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Abstract
Bernhard’s literary texts are replete with (juridically well-informed) inheritance stories, last wills and legacies, inheritance conflicts and constraints. Many texts follow in their construction the genealogical line from fathers to sons that is burdened by an always fatal family and national history, which is represented via inheritance law and narration. A case in point is the story “Ungenach” (1968), in which the son, as the sole heir, is confronted with a rich inheritance bequeathed to him by his father, who owned huge estates. The story deals with his efforts to organize an “Abschenkung” (divestment by donation) in favor of criminals and outsiders to get rid of his ancestry. A similar plot rules Bernhard’s great novel Auslöschung ([Extinction] 1986) on the last will of a wealthy family in the aftermath of Austrian fascism. The paper examines the juridical and poetic dimensions of Bernhard’s inheritance writings – beginning with the conflicts around Thomas Bernhard’s own last will, which prohibits all performances of his plays in Austria.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Ulrike Vedder, Das Testament als literarisches Dispositiv: Kulturelle Praktiken des Erbes in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 2011).
2 Quoted according to Bernhard Judex, Thomas Bernhard: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2010), 28. This and all following translations from German sources are done by Alexander Matschi.
3 See, for example, the establishment of the Thomas-Bernhard-Privatstiftung for reasons of inheritance law (including its conflicts, for example, over digitization, which led to the closure of the Bernhard Archive in 2015); the legally secured publication policy of the Suhrkamp publishing house (since testamentary dispositions may not violate contracts concluded); the performance initiatives of Austrian theaters accompanied by legal proceedings. For some background information, see the interview with Thomas Bernhard’s heir Peter Fabjan (2011): https://literaturkritik.de/id/16169.
4 Cf. the integration of the will into the chapter “Skandale und Erregungen,” in Bernhard-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Martin Huber and Manfred Mittermayer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2018), 470–7.
5 “Bernhard programmatically negotiates the problem of processes of transmission and handing down on the basis of the question of inheritance and ‘succession’” (Philipp Schönthaler, Negative Poetik: Die Figur des Erzählers bei Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald und Imre Kertész (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 70.
6 See, for example, Uwe Betz, Polyphone Räume und karnevalisiertes Erbe: Analysen des Werks Thomas Bernhards auf der Basis Bachtinscher Theoreme (Würzburg: Ergon, 1997); Katharina Drobac, “Die Nazihose des Herrn Bernhard. Eigenes und Ererbtes in Thomas Bernhards Reflexionspoetik,” in Thomas Bernhard: Gesellschaftliche und politische Bedeutung der Literatur, ed. Johann Georg Lughofer (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2012); Joachim Hoell, Der “literarische Realitätenvermittler”: Die “Liegenschaften” in Thomas Bernhards Roman “Auslöschung” (Berlin: VanBremen, 1995).
7 Thomas Bernhard, Extinction, trans. David McLintock (New York: Vintage International, 2011), 723.
8 Ibid., 61.
9 Thomas Bernhard, Correction, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 33.
10 Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein‘s Nephew: A Friendship, trans. David McLintock (New York: Vintage International, 2009), 59.
11 Ibid., 58.
12 See Ulrike Vedder, “Literatur der Seitenverwandtschaft: Diderots Nichten und Neffen in der Gegenwartsliteratur,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 19, no. 3 (2009) on Thomas Bernhard’s story Wittgenstein‘s Nephew, among others.
13 See Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften (Munich: Fink, 2006).
14 See Stefan Willer, Sigrid Weigel, and Bernhard Jussen, eds., Erbe: Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2013).
15 Bernhard, Extinction, 455.
16 Ibid., 550.
17 Ibid., 457.
18 Interview with Thomas Bernhard, quoted from Huber, Mittermayer, eds., Bernhard-Handbuch, 16.
19 Legal disputes concerned, for example, a theater review written by Bernhard, his autobiographical writing Die Ursache [An Indication of the Cause], or the staging of his play Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige.
20 Klaus Schuhmacher, Paragraphie: Über das gedichtete Recht (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992), 13.
21 Thomas Bernhard, “Ist es eine Komödie? Ist es eine Tragödie?” Erzählungen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), 85–6.
