Thomas Bernhard’s politics

Good luck trying to pin down Thomas Bernhard’s politics. Reading his plays, poems and novels won’t help you determine what the Austrian writer truly held to be politically true or what his politics were. Perhaps the only conclusion we can draw is that he was disgusted by all political interventions, found them all equally repugnant, preposterous and irrelevant.

Here he berates socialism or social democracy, which he declares ‘a sham’:

the socialists are today's exploiters
the socialists are the grave-diggers of this country
the socialists are today's capitalists
the socialists who are no longer socialists
are the real criminals in this country
compared with them the Catholic riff-raff is downright irrelevant

And as the above quote from Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz indicates, the Roman Catholic church, the bulwark of Austrian conservatism, is another consistent target for loathing, especially when Bernhard associates it with Austria’s Nazi past, and it becomes, in Bernhard’s phrase, Catholic National Socialism, which Bernhard was fond of saying is the national ideology of Austria – ‘wherever we look, we see only Catholicism or National Socialism’ – prevailing to this day:

What’s happening right now
is that a majority of Austrians want
National Socialism to rule
under the surface National Socialism
has been back in power for a long time

Of course, just because Bernhard’s characters articulate hatred for socialism or believe that Austria remains in the grip of Roman Catholic Nazism doesn’t mean this is what Bernhard himself believed – though he probably did. Nor should we forget that Bernhard was a provocateur, who relished in taunting, shocking and disorientating his audience and readers, who believed in exaggeration as a useful aesthetic tool– ‘to explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear.’

Ultimately, Bernhard’s interests go beyond politics, which is just another distraction from the things that really matter in his world – madness, despair, failure, illness and death, the specifics of the human condition, although, since politics and society are human creations, they come to characterise these fields too.

what do you say will the Reds win the next election
but they have no character
and the Conservatives are all morons
swinishness is the driving force in all parties
if you elect a politician today
you’re electing a corrupt bastard
that’s how it is