12 Facts About Thomas Bernhard

1.

Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular.

2.

Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen in the Netherlands, where his unmarried mother Herta Bernhard worked as a maid.

3.

Thomas Bernhard's natural father Alois Zuckerstatter was a carpenter and petty criminal who refused to acknowledge his son.

4.

Zuckerstatter died in Berlin from gas poisoning in an assumed suicide in 1940; Thomas Bernhard never met him.

5.

Thomas Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer.

6.

Thomas Bernhard's Lebensmensch was Hedwig Stavianicek, a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he cared for alone in her dying days.

7.

Thomas Bernhard had met Stavianicek in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the death of his beloved grandfather.

8.

Thomas Bernhard trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and was always profoundly interested in music.

9.

Thomas Bernhard's attractive house in Ohlsdorf-Obernathal 2 where he had moved in 1965 is a museum and centre for the study and performance of his work.

10.

Thomas Bernhard's work is most influenced by the feeling of being abandoned and by his incurable illness, which caused him to see death as the ultimate essence of existence.

11.

Thomas Bernhard is often considered a verbose writer, but Andreas Dorschel has broadened this view by showing that Thomas Bernhard's characters oscillate between excessive speech and highly economical expressions.

12.

The International Thomas Bernhard Foundation, established by his executor and half-brother Dr Peter Fabjan, has since made exceptions, although the German firm of Suhrkamp remains his principal publisher.