Thomas Bernhard

Ruth Starkman (University of San Francisco)

Suicide and murder, obsession and mania, incest and patricide, madness and loneliness, Austria and Nazis: these are a few of Thomas Bernhard's favorite themes. In his enormous œuvre of seventy novels, plays, short stories, and verse, these themes return with relentless repetition as though each utterance were a profound new epiphany of the same Schopenhauerian aphorism: life is suffering, Austria is hell on earth. Bernhard loved and hated his hometown of Salzburg; but he pursued the land of his fathers like a patricidal maniac. Born out of wedlock on 9^th February 1931 in Heerlen (The Netherlands) two years before Austria's native son, Adolf Hitler came to power, Bernhard died on 12 February 1989 in Gmunden, Austria at the end

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Citation:
Starkman, Ruth. "Thomas Bernhard". The Literary Encyclopedia. first published 28 August 2003
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5433, accessed 03 September 2010.]

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Life, Works and Times

Dates:

Life: 1931 to 1989
Activity: 1956 to 1989

Places:

Birth: Netherlands
Primary Activity: Austria
Primary Activity: Germany

Activities:

Dramatist/ Playwright (Primary)
Novelist (Primary)