The cellar. A withdrawal

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The cellar. A withdrawal is an autobiographical report by the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard . The work, published in 1976, is the second part of a five-part autobiography by Bernhard and a direct continuation of the memories of his youth from the first part, The Cause. A hint .

The works of Bernhard's autobiography

In five autobiographical reports, Thomas Bernhard tells how he became the writer he was. From childhood to boarding school in Salzburg, teaching and studying to the isolation of the eighteen-year-old in a lung sanatorium.

content

The report begins on the morning when the sixteen-year-old high school student spontaneously decides on the way to school to withdraw from his previous, hated and seemingly meaningless life by taking "the opposite direction" and finding an apprenticeship in the basement, a grocery store - as well as the liberating and at the same time holding feeling to lead "a useful existence", to be involved in life. In the basement, on the edge of the Salzburg Scherzhauserfeldsiedlung , the shabby, dreary residential ghetto of the dispossessed, the written off, the anti-social and the criminals, Bernhard gets to know and understand all those outcasts from society and takes sides with these lost, disturbed livelihoods.

people

The two important people in the report are - besides Bernhard himself - the shop owner Karl Podlaha and Bernhard's grandfather Johannes Freumbichler .

  • Karl Podlaha : He's the owner of the grocery store and Bernhard's superior and trainer. Bernhard describes him with the words: "Karl Podlaha, who was a destroyed person and a sensitive Viennese character and who wanted to become a musician and then always remained a little shopkeeper." Bernhard feels inspired by him to take music lessons again (in singing and later music theory and music aesthetics). Since he is a fast learner, he decides to start studying music.
  • Johannes Freumbichler : Freumbichler is Bernhard's grandfather. He is the only one in Bernhard's family who shows understanding for Bernhard's decision to drop out of school and start an apprenticeship. The grandfather is also a writer and tries to get the young Bernhard to work as an artist. He wants his grandson to be successful with his art. He never did that himself.

Language and style

In this work there are some stylistic elements that are already known from earlier works by Bernhard.

  • Repetitions : An example of this can be found in the employment office scene. Here emphasizes Bernhard countless times that he would like in the "opposite direction" knew ( "I know why I take out the civil servant in the employment office dozens of cards from the card box had, I wanted in the opposite direction , this term in the opposite direction had I kept telling myself on the way to the employment office, again and again in the opposite direction ... "). Bernhard uses this stylistic device to emphasize the importance of his decision. There are numerous other such striking repetitions in the work.
  • Complex sentence structure : Bernhard writes mostly in very long sentences. Thoughts are often corrected and expanded within a sentence.
  • Variants : Bernhard often describes the same motif several times, but always slightly varied. That reinforces the message of these thoughts.

reception

In his dissertation The seduction. Thomas Bernhard's prose criticizes Andreas Maier , Bernhard intendiere in Der Keller. A withdrawal of "pathetic effects (...) which on closer inspection cannot go together well". Bernhard speaks of himself in superlatives and speaks "exclusively indifferent and positive about himself". In the novel, the “fifteen-year-old boy” Bernhard is “moved in terms of motifs close to Christian saints in the Middle Ages”, whereby Maier rejects the possibility of an ironic view of this observation.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernhard, Thomas. The basement - a withdrawal. DTV. Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-423-01426-7 , p. 2
  2. ↑ Bernhard, Thomas. The basement - a withdrawal. Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-423-01426-7 , p. 7.
  3. ↑ Bernhard, Thomas. The cellar. A withdrawal.DTV. Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-423-01426-7 , p. 16.
  4. ↑ Jan Süselbeck : The misunderstanding. On Andreas Maier's reception of Thomas Bernhard's prose . literaturkritik.de