22 Edit Kovács, Richter und Zeuge: Figuren des Autors in Thomas Bernhards Prosa (Vienna: Praesens, 2009), 16.
23 Ibid., 100.
24 Bernhard, Extinction, 831–2.
25 Ibid., 632.
26 Ibid., 831.
27 Ibid., 318.
28 Since Wolfsegg can be given away, it is obviously not a “Fideikommiss” (inalienable and indivisible property of a family) – even though the estate seems to lead an unchanging life of its own full of power and autonomy, independent of its respective heirs.
29 Bernhard, Extinction, 1024–5.
30 Ibid., 760 (italics in the original).
31 Hermann Helms-Derfert, Die Last der Geschichte: Interpretationen zur Prosa von Thomas Bernhard (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), 73–4.
32 Cornelia Vismann, Akten: Medientechnik und Recht (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2000), 8–9. See also: “A file technique entails a certain form and certain instances of the law. A different kind of binding, a new form of writing down, a changed storage mode, a conversion of the data collection affect the version of the law.” Ibid, 9.
33 Schönthaler, Negative Poetik, 81. “It is thus not the mediating self-representation of a protagonist according to the scheme of the novel, but the protocol as official, institutionalized written form that constitutes the sediment of the text.”
34 Vismann, Akten, 11.
35 See Ulrike Langbein, Geerbte Dinge: Soziale Praxis und symbolische Bedeutung des Erbens (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2002); Ulrike Vedder, “Erbstück,” in Handbuch Literatur & Materielle Kultur, ed. Susanne Scholz and Ulrike Vedder (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 397–9.
36 Krzysztof Pomian, Der Ursprung des Museums: Vom Sammeln (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988), 84.
37 See Claude Haas, “Fatale Requisiten in Tragödie und Trauerspiel,” in Handbuch Literatur & Materielle Kultur.
38 Thomas Bernhard, “Der Wetterfleck,” Erzählungen, 136.
39 Ibid., 144.
40 Thomas Bernhard, “Breath: A Decision,” in Gathering Evidence: A Memoir, trans. David McLintock (London: Vintage, 2003), 257.
41 Ibid., 272, 254.
42 Drobac, “Die Nazihose des Herrn Bernhard”, 179.
43 Bernhard, Correction, 293–4.
44 Ibid., 304.
45 Ibid.: “I went over to the sofa and grabbed handful after handful of the Roithamer legacy and crammed the desk drawers full of it. Again and again I grabbed a handful of papers and crammed it into a drawer, until the last sheet of paper was inside, in the end I had to use my knee to force the drawer shut which, being the last drawer, I had crammed full to bursting.”
46 Betz, Polyphone Räume und karnevalisiertes Erbe, 188.
47 Jean Améry, “Morbus austriacus: Bemerkungen zu Thomas Bernhards Die Ursache und Korrektur,” in Der integrale Humanismus: Zwischen Philosophie und Literatur: Aufsätze und Kritiken eines Lesers 1966–1978 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985), 229 (even if Améry then distances himself from a reading of Bernhard’s texts from the perspective of the philosophy of death).
48 Till Greite: “Watten: Ein Nachlaß, “Bernhard-Handbuch, 107. Here, Greite also uses the term “liminale Poetik” ([liminal poetics] ibid.).
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Notes on contributors
Ulrike Vedder
Ulrike Vedder is professor at the Institute for German Literature at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Before, she served as a research assistant at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (Center for Literary and Cultural Research), Berlin, among other places. She has a doctorate on the media history of the discourse of love and a postdoctoral thesis on wills and inheritance in 19th-century literature.
Current research foci: Narrations at the gates of death; literature and material culture; aesthetics of the museum; genealogy, inheritance, generation.
Recent book publications: Das Testament als literarisches Dispositiv. Kulturelle Praktiken des Erbes in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (2011); Handbuch Literatur & Materielle Kultur (co-edited with S. Scholz, 2018, Paperback 2019); Alter und Geschlecht. Soziale Verhältnisse und kulturelle Repräsentationen (co-edited with E. Reitinger, P. Chiangong, 2018); Museales Erzählen. Dinge, Räume, Narrative (co-edited with J. Stapelfeldt, K. Wiehl, 2020).