The literary design of childhood is not least one of perspective. Nobody knew and could perhaps do that better than Marcel Proust, when he peeled the childhood memories of his hero Marcel out of a world of chimeras and things that were always way too big. Proust, a spoiled child at the center of the family, could still remember his childhood as that of an ideal paradise, which was also threatened by ghosts and the outside world – but which had never lost its epicenter. Thomas Bernhard’s childhood is like a great lack of understanding.
The unloved, illegitimate child, who had to fight hard for the fixed stars of growing up, above all the writing grandfather Johannes Freumbichler – Bernhard found it relatively late in the series of his autobiographical texts, not least in the prose work “Ein Kind” (1982). , found its expression. When Bernhard ventured into the field of autobiography, he was a sufficiently well-established poet who, however, took a look at his own early history precisely because of the certainty of meaning.
“I am the cause”
“I am the cause myself” is the name of a documentation on Bernhard’s work, and even if his writing may be the highest form of an artificial cosmos, it should always be derived from a recognizable and, above all, emotionalizable reality. It’s not for nothing that the I in “Ein Kind” says: If I hadn’t experienced it all, I would have had to invent it exactly like that.
Director Gerald Maria Bauer dares an experiment with the dramatization of Bernhard’s prose work, since it is an autobiography without any form of direct speech, in short: the opposite of a dramatic and dramatizable text. Bauer is probably concerned with the question of whether his generation’s dependence on the aura of Bernhard’s work can be transferred to a younger generation, and last but not least whether Bernhard can be expected of a very young audience.
Childhood made accessible through the archive
Bauer places Bernhard’s autobiography in the archive – which reads like a special bon mot, since the Republic had just acquired the estate of the author for a record sum, who had forbidden any performance of his work in Austria during the validity of the copyright.
The fact that Bernhard had already banned performances of his works at Achim Benning’s Burgtheater during his lifetime because he was defeated in the race for the leadership of the castle in 1976 has meanwhile fallen into oblivion, just as Bernhard’s decrees are read more as a work of art than a legal directive in the present.
Bernhard’s text “Ein Kind” jumps onto a group of performers over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour evening. A young man and a slightly older ego (Jasper Engelhardt and Valentin Späth) are supposed to double the autobiographical ego. And mother and grandfather (Violetta Zupancic and David Fuchs) are just as much on stage as temporary companions from the past.
“I was content with self-admiration”
The piece begins with perhaps what is actually the best that this book has to offer: the bicycle ride in Traunstein, which was perhaps an attempt to break out of one’s own childhood – at least a daring act in which the child rises above its own smallness or limitations . “When we are at the top, we want the observer as an admirer like nothing else, but this observer as an admirer was missing. I was content with introspection and self-admiration,” the draft reads.
The Radszene has always presented Bernhard’s autobiographical text as a work with brighter, friendlier moods than many other, particularly autobiographical works. In the family constellation one actually goes through the biography of the author up to the merchant’s apprenticeship, in which something like the later position of the author Bernhard is located: approaching and rejecting the world, both were acquired in the merchant’s shop.
A very moving text
In fact, the double self works well on stage. Nobody ever has a clear function, rather the text jumps from one person to another within the sentence boundary. And so the rest of the family also has the task of coping with this bundle of texts, with the grandfather playing the role of the echo chamber of the entire work. This is artistically understandable, but in a certain way it gets on the nerve of the grandfather’s longing figure. The grandfather, in the end he was supposed to be more the world opener and anchor of a basically insecure person than a narrative instance, as we know them from “Extermination”.
An innocent childhood world, indeed a former paradise, does not exist with Bernhard. Above all, the mother is always absent, not least rejecting. This blank space makes the staging more than clear.
But maybe in the end there is too much of Bernhard’s overall context in this urge to be staged. Bernhard’s text lives precisely from the questioning of perspective and the later classification into childhood. But a poetic air, as in Peter Handke’s “Immer noch Sturm”, is missing in this template. At least a little less density in the text would have left more room for perspective. On the other hand, at the age of 13 and up, you can feel like you’ve been served a pretty good chunk of Bernhard’s complete works in one evening.
