Extinction (novel)

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Extinction. A Decay is a novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989). It was released in 1986 . Along with the as yet unpublished Schwarzach St. Veit manuscript, extinction is his “most extensive and most important novel”.

The novel consists exclusively of an internal monologue , a writing by the protagonist and first-person narrator Franz-Josef Murau, who describes his thoughts on the accidental death of his parents and his brother.

The focus is on Murau's memories of his youth at the Wolfsegg family seat in the municipality of the same name near Vöcklabruck in Upper Austria . With the help of the transcript, Murau wants to deal with the conditions in Wolfsegg, which finally forced him to flee to Paris , Lisbon and Rome . His “origin complex” (p. 201) should be processed and his memories “erased”: “My report is only there to erase what is described in it” (p. 199).

Emergence

Bernhard completed the work on extinction as far as possible by 1982, but did not have the manuscript put to print until 1986, after the publication of Alte Meister . Extinction is his last prose work published during his lifetime .

content

The almost fifty-year-old Austrian Franz-Josef Murau lives in Rome, where he teaches his student Gambetti in German-language literature and philosophy. One afternoon Murau received a telegram from his two sisters Caecilia and Amalia, who informed him of the accidental death of his parents and his brother Johannes.

In the first part of the novel, entitled The Telegram , Murau reports on the rest of the day he spends in his apartment in Rome after receiving the news. Most of these descriptions take up his memories of his childhood and youth at the family seat of Wolfsegg Castle at Hausruck in Upper Austria. Conflicts with his conservative family and the prevailing conditions there forced Murau to flee abroad and ultimately to Rome. He was supported in this by his uncle Georg, his only confidante within the family. These unprocessed memories, however, do not suddenly erupt as a result of the news of the death of their parents and brother, but have always been the subject of conversations with his student Gambetti and his girlfriend Maria (the allegory of an "implicit debate with Ingeborg Bachmann about writing" and a tribute to her by Bernhard). The long stream of memories replaces the external action, which can be briefly summarized: Murau stays in his room, packs suitcases and looks at photos of his family.

The second part, The Testament, tells about Murau's stay in Wolfsegg on the occasion of the funeral of his parents and brother. After his arrival in Wolfsegg, Murau helps his sisters prepare for the funeral and welcomes the mourners. The elegant and educated Archbishop and Vatican diplomat Spadolini occupies a special position . The narrator has a strong love-hate relationship with this cleric, who had a relationship with Murau's mother for over thirty years.

The funeral takes place on the following day, two days later Murau gives the property, of which he has become the sole heir, to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna (p. 650) and travels back to Rome, where he “wrote this 'extinction'” (unpag .). The parenthesis "born 1934 in Wolfsegg, died 1983 in Rome", inserted in the last sentence of the novel and - besides the initial insert "writes Murau" (p. 7) - the only interruption of the inner monologue of the protagonist from the narrative perspective of the implicit author out, informed about Murau's death.

Approaches to interpretation

The narrative is intended as a “restitution of that lost writing” by Uncle Georg: “I'm sure my Uncle Georg was up to something similar [...]. Since this anti-autobiography of my uncle is no longer there, I myself have an obligation to take a ruthless view of Wolfsegg and to report this ruthless view. "(P. 197) An outsider and 'nest-dirtier' hereby sets another outsider in the family a monument - thereby legitimizing his project. The writing allegedly withheld and destroyed by the mother is supposed to be preserved and preserved from being "erased". In the act of storytelling, what “falls apart” in the life told is passed on. Wolfsegg Castle, which was wiped out of the family's property by the donation to the Jewish community in Vienna, also serves as a vehicle to keep alive the “memory of the de facto reparations for the Austrian victims of the Nazis”.

A large part of the family is de facto "wiped out" at the end of the story: the parents, the brother, the uncle and the narrator himself. And what happens to the sisters remains open - this is also an extinction.

