Wittgenstein's nephew

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Wittgenstein's nephew. A friendship is a story by Thomas Bernhard from 1982.

The topic is Bernhard's friendship with Paul Wittgenstein , second nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein and member of the rich Viennese industrialist family Wittgenstein . Paul suffers from an unspecified illness that repeatedly entails stays in psychiatry , while Bernhard himself is struggling with a chronic lung disease.

The title is based on Diderot's work Rameau's Neffe , whose protagonist, like Paul Wittgenstein, stands in the overpowering shadow of a famous relative.

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According to the publisher's information from Suhrkamp , Bernhard continues his autobiography in five volumes in the description of his friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, based on the years 1967 to 1979. With the subtitle, Bernhard focuses on the history of his friendship with Paul Wittgenstein .

Bernhard begins and locates the story in 1967 during his stay in the pulmonary hospital on Baumgartner Höhe in the Hermann pavilion . In the same Otto Wagner Hospital in the Am Steinhof psychiatric clinic, he settled his friend Paul Wittgenstein, a nephew of the well-known philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein , who happened to be freely named in the Ludwig pavilion . The friendship actually existed.

For twelve years, Bernhard “watched” the impoverishment, loneliness and death of his friend, and his story has become the requiem for him, so to speak.

“Humorous or is it a parable? The power of the obsession of two artists, completely obsessed with a particular idea - which fails. The double bottom is that two people have a goal and subordinate everything else to this goal, that's the essence of the artist, ”says Marcel Reich-Ranicki . The goal, the article from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , is to be seen here as a metaphor.

Stage version

German premiere of an adaptation and production by Patrick Guinand in 2001 with Toni Böhm and Hasija Boric at the Volkstheater in Vienna.

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With the drama Ritter, Dene, Voss in 1986, Bernhard took up the location of the psychiatric clinic “Am Steinhof” again.

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