected again and again with places – buildings, but also routes taken, which are described in this text in very concrete terms (mostly in terms of their damaged condition in those days). In this way they become memorials to what has happened, which is to be wrested from oblivion ; in the subsequent discussion I will give a few distinctive examples of this.

14One of the first of these memory-spaces that are invoked in Bernhard’s book is already connected with historical circumstances that were strongly taboo in the decades after the Second World War. The narrator relates that he and his fellow pupils spent most of their time not in school, but « in the air-raid shelters, which we had seen being driven, over a period of months, into the two hills of the city by forced labour from abroad, mainly Russian, French, Polish, and Czech prisoners working under inhuman conditions » (GE 86-87).

15These are the extensive shafts built as air-raid shelters in the city hills of Salzburg, which were among the largest civil-engineering projects of the Nazi period, along with the construction of the State Bridge, which was begun in 1940 and completed in 1949. Since they required the constant commitment of around 500 to 700 workers, numerous prisoners of war, primarily Russians and Frenchmen, were called in to work beside the civilian labourers7.

16The shafts were not very well ventilated and on top of that were clearly overcrowded during air raids, an acute lack of oxygen set in very quickly. Over and over, individuals seeking shelter passed out – a circumstance that Bernhard calls to memory in a very dramatic way : « I saw many of the victims being dragged out dead » he claims (GE 87), reproducing the child’s impression, which deviates somewhat from statistical reality. Yet here again he is concerned with granting the victims a voice : « These people who died of suffocation or fear were the first victims of the air attacks [...] even before a single bomb had fallen on Salzburg » (GE 87).

17When, on October 16, 1944, the first American bombardment of Salzburg did take place, the destructive effects of the bombs were visible on the well-known buildings of the city8. The serious damage included the cupola of the cathedral, the neighbourhood between Mozart Square and Rudolf Square, numerous houses in the Kaigasse, the Mozart residence on Makart Square, and the area around the Main Station, for instance, the houses on Fanny-von-Lehnert-Straße. One encounters these buildings in Bernhard’s description as well, among them also the "Schranne", the great market hall near Mirabell Square, which was reduced to a bizarre torso by the attack of February 27, 1945 ; it was torn down after the war. All told, 547 people and 46 percent of habitable buildings fell victim to the bombs9.

18Bernhard’s autobiographical account in this regard concentrates on especially impressive images, which, incidentally, are also confirmed by historical documents (such as photographs). The damage to the cathedral cupola especially has become a sign of the barbarity of the events ; Bernhard directly compares the trail of destruction with physical injuries : « It was as though this gigantic building, which dominated the lower part of the city, had had its back ripped open and were bleeding from a terrible wound » (GE 90). After the boy had been initially fascinated by the overpowering spectacle of the bombers and the deadly payload they were dropping, at this moment his perspective changes : « Suddenly confronted with the absolute savagery of war, yet at the same time fascinated by the monstrous sight before my eyes, I stood for several minutes silently contemplating the scene of destruction presented by the square with its brutally mutilated cathedral» (GE 90). The destruction incurred by the "Schranne", the huge market hall, is also described later in an analogous way – like destructive violence to a living organism : the "Schranne", Bernhard writes, was broken up into four great pieces, and « the great building, which had been about a hundred or a hundred and twenty yards in length, looked like a slaughtered beast, the vaulting having split or caved in to form a huge open belly » (GE 108).

19The image of the wound torn open in the cupola of the cathedral is embedded in Bernhard’s work in one of the significant routes that take him in memory through Salzburg ; it is a path of annihilation and devastation. It leads from the Mozart residence past the cathedral and the Kaigasse to Fanny-von-Lehnert-Straße and on to the Co-op building by the railroad station. And Bernhard expressly connects the events of that time with the consciousness of the man who is now remembering, when he writes about himself – in contrast to his many contemporaries who forget and repress :

To this day I cannot forget the sight of those bodies covered with sheets, lying on the grass in front of the Co-op ; and whenever I am anywhere near the station I can see these bodies and hear the desperate voices of the relatives ; and the smell of burnt flesh, both animal and human, still attaches to the terrible picture I recall of the Fanny-von-Lehnert-Strasse (GE 91).

