Amras (Thomas Bernhard)
Amras is the first big story by Thomas Bernhard from 1964. The title refers to the Amras district of Innsbruck . With this, Bernhard put the plot of one of his works back to Austria after the story Der Kulterer (1962) and the novel Frost (1963). In terms of content, the story deals with the fate of two brothers, their mutual annoyance at life and their surrender.
content
The family of about 20-year-old K., the first-person narrator, and Walter, his younger brother, commit collective suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. By chance the two brothers are found before death occurs. To protect them from the public, their maternal uncle takes the two boys to a tower in Amras that they have known from their childhood. The reasons for the family suicide are, on the one hand, the Tyrolean epilepsy , which the mother and Walter suffered from, and, on the other hand, the father's debts resulting from the epilepsy.
Because of the agony that the disease creates, the family plunges further and further into their misery until the father decides on the collective suicide to which all family members submit. Having escaped death, the two sons grapple with their fate in the tower, are haunted by memories of their parents and, against the background of their survival, suffer from feelings of guilt. For the scientifically inclined K. and the musical Walter, the tower is both a prison and a place of refuge. However, Tyrolean epilepsy returns in the loneliness in the tower and makes life difficult for the young men. Walter now has to go to an internist in Innsbruck on a regular basis , which means for the protagonists , after their isolation, a renewed confrontation with society. After a visit to this internist and particularly bad seizures, K. leaves the tower to talk to the circus people in the winter quarters. Meanwhile, Walter kills himself by jumping out of the tower window.
The uncle then arranges for K. to be brought to Aldrans , where the uncle owns a forester's house. Despite working with the loggers, K. remains isolated there and indulges in his memories. In the meantime he tries to buy back certain things from the mortgaged household goods, deals with the fading memory of Walter and goes for walks through the cemetery with a young woman. In Aldrans, death and K's loneliness are omnipresent. His mental state gets worse and worse towards the end. In the end he even turns away from the natural sciences and leaves Aldrans with a request for forgiveness and understanding, so that although he is no longer at the university, he can continue his studies within himself. It remains unclear whether his path will lead him to a madhouse.
Structure and narrative perspective
The narrative has a chapter-like subdivision with headings. The action is interrupted by quotes from letters to Hollhof (a friend of the father's), the uncle and one of the father's believers. There are also literary fragments by Walter, notebook entries and literary quotations in Italian. According to Marquardt, Bernhard uses this notation to represent "the inability to draw a coherent picture of the outside world [...]". The text focuses on the protagonists' reflections, their memories and their thoughts on illness and death.
The plot is told from a retro perspective. The narrative perspective changes from a we-narrator to a first-person narrator and finally to a you-narrator . In addition, there is a special sentence structure, which is particularly noticeable due to the extraordinary length and nesting of the sentences and the multitude of interspersed aphorisms . Bernhard uses complex and partly unfinished sentences to make the confusion and deterioration of the mental state of the protagonists clear. The distance between the brothers and their surroundings and other people is evident not only in their retreat into the enclosed space of the tower, but also in their way of speaking. The excessive use of scientific and abstract terms is intended to show the distance between the brothers K. and Walter and society and everyday social life.
Motifs
The tower : It has an ambivalent connotation in the story . For one thing, it is a place of refuge shortly after the suicide and protects the brothers from the babble of Innsbruck society. In addition, there are some childhood memories associated with the tower. In the further course, however, the tower becomes a physical and mental prison. The brothers are isolated and begin to fantasize in solitude. The isolation in the tower is similar to the seclusion in the Herrengasse building . Furthermore, creating a self-injury behavior and Walters epilepsy worse. The brothers seek distraction and occupation in their sciences, but they are disappointed.
The Tyrolean epilepsy : The Tyrolean epilepsy inherited from the mother firstly illustrates the negative notion of homeland and secondly demonstrates the wickedness of femininity . The disease brings down the family, affects the healthy family members, and is the main cause of surrender to life. It serves to encode dangerous provinciality and for the brothers it is at the same time disturbance, identity and individuality.
The brothers : K. and Walter are opposites in many ways. K. is the natural scientist and pays attention to his brother Walter, while Walter is the musical and finer of the two. He also carries the disease that is responsible for everything and therefore commits suicide. The demarcation from society is reinforced by the elitist status that they both have.
Father and mother : the protagonists' parents both contribute to the family tragedy. Due to her Tyrolean epilepsy, the mother is the reason that the father turns to gambling and loses a lot of money. He is the bon vivant in contrast to his sickly, bedridden, despotic wife. It is repeatedly cited as the cause of the agony of life.
Nature : The nature that surrounds the brothers is a mirror of their inner constitution. The attributes that Bernhard uses to describe nature are also attributes that show the inner world of K. and Walter. The brothers are inseparable from nature. With the blurring border between outside and inside, Bernhard manages to make the border between reality and fantasy indistinct.
The darkness : It is considered a metaphor for the degenerate world that encompasses all that is. This terminology , which describes the essence of existence, is also found in Frost .
The province : There is an obviously negative connotation to Tyrolean epilepsy. K. describes nature or the landscape itself as causing disease. Even in Aldrans, the place of the forest workers, K. can no longer find a connection to society . The province keeps him in isolation .
literature
- Thomas Bernhard: Amras. (= Library Suhrkamp. 489). Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-01489-7 .
- Clemens Götze: The losers. To the companionway topos in Amras. In: Clemens Götze: “It's all ridiculous when you think of death!” Studies on the work of Thomas Bernhard. Marburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8288-2672-4 , pp. 43-60.
- Eva Marquardt: Opposite direction. Development tendencies in the narrative prose Thomas Bernhard. (= Studies on German literary history. 54). Tübingen 1990, ISBN 3-484-32054-0 .
- Markus Scheffler: Basically I hate art. About melancholy in Arthur Schopenhauer and its use in Thomas Bernhard's prose. (= Contributions to recent literary history. 252). Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8253-5413-8 .
- Jens Tismar: Troubled idylls. A study on the problem of idyllic desires using the example of Jean Paul , Adalbert Stifter , Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard. Munich 1973, ISBN 3-446-11732-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Markus Scheffler sums it up on p. 264 as follows: "Amras describes a world that has gone completely out of joint, which has reached a final stage, whose creative power has died out and which is no longer viable."
- ↑ Marquardt p. 91.
- ↑ See Marquardt, p. 90.
- ↑ Tismar, p. 115 "The cumbersome sentence description wants nothing but to draw attention to the peculiar tension between rationality and irrationality."
- ↑ See Tismar, p. 117.
- ↑ See Marquardt, pp. 88f.
- ↑ See Tismar, p. 118.
- ↑ See Scheffler, p. 261.
- ↑ See Marquardt, p. 93.
- ↑ See Scheffler, p. 264.