Before retirement

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Data
Title: Before retirement
Original language: German
Author: Thomas Bernhard
Publishing year: 1979
Premiere: June 29, 1979
Place of premiere: State Theater Stuttgart , Stuttgart
Place and time of the action: In the house of the court president Höller
people
  • Rudolf Höller , president of the court and former SS officer
  • Clara and
  • Vera , his sisters

Before retirement is a play by the Austrian poet and writer Thomas Bernhard .

In the separate edition from 1979 the play has the subtitle "A Comedy of German Soul", a term that can be interpreted as cynicism for Bernhard's sarcastic picking up of a family of West German bourgeois, in which the National Socialist ideas are still very much alive . This piece cannot be grasped with Aristotelian definitions of the genre; Bernhard is instead pursuing his own conception of a theater that unites both tragedy and comedy.

The occasion for the play was the Filbinger affair in the Federal Republic of Germany at the time and the dispute between the director Claus Peymann and the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Hans Filbinger , who was forced to resign as a naval staff judge due to his National Socialist past. Before retiring , it premiered on June 29, 1979 in the Württemberg State Theater in Stuttgart .

content

The three acts of the "Comedy of German Soul" are set in the house of the court president Höller, a former SS officer and deputy concentration camp commandant , who celebrates Himmler's birthday every year on October 7th . The theater audience can watch the preparations for the festival as well as this itself. At the end of the play Rudolf, gripped by National Socialist madness, dies of a heart collapse. Waiting and partying form the “barren action core” of the piece.

construction

first act

In the first act, the two sisters wait for their brother. Vera irons Rudolf's judge's gown, but also his SS officer's uniform. In this way, both the social position of the court president Höller and thus his current power as well as his National Socialist past are staged. Both begin to quarrel about the - according to Clara, bad - treatment of their nanny Olga. The viewer has to realize that the two sisters are fundamentally different and that their relationship to one another is fraught with conflict.

Second act

At the beginning of the second act, Rudolf, who has come back from work “quite exhausted”, sits in an armchair and tells that he was “bumped into” by Jewish children. He also proudly reports that he prevented the construction of "a poison gas factory [...] in front of [the] windows" of the shared home - which is nothing more than a continuation of Himmler's policy. These reports are the starting point of a sharp criticism of modern society by Rudolf and Vera, whereby the Jews are held responsible for the alleged "neglect [...] in all areas". When Vera briefly leaves the room, a very violent argument breaks out between the previously silent siblings Clara and Rudolf, through which the whole hatred between the two is expressed.

Third act

In the third act, all three siblings sit at the dining table and drink champagne on the occasion of Himmler's birthday. Rudolf appears in "complete SS Obersturmbannführer uniform with cap, pistol on belt and in black boots" [p. 979, p. 89]. He looks at his photo album with Vera and recalls his war crimes with no worries. [S. 108]. At the party he drinks copiously and finally pulls his pistol out of the holster and threatens to "kill" the sisters [p. 118]. He has a life-threatening heart attack and Vera is forced to call a Jewish doctor. Before doing this, she tells Clara that she was guilty of her brother's upset by keeping quiet. Indeed, Clara practices with her oppressive silence - during the entire third act she speaks only one word [p. 110] - a special power.

characters

Rudolf lives completely withdrawn with his two sisters Vera and Clara, the siblings no longer have any social contacts. Besides them, as mentioned in a conversation, there is only one deaf, dumb and illiterate maid named Olga.

Rudolf

In the time of National Socialism , Rudolf took a "judges course" [p. 107] and became the youngest judge on the Eastern Front during the war . Thanks to Himmler's help and with Vera’s support, he was able to hide his past as deputy concentration camp commandant in Germany after the end of the war and thus escaped trial and execution. After ten years, no more questions were asked about his work during the National Socialist era. Although Rudolf has not given up his National Socialist ideas and is ready to defend them by force of arms, although he dreams of being able to celebrate Himmler's birthday “openly”, he experienced a rapid rise after the war and became president of the court and member of parliament. As a good and convincing speaker, Rudolf is a particularly influential person. He even seems to know the deputy prime minister personally. Despite his "dignity mask" [p. 71] and the callousness with which he speaks about his Ukrainian victims, the court president Höller also has his "tender sides" [p. 104]. According to Vera, he never grew up and remains a timid and shy person. He lets himself be intimidated by children. Rudolf is about to retire, which he fears because he will then have too much time to "brood over".

Vera

Vera is the older of the two sisters. Even if she doesn't quite share Rudolf's fascination for Himmler, even if she is convinced of his madness, she wants to support him in celebrating the birthday of his “idol”. Hence, she can be considered an opportunist. She maintains an incestuous relationship with her brother , which can be read as a parody of the National Socialist efforts to preserve blood purity.