20At this point Bernhard creates one of those especially disturbing images that he uses to convey the brutality of the events beyond statistics and figures : « On the way to the Gstättengasse I stepped on something soft lying on the pavement in front of the Bürgerspital Church. At first sight I took it to be a doll’s hand, and so did my companions, but in fact it was the severed hand of a child » (GE 90). In Bernhard’s posthumous papers there are some sheets that indicate just how much he organized his book around particular central elements of memory : there he addresses for the first time the scenes that he then intends to treat more extensively in his book. The severed hand of the child is noted from the beginning among these central elements of memory10. When he integrates it into the text, he formulates the consequence of his impression back during the war : « It was the sight of this child’s hand that quite suddenly transformed this first attack on the city by American bombers from the sensation it had been up to then – a sensation which produced a state of excitement in the boy I was at the time – into an atrocity, an enormity » (GE 90-91).

21Starting in the fall of 1943, Thomas Bernhard attended the « Andrae School », a secondary school on Faberstrasse in Salzburg, and lived in the affiliated boarding house on Schrannengasse in the immediate neighbourhood of the school. This school boarding house was run by the Church as the « Johanneum Boys’ Asylum » until 1938. After the National Socialists assumed power, nearly all religious dormitories were placed under state control, and Salzburg was no exception, of course. Therefore the boarding-house directors were generally tried-and-true National Socialists, and according to a decree of the Imperial Minister for Science, Instruction, and Popular Education (October 1939), their express purpose was the « uniformity of education ». With the beginning of the school year in September 1945, the boarding house was again put under Catholic custody, in which, according to the house rules, all were to be « formed within a happy congregation into God-fearing, inwardly happy people »11.

22This historical sequence appears in the book, blended into a simultaneously effective amalgam, as significant for a mentality that is fundamentally discernible in Salzburg. The narrator maintains : « All the year round [...] the spirit of this city is in reality a Catholic-Nazi denial of the spirit », and « when we have dealings with people in the city, we only ever find ourselves dealing with either hundred-percent Catholics or hundred-percent National Socialists, the minority who are neither being ludicrously small » (GE 122). Once again, a concrete place becomes an object lesson for this state of affairs, and once again this scene is on the sheet of key words mentioned above, on which Bernhard sketched out his book. One of these notes reads : « Cross, previously portrait of Hitler »12. It refers to one of the most cryptic spatial depictions in An Indication of the Cause : while the room in the boarding house in which the respective rituals of ideological indoctrination of the pupils took place has been renamed (« […] the so-called day-room, where we had formerly been instructed in National Socialism, had been turned into a chapel », GE 114), a small detail on the wall indicates the fundamental continuity that persisted beneath the outward change : « […] where the cross now hung there was a conspicuous white patch on the grey surface of the wall where for years Hitler’s portrait had been » (GE 115).

234. In the second volume of his autobiography, The Cellar : An Escape (Der Keller. Eine Entziehung, 1976), Thomas Bernhard quits school and with this achieves the radical departure from the realm of the Gymnasium and the boarding house. Once again it is an explicitly spatial conception that is invoked in this regard. This is how the book begins : « I found the other people by going in the opposite direction, no longer to the odious grammar school but to the apprenticeship which was the saving of me » (GE 145). It is a path that he clearly marks topographically, but above all sociologically :

by [...] no longer walking to the centre of the city with the civil servant’s son but along the Rudolf-Biebl-Strasse to its outskirts with the journeyman locksmith from next door ; by taking not the route through the wild gardens and past the ornate villas to the academy of the middle class and the lower middle class but the one which led past the institutes for the blind and the deaf and dumb, across the railway tracks and through the allotments, past the wooden paling of the sportsground by Lehen Asylum, to the academy of the poor and the outsiders, the academy of the mad and allegedly mad, on the Scherzhauserfeld Project – the roughest and most dangerous district of the city of Salzburg and the source of most of its criminal cases (GE 145).

