The cause. A hint

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The cause. A hint is the first part of a five-part autobiography by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard , published in 1975. The second volume appeared in 1976, Der Keller. A withdrawal , followed in 1978 by The Breath. A decision and in 1981 the fourth volume Die Kälte. An isolation , the following year the fifth and final part A child .

content

The student Thomas Bernhard attended high school in Salzburg between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Bernhard thinks of suicide from the start , because he cannot cope with the educational methods used by Rector Grünkranz in the boarding school and with the bad times during the Second World War. At the beginning he also wants to find out what a bomb can do, but when one hits he is deeply shaken. Because when he scouts out what the consequences are, he steps on one hand. At first he thinks it is a doll's hand, but when he looks more closely he sees that it is a human hand. In addition, the bombing often makes going to school impossible. Because before he gets ready to go to school, a bomb alarm is usually given. So he has to go into the protective tunnels every day during this frightening time.

After the Second World War, not much was changed in the boarding school, only the National Socialist room was transformed into a Catholic room. The new rector, Uncle Franz, uses the same educational methods as Grünkranz. When all of this becomes too much for Bernhard one day, he decides to report to the employment office. There he is referred to the grocer Podlaha.

Characters

  • Thomas Bernhard is the main character in this autobiographical story. He suffers from the treatment of the boarding school director who often beats him for no reason. As a result, he soon begins to develop suicidal thoughts. When he is about to put this idea into practice, he turns to his grandfather, the only person he has sympathy for.
  • Grünkranz is director of the NS boarding school that Bernhard visits. He is a model SA officer and tries to make the students part of the Hitler regime by forcing them to sing slogans and songs in praise of the Führer.
  • Uncle Franz is Grünkranz's successor. This director had assumed the legacy of the National Socialist Grünkranz in a Catholic way and the prefect subordinate to him beats the students with the same arbitrariness. However, Bernhard only has respect for him and is no longer afraid.
  • The grandfather, Johannes Freumbichler, is a defining figure in Bernhard's life. He never marries Catholic, which is why he is ultimately denied a grave in the cemetery. Freumbichler is a critical writer who does not earn much and therefore repeatedly has problems with the financial support of his family. He tries to bring Bernhard in his footsteps and encourages and challenges him in creative work.

Bernhard is hostile to most people, especially Grünkranz and Uncle Franz, but also to his parents, who do not care about him.

Language and form

The stylistic features are typical of Thomas Bernhard: long sentences, the statements of which are reinforced by repetitions and variations, as well as many adjectives that are intended to enhance the effect. He often changes the narrator's point of view, for example he writes once in the first person and a few pages earlier in the third person. You won't find a single paragraph in the book, which makes it difficult to take reading breaks. Bernhard plays with the words and their meanings.

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Jean Améry : Morbus Austriacus: Comments on Thomas Bernhard's "The Cause" and "Correction" . In: Jean Améry: The integral humanism between philosophy and literature: essays and reviews of a reader 1966-1978 . Edited and with an afterword by Helmut Heißenbüttel. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1985, pp. 228-235.
  • Jürgen Brunner: From 'Illness to Death' to 'Correction': Cultural-historical and suicidological remarks on literary depictions of suicide . In: Bettina von Jagow and Florian Steger (eds.): Yearbook Literature and Medicine , Volume 1. Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, Heidelberg 2007, pp. 13-30.
  • William J. Donahue: On Thomas Bernhard's The Cause: A hint . In: Modern Austrian Literature 21: 3–4, pp. 89–105.
  • Martin Huber: "Fictional character complains to the author": On the reception of Thomas Bernhard's The cause: A hint . In: Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler and Martin Huber (eds.): Instead of Bernhard: About misanthropy in the work of Thomas Bernhard . Verlag der Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1987, pp. 59–110.
  • Gudrun Mauch: Thomas Bernhard's biography of pain: “The cause,” “The cellar” and “The breath” . In: Modern Austrian Literature 13: 1, pp. 91–110.
  • Walter Pape : “Events that hurt me for my whole life as an experience”: The air raids on Salzburg (1944) in Thomas Bernhard's Die Cause and Alexander Kluge's The air raid on Halberstadt on April 8, 1945 . In: Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (eds.): Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan . Rodopi, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 181-197.
  • Barbara Saunders: Thomas Bernhard: "The cause", "The cellar", "The breath" and "The cold" . In: Barbara Saunders: Contemporary German Autobiography: Literary Approaches to the Problem of Identity . Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London 1982, pp. 57–77 (also Diss. University of Cambridge 1982).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b The cause, Thomas Bernhard ( Memento of the original from February 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on literaturmappe.jimdo.com, accessed September 6, 2014.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / literaturmappe.jimdo.com
  2. Cecilia Hausheer: On the language technique of repetition and variation in Thomas Bernhard's “The cause. A hint ”. (= Dissertation, University of Zurich) Zurich 1987, OCLC 637805981 .
  3. The cause - a hint. by Thomas Bernhard on fundus.org, accessed on September 6, 2014 (PDF)