Grossvaterland: Thomas Bernhards Schriftstellergenese dargestellt anhand seiner (Auto-) Biographie.(Review)

Grossvaterland: Thomas Bernhards Schriftstellergenese dargestellt anhand seiner (Auto-) Biographie. By ALEXANDRA LUDEWIG. Bern, Berlin, and Bruxelles: Lang. 1999. 366 pp. 29 [pounds sterling].

The Salzburg Heimatdichter Johannes Freumbichler would in all probability have been consigned to literary-historical oblivion if his grandson had not happened to be Thomas Bernhard. In his autobiographical texts Bernhard acknowledges the decisive role played by Freumbichler in his upbringing, and many of Freumbichler's character-traits are shared by Bernhard's fictional protagonists. The relationship between the two writers has formed the subject of several studies, of which Alexandra Ludewig's is the latest.

As her punning title suggests, however, the scope of her book goes beyond the Bernhard-Freumbichler nexus to take account of Bernhard's relationship to Austria: the country, its history, and its culture. She begins her study with a reading of Bernhard's autobiography as an act of myth-formation, and demonstrates that Bernhard's poetic principle of 'Gegen-Satze', that is, the simultaneous presence of contradictory statements within a short passage of text, foregrounds the artificiality of his putatively autobiographical works. Ludewig then examines the representation of Freumbichler in Bernhard's autobiographical pentalogy, before juxtaposing her own account of 'Der reale Grossvater Johannes Freumbichler' in order to show the extent to which Bernhard mythologizes his grandfather's life-story. There follow potted histories of Austria, Austrian literature, and Bernhard's architectural activities, a consideration of Bernhard as anti-Heimatdichter, and a concluding section on recent anti-Heimat novels by Franz lnnerhofer, Josef Winckler, and Robert Schneider.

An exceptional quantity of research has clearly gone into the production of Grossvaterland. The thirty-page bibliography lists works on Austrian political and literary history, the history and theory of the Heimatroman, and a wealth of other secondary and theoretical sources. Ludewig has augmented her reading with archival research on the Freumbichler Nachlab and other unpublished sources, and also conducted interviews with Bernhard's surviving relatives. However, it is difficult not to come away from this book with the sense that Ludewig's project is hampered by the very diversity of the material she seeks to elucidate.

The basic principle ...