The cold. An isolation

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The cold. The fourth part of Thomas Bernhard's autobiographical cycle, first published in 1981 by Salzburg Residenz Verlag, is an isolation . Together with The Cause. A Hint (1975), The Basement. A Withdrawal (1976), The Breath. A Decision (1978) and A Child (1982) the childhood and adolescent memories of Bernhard. As early as the late 1960s and early 1970s, in Bernhard's works, for example in Das Kalkwerk (1970) or Die Jagdgesellschaft (1974), there was a growing tendency to research the conditions of his origin and to get to the bottom of the causes of his thoughts and actions. Although Bernhard's autobiography provides significant information about his life, its artistic character must not be ignored.

action

Thomas Bernhard is admitted to the Grafenhof public lung sanatorium because his lung disease has worsened. He is desperate because he has had a long hospital stay, his grandfather has recently passed away, and his mother is dying of cancer. The conditions in Grafenhof are accordingly catastrophic in the post-war period: there are no financial means to provide medical care for the patients, the doctors are cold towards the patients and the sanatorium is like a barrack. After initially being aloof from his fellow patients, Bernhard finally found a friend in a musician who taught him harmony and form theory as well as Italian, so that Bernhard got closer to his goal of pursuing a professional career as a singer.

A few weeks later, Bernhard left Grafenhof cured until shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with open pulmonary tuberculosis. After a short stay in hospital, he returns home and see a pulmonologist who eventually leads to a medical error. After another painful stay in hospital, Bernhard returns to Grafenhof, but this time he is more comfortably accommodated in a loggia together with a doctor of law. Finally, he decides to leave Grafenhof at his own risk, to return home and to go back to the pulmonologist for treatment.

Themes and motifs

The relationship with the family

The plot is often interrupted by Bernhard's memories of the deceased grandfather, the sick mother and the unknown father. The "mine" are portrayed by him as cold towards his fate, neither write nor visit him and the feeling of being undesirable is always present for him. He found out again about his mother's death through the newspaper; he had approached her before: “We didn't have the strength to say anything, we just cried and pressed our temples together” (Bernhard 2009, 36).

He is increasingly questioning his own origins and that of his family: “Where was my grandfather from? Where was my grandmother from? On the paternal side! Maternal! Where were they all from, who had me on their conscience, from which I demanded clarification. ”(Bernhard 2009, 78) The search for the unknown father remains ambivalent, however, since he does not have the courage to pursue it after violent arguments with his mother to look for him. He restricts himself to “speculating who he could have been, what kind of person, what kind of character” (Bernhard 2009, 76). Nevertheless, he senses that his mother's hatred of his father is directed towards his own son: “My mother's revenge very often consisted of sending me to the town hall to collect the five marks that the state paid for me Month (!) Paid, she was not afraid to send me straight to hell as a child with the comment: so that you can see what you are worth. "(Bernhard 2009, 73)

Through the relentless portrayal of human coldness, Bernhard creates an "anti-idyll" that remains artificial, since it is not Bernhard's intention to trace the horrors of his childhood exactly, but rather through his aesthetic-philosophical and thus distance-creating narrative process on the artistic character the autobiography indicates.

National Socialism

Even if National Socialism is not explicitly addressed in his post-war memoirs, there are many allusions to Bernhard. The comparison between Grafenhof and the National Socialist extermination camps comes to mind: the neglect of the patients lying on wooden plank beds in twelve-bed rooms and the constant presence of illness and death make Bernhard Grafenhof a "terrible word", a "hell" that is logical "Connects to post-war hopelessness, to post-war horror" (Bernhard 2009, 24). The doctors, especially the Primarius, a former National Socialist, rule as strictly military as in a penal institution.

illness

Although the theme of illness and death runs through all of Bernhard's works, the examination of existential crises such as illness and death is symptomatic of the autobiographical writing of the 1970s. For Bernhard, illness becomes a question of identification: if he initially takes on the role of a bystander, an observer, in time he adapts to the rest of the sick in order to later give up his spiritual resistance to the conditions in Grafenhof: "[H ] here I want to be! Where else?…. I didn't hate the here now, I hated the there, the over and the outside, everything else! ”(Bernhard 2009, 25). However, Bernhard draws new vitality through the Kapellmeisterfreund, the older friend becomes his role model, since for him as an artist only the "absolute affirmation of existence" against the inhuman circumstances in Grafenhof comes into question (Bernhard 2009, 87 f.). The comparison to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain is obvious, but unlike in Mann's novel, a declining era is not solemnly bid farewell, but rather the waning of the underprivileged sick is described, so that Die Kälte acts as an “anti-magic mountain”.

bibliography

Primary literature

  • Bernhard, Thomas: The cold. An isolation. 13th edition. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009.

Secondary literature

  • Hoell, Joachim: Thomas Bernhard . Ed. V. Martin Sulzer-Reichel. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000 (dtv portrait).
  • Holdenried, Michaela: Autobiography . Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000.
  • Thomas Bernhard. Work history . Ed. V. Jens Dittmar. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1981 (Suhrkamp pocket book materials).
  • Comment. In: The Autobiography . Ed. V. Martin Huber and Manfred Mittermayer. Vol. 10: Thomas Bernhard. Works. Ed. V. Martin Huber and Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​2004.