Clara

Clara, on the other hand, can be seen as an opposition activist. She is a “socialist” and was in love with a “revolutionary” who, however, committed suicide. She reads "left" books and newspapers. As a result of an American bombing, she is paraplegic and sits in a wheelchair. Clara hates her siblings, but is dependent on them and therefore cannot run away. For a long time she has the "laws" [p. 36] accepted her siblings, but now refuses to continue. With her oppressive silence, she finally kills her brother.

Reception and interpretation

This time Bernhard is not aiming, as in most of his plays, at social conditions and mismanagement in Austria; the topic for this time is the continued existence of National Socialist structures in the Federal Republic of Germany, exemplified by the family of a judge. The monologues typical of Bernhard's pieces are less excessive here, but the conversations between the participants continue to expand into unbridled, verbose tirades of hate.

In the GDR , where “Before Retirement” was performed from 1986, the “Comedy of German Soul” was seen primarily as an “anti-fascist work”: “Bernhard Stück was used to confirm the state ideology, it seemed - politically speaking - the To meet the interests of the GDR to a large extent ”. The “Comedy of a German Soul” is not just about Hans Filbinger . Rather, it seems as if Bernhard wanted to show that the “criminal” is in “each of us”. When he was asked on June 23, 1980 in a Spiegel interview with Hellmuth Karasek and Erich Böhme whether “Before Retirement” was a Filbinger piece, he said: “So don't misunderstand me. I feel like myself and everyone else are related to everyone. That there is a Filbinger in me as in everyone else. "

bibliography

Text output
  • Before retirement. A comedy with a German soul . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979.

Secondary literature

  • Andreas Herzog: Before the GDR retired: misunderstandings about the most complicated piece by Thomas Bernhard. In: Forum Modernes Theater 7. 1992. H. 1, pp. 18–35.
  • Dagmar von Hoff: Family Secrets. Incest in contemporary literature and film . Cologne 2003.
  • Hans Höller: Thomas Bernhard: Before retirement . In: Interpretations: Dramas of the 20th Century. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Reclam 1996, pp. 239-259.
  • Anton Kiesenhofer: Out of protest and resignation. Artist problems and social analysis in four pieces by Thomas Bernhard: A festival for Boris, The hunting company, Before retirement, At the goal. In: Modern Austrian Literature. 21. 1988. H. 3/4, pp. 123-134.
  • Stefan Krammer: "Don't talk about silence ...". On the semiotics of silence in Thomas Bernhard's dramatic work. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2003 (= Epistemata: Series Literary Studies; 436).
  • Rolf Michaelis: Art cripple from the exaggeration specialist. Notes on Thomas Bernhard's plays from 1974 to 1982 . In: Thomas Bernhard. In: Text + Criticism 43 (1982; second, expanded edition), pp. 25–45.
  • Lothar Pikulik: Heiner Kipphardt: Brother Eichmann and Thomas Bernhard: Before retirement. The “banality of evil” on the (world) stage. In: German contemporary drama. Vol. 1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1987. pp. 141-191.
  • Klaus von Schilling: The present of the past in the theater. The culture of coping and its failure in political drama from Max Frisch to Thomas Bernhard . Tübingen: Narr 2001 (= Forum Modernes Theater: Schriftenreihe; 29).
  • Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler: Fainting through habit . In: Ders .: The exaggeration artist. Fourth, ext. Edition. Vienna: special number 2010, pp. 156–175. (Essay on the dramatic work of Bernhard with special consideration of Before Retirement )
  • Bernhard Sorg: Life as a trap and treatise. To Thomas Bernhard's The World Doer . In: In the matter of Thomas Bernhard. Edited by Kurt Bartsch [and a.]. Königstein im Taunus: Athenaeum 1983, pp. 148–157.
  • Thomas Bernhard . Work history. Edited by Jens Dittmar. Second, act. Output. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990. (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch; 2002).
  • From one disaster to another . 13 conversations with Thomas Bernhard. Edited by Sepp Dreissinger. Weitra: Publication PN ° 1 1992.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Winkler 1989. pp. 169-175.
  2. ↑ Herzog 1992, pp. 18–35, p. 22. Thomas Bernhard. 1990. 209.
  3. ↑ Michaelis, 1982, pp. 25-45, p. 43.
  4. ↑ All text quotes from Before Retirement. , Frankfurt am Main 1979.
  5. ↑ a b Krammer 2003, p. 118
  6. ↑ Herzog 1992, pp. 18-35, p. 23
  7. ↑ Hoff 2003, p. 150
  8. ↑ Federico 1984, pp. 142-148, p. 143.
  9. ↑ Herzog 1992, pp. 18-35, p. 19.
  10. ↑ See Herzog 1992, pp. 18–35, p. 22.
  11. ↑ Quoted from: Herzog 1992, pp. 18–35, p. 23