The main action is reflection: remembering what has happened and said in the focus of psychology on the one hand and politics on the other. Childhood trauma is discussed as well as the involvement of parents in National Socialism. The leitmotif “I said to Gambetti” marks two levels of meaning in the text: on the one hand, the narration itself is thematized and the fiction of an immediate reception is broken. On the other hand, this redundant formula gives the relationship between the first-person narrator and his “alter ego” Gambetti, a teacher-student relationship, of central importance: One could also refer to “the excessive linguistic invocation of Gambetti in Murau's speech as the lovingly and desperately invoked presence of understand others ”. It seems as if the narrator had the most frequent and most intensive contact with Gambetti in Rome, which suggests that the younger is of great importance to the older: the narrator calls him "my dearest, most valuable person in Rome" (p. 512 ), "To whom I cling just as he clings to me" (p. 513). This “ever-echoing, never-elaborated story of Murau's deep relationship with his pupil Gambetti” is peculiarly spared the narrator's analytical and self-analytical gaze. The reader feels through the "sublime erotic tone" of antique teacher-student pairs, z. B. in the vicinity of the Platonic Academy . Murau's relationship with his deceased uncle can be seen as a model or at least a forerunner for this mentoring relationship.

The trip to Wolfsegg is the occasion for Murau to deal with his feudal origins, trying to defame everything connected with his Austrian origins in a never-ending series of exaggerated hateful tirades. Only his uncle Georg, who was rejected by the family and who, like Murau, questioned his family of origin, can be a role model for him. The parents are particularly accused of adopting the National Socialist ideology without criticism , the intolerance of which continues to determine their thinking even after the war. Almost without differentiation in terms of content z. B. the Austrian judges, teachers, mothers, the governments, the ruined cities, the dullness of the hunters etc. criticized and contrasted with the supposedly true ideals, such as the Italian people or the "simple people". The striking “contrast between art and barbarism, between Rome and Wolfsegg” is the program and is presented by the narrator - in order to criticize it and reduce it to absurdity, as does Murau “the German nature in general and the Austrian in particular”. Murau's criticism focuses on the deformation of the child's personality, the suppression of artistic and philosophical ambitions (the libraries in Wolfsegg remain closed for a long time!), The manifest National Socialism, which brought so-called "simple people" like the Schermaiers to concentration camps, and the "Waldheim Austria's" unwillingness to face its National Socialist past. At the level of the narrator, a critique of criticism is exercised out of a “pleasure in play” and the absurdities of the “art of exaggeration” (pp. 128, 611) are exposed to the ridiculousness of the implicit reader.

Laughter is already a leitmotif at the level of action: when the student laughs repeatedly at Murau's remarks ("Gambetti laughed out loud and called me an excessive exaggerator". P. 123), this gets a laugh that Murau occasionally joins in Destructive and pessimistic explanations have a comedic note, the narrator sees himself as “old age fool” (p. 129): “A rather cheerful relaxation dictates and directs the concept of extinction [...]. The new heroes can laugh, even at themselves ”, and a reviewer calls the narrator a“ disgruntled comedian ”. According to Hans Höller, this“ aspect of the comic and the poetics of laughter has been neglected in the previous Bernhard reception ”and could compared to reception concepts that evoke an "overwhelming alpine virtuoso of desperation" on the one hand and an "always disappointing Austrian disgruntlement mannerist" on the other, which open up new horizons of interpretation.

The narrator repeatedly directs the acidic criticism against himself: "I probably also suffer from a pathological aversion to Wolfsegg, I am unjust to her, I am ruthlessly unjust to her and to everything that affects her in my way of observation" (p. 304 ). The malice and "infamy" that he perceives in his environment must also be discovered in himself - and this relativizes the hateful tirades, they appear to the reader in a different light, so that Bernhard's prose educates him to be a "critic of the text" . In an autoreflective turn of phrase, the text itself is thematized, its subject is writing or receiving, philosophically speaking: "The thinking of the Bernhard narrator is directed, as in none of his previous books, on itself, [makes] thinking - as well as seeing, observing, feeling, judging - to his actual topic ”.

That literature itself is a theme in the novel ( autoreflectivity ) can also be seen from the fact that works by Jean Paul, Kafka, Thomas Bernhard (!), Musil, Broch are mentioned right at the beginning as a program of Gambetti's training, as well as Goethe's “Elective Affinities” and Schopenhauer's “World as Will and Idea”.

