Thus, the film starts with Bernhard discussing his rather gloomy and earnest poetry – collected in In Hora Moris and Under the Iron of the Moon and On Earth and in Hell –
I cannot sleep,
for the circus has started up outside my window
and people are cheering!
As if through the grass of hell
I see their faces,
which bring this city
its destruction
– before Bernhard talks about his early novel Frost, then The Lime Works, in which Bernhard makes an aesthetic breakthrough, injecting a diabolical humour into the madness and rantings of his protagonists.
We then see Bernhard being interviewed about his first theatre works – A Party for Boris, The Famous, Minetti – before moving on to his multi-volume autobiographical work, published in English as Gathering Evidence, which describes his childhood and upbringing in what he calls Catholic National Socialist Austria, redeemed only by the influence of his grandfather, an intellectual, a failed writer but above all an iconoclast and nonconformist; and his near-fatal lung illness and hospitalisation as a young man.
The film charts Bernhard’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with Austria as through his novels and plays he spares no invective to castigate the country’s politics and culture and engages in thinly-disguised attacks on leading intellectual figures he has encountered over the years.
Bernhard’s loathing is partly contrived – ‘to explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear’. In many of the later interviews, Bernhard goes about trying to explain himself with a smirk on his face, apparently in full knowledge of how provocative he’s being and laughing about how offended his audience is.
Thus Bernhard’s taunting of his audience is part of a performance, with Austria as the stage, the entire Austrian population as his audience and he as a stand-up or a clown berating them and making them squirm.
The relationship between Bernhard and his Austrian audience grew so strained, the film shows, that his novel Cutting Timber: An Irritation, a coruscating and hilarious denunciation of former friends and bourgeois intellectual Vienna was, by court order, banned for libel, while his final play Heldenplatz, about continued antisemitism in Austria, written at a time when ex-Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim had been elected Austria’s president, was intended to libel a whole country – Waldheim called the play ‘an insult to the Austrian people’ – and was met with protests