24With his description of the Scherzhauserfeld Project, Bernhard recalls an essential aspect of the urban planning in Salzburg between the wars : social housing projects. Since World War One, communal and cooperative forms of housing construction had increased in order to replace the market-economy system of supplying housing. Thus not only Social-Democratic communities, but even cities like Salzburg with a bourgeois majority began building affordable housing, which was needed more and more urgently.

25From 1925 to 1931 (the year of Bernhard’s birth), five sizeable apartment complexes were erected in the Lehen district on the city’s periphery. The first part of the project was built from 1928 to 1929 ; it was named after the Scherzhauser family, who had owned the grounds until 1770. Then, from 1930 to 1931, a three-storey, meandering housing complex was built, in which the « cellar » that Bernhard talks about was also located, the grocery store belonging to the merchant Karl Podlaha, where the school dropout began a retail apprenticeship. With regard to Bernhard’s description it is important to mention that the project actually did stand at the city limits, totally isolated from the neighbouring communities of Itzling and Maxglan, until 193513.

26There were about 1200 people living in the « Scherzhauserfeld Welfare Housing Project », as it was officially designated, during Bernhard’s apprenticeship, for the most part « underprivileged families, unskilled labourers, shift workers, and low-ranking office workers »14. Unemployment, alcoholism, and criminality were the constant companions of these fragile existences. The Scherzhauserfeld Project, this « perpetual blot on the city’s landscape […], was constantly cropping up in the columns of the daily newspapers in the form of reports about criminal proceedings or about palliative measures taken by the provincial government » (GE 156). Thus writes Bernhard, who, after all, acquired his first professional writing experience in the mid-fifties as the courtroom reporter of the Salzburg newspaper Demokratisches Volksblatt (Democratic People’s Paper). And as the mouthpiece of the marginalized people far removed from the affluent section of the city, he turns against that society that forgets and represses its outsiders just like the shameful historical events before 1945 : « Life became atrophied here and amounted in reality merely to a creeping death, yet a few hundred yards away affluence and pleasure were rolling off the assembly lines in a perverse city which gave itself the air of being the sole ruler of the world » (GE 162). Once again it is to an act of remembering that the book about the « cellar » explicitly owes it origins : « I have learnt from the newspapers that the city is proposing to tear down the Scherzhauserfeld Project », Bernhard writes. « A brief notice in the press has once more set in motion a mechanism in my head which came to a halt a long time ago » (GE 161).

275.« What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth », Thomas Bernhard stresses in an excursus of linguistic criticism preceding the passage just quoted (GE 161). « We are bound to say that we have never communicated anything that was the truth, yet throughout our lives we have never stopped trying to communicate the truth » (GE 160).

28In the light of this search for truth (or of that part of truth that can be conveyed) stands Bernhard’s definition of his own position, of his self-conception as an author and critical topographer of Salzburg. « There must be people who always say "but" », is his rejoinder to his interviewer Rudolf Bayr, who had mildly objected to his anti-Salzburg fury. « The truth is basically always a matter of inserting a "but" and finishing the sentence. [...] an instance of beauty without a "but" » is always « a falsification »15. The only impetus in him is basically « nothing but the impetus to say what no one is saying, or to write what no one is writing », he says in the same interview, unmistakably establishing the place from which he speaks – as a place conceived in contradiction. « What everybody writes, that it’s a beautiful city – everybody knows that anyway. But behind the beauty there is simply something else, and making that clear was my task and my pleasure as well », he adds16.

29Almost ten years later, while writing one of his best-known late books of prose, this task and this pleasure have not changed in the slightest. With undiminished vehemence, Bernhard puts the following outburst into the mouth of the first-person narrator of his Glenn Gould novel The Loser (Der Untergeher, 1983), who studies music in this city at the Mozarteum (as did Bernhard himself in the mid-fifties):

The town of Salzburg itself, which today is freshly painted even in the darkest corners and is even more disgusting than it was twenty-eight years ago, was and is antagonistic to everything of value in a human being, and in time destroys it […]. The people in Salzburg have always been dreadful, like their climate, and when I enter the town today not only is my judgment confirmed, everything is even more dreadful17.