Bernhard's last work bundles the essential motifs of his poetic work: “This is especially true for the existential metaphor of theater. All the elements of the theater can also be found in his last great prose work. ”While in wood cases a room is still compared with a stage , in extinction it has become a real stage and is named as such. “Franz-Josef Murau tells two different plays: the drama of the Murau family and that of the funeral of the narrator's parents and brother. The former ended with the family's fatal car accident. The second part of extinction. A disintegration is nothing more than the description of this episode of a family drama. The funeral becomes a 'theater with death' ”. The narrator says: “The funeral is just a drama that they forced you to play and the title of which you pay your last respects is basically just repulsed, because it's a lying one, I thought. And that kind of drama is the most mendacious. A funeral like this is the greatest drama that can be imagined, I thought. No dramatic writer, not even Shakespeare, I thought, has ever written such a great drama, on the other hand all world literary drama is ridiculous. "

The "androgynous spirit people " are clearly denoted positively - apart from the already mentioned sympathizers Uncle Georg and Gambetti - : Eisenberg as a representative of "political authenticity" and Maria, who stands for "authenticity in matters of art". The narrator behaves strangely uncritically towards these friends and grants them almost absolute right of disposal over his mind, so that he B. regularly has Maria burn his manuscripts. Incidentally, what has already been established on the level of action is repeated on the figure level: the deconcretization or disembodiment in favor of the reflective, meditative. So everything physical or sexual, especially with regard to the narrator, is left out. Only Spadolini, who is seen as ambivalent, and the permanently denounced mother are also allowed to be sexual beings. - Women who do not correspond to the ideal figure in the novel as "cold, loveless, cruel [mother]" and as "stupid and uneducated [...], tasteless and unimaginative" like the sisters.

Style and structure

An essential literary process is that of the stream of consciousness , in which inner actions such as memory, reflection, etc. dominate over the outer action.

The most important stylistic devices of the novel are the repetitions and exaggerations of Murau's statements , which are typical for Thomas Bernhard a. through the frequent use of superlatives and generalizing adverbs such as "always", "never". The narrator speaks of “the art of exaggeration”, the process becomes the subject of conversation between teacher and student through an auto-reflective phrase and thus also the subject of the novel.

It is noticeable that the novel consists almost exclusively of running text that lacks any structure through chapters , paragraphs or indentations . Only the subdivision of the text into the two roughly equal parts The Telegram (Murau's evening in Rome) and The Testament (Murau's stay in Wolfsegg) gives the work a “refined” formal structure: “From the Rome part, it goes forward to Wolfsegg told to and from the Wolfsegg part back to Rome ”. By the way, it is striking that there are texts, short texts, which introduce and conclude the plot of the novel - a further indication of the primacy of the epic over the dramatic, the narrative process over the narrated plot .

In an interview, the author states that his writing is “a question of rhythm” and “has a lot to do with music”. In fact, there are structural elements in the text, all of which correspond to “musical principles”; In addition to the repetition, these are also the “opposition”, the “variation” and the “modulation”. These "regular forms of language" with their "machine-like, self-reproducing mechanics" can on the one hand be understood as an "expression of self-alienation and the radical failure of a historical subject" and on the other hand offer the possibility of indulging in them like a piece of music without resistance ] give ”, so that“ the music-making-speaking I like its listener can suddenly experience that it is in [its order] ”.

The leitmotif repetition of passages like "I thought", "I said to Gambetti", "as is said" and the permanent use of climactic elements give the more than 600-page novel its rhythm. These syntagms serve, among other things, to stretch the time so that the narrative time is longer than the narrated time of three days with little action.

literature

Primary literature

  • Thomas Bernhard: extinction. A disintegration . Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 1986 (first edition).
  • Thomas Bernhard: extinction. A disintegration . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988 (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1563), ISBN 3-518-38063-X .
  • Thomas Bernhard: extinction. A disintegration . Licensed edition for the Gutenberg Book Guild , Frankfurt am Main / Olten / Vienna [no year].

Secondary literature

  • Joachim Hoell : The literary mediator of realities. The properties in Thomas Bernhard's novel "Erasure" . VanBremen, Berlin 1995, e-book at epubli, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-8442-8585-7 .
  • Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's "Extinction" . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 .
  • Kay Link: Theater Total: Extinction. A disintegration . In: Kay Link : The world as theater - artificiality and artistry with Thomas Bernhard . Akademischer Verlag Stuttgart, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-88099-387-4 , pp. 114–119.
  • Bernhard Sorg: Thomas Bernhard . CH Beck , Munich 1992, ISBN 3-406-35053-4 .

Theater adaptations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Höller and Erich Hinterholzer: Poetics of a scene. Texts and photos for Murau's 'Wolfsegg' . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 238.
  2. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, quoting is based on the Suhrkamp paperback edition.
  3. ↑ Cornelia Fischer / Axel Diller: Bernhard, Thomas - extinction . In: Kindler's Literature Lexicon in 18 volumes, 3rd, completely revised edition 2009 ( online , accessed from Bücherhallen Hamburg on May 31, 2020).
  4. ↑ Holger Gehle: Maria: An attempt. Reflections on Ingeborg Bachmann's encryption in the work of Thomas Bernhard . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 159.
  5. ↑ a b Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's "Extinction" . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , foreword , p. 7.
  6. ^ Renate Langer: The difficulty of coping with Wolfsegg. Thomas Bernhard's 'Extinction' in the context of Austrian castle novels after 1945 . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 200.
  7. ^ Irene Heidelberger-Leonard: Auschwitz as a compulsory subject for writers . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 182.
  8. ↑ Hans Höller: People, history (s), places and landscapes . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 229.
  9. ↑ Heinz F. Schafroth : Hauptwerk - or not? Thomas Bernhard's further staging of the fall of the West . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 78.
  10. ↑ Andreas Gößling, quoted in n. Hans Höller: People, history (s), places and landscapes . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 233.
  11. ↑ Heinz F. Schafroth: Hauptwerk - or not? Thomas Bernhard's further staging of the fall of the West . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 71.
  12. ^ A b Irene Heidelberger-Leonard: Auschwitz as a compulsory subject for writers . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 187.
  13. ↑ a b From two interviews with Thomas Bernhard. Recorded by Jean-Louis de Ramburres . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 14.
  14. ↑ Helga Schultheiß: How to survive? Laugh everything away! . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 80.
  15. ↑ Eberhard Falcke: Copy. A rebellion . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 73.
  16. ↑ Hans Höller: Reconstruction of the novel in the spectrum of newspaper reviews . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 63.
  17. ↑ Eberhard Falcke: Copy. A rebellion . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 71.
  18. ↑ Rolf Michaelis, quoted in n. Hans Höller: Reconstruction of the novel in the spectrum of newspaper reviews . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 59.
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Schreiber, quoted in after Hans Höller: Reconstruction of the novel in the spectrum of newspaper reviews . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 59.
  20. ↑ Kay Link: Theater Total: Extinction. A disintegration . In: Kay Link : The world as theater - artificiality and artistry with Thomas Bernhard . Akademischer Verlag Stuttgart, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-88099-387-4 , p. 114.
  21. ↑ Kay Link: Theater Total: Extinction. A disintegration . In: Kay Link : The world as theater - artificiality and artistry with Thomas Bernhard . Akademischer Verlag Stuttgart, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-88099-387-4 , p. 114 f.
  22. ↑ Thomas Bernhard: Extinction. A disintegration . Licensed edition for the Gutenberg Book Guild , Frankfurt am Main / Olten / Vienna [no year], p. 591.
  23. ^ Irene Heidelberger-Leonard: Auschwitz as a compulsory subject for writers . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 186.
  24. ↑ Mireille Tabah: Demonization and Transfiguration. Images of women in 'extinction' . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 148.
  25. ↑ Mireille Tabah: Demonization and Transfiguration. Images of women in 'extinction' . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 150.
  26. ↑ Heinz F. Schafroth: Hauptwerk - or not? Thomas Bernhard's further staging of the fall of the West . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 75.
  27. ^ Andreas Herzog: Thomas Bernhard's Poetics of Prosaic Music . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 132.
  28. ^ Andreas Herzog: Thomas Bernhard's Poetics of Prosaic Music . In: Hans Höller and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (eds.): Anti-autobiography - On Thomas Bernhard's “Extinction” . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38988-2 , p. 140.
  29. ↑ In case of doubt for the fattening pig in FAZ of February 27, 2016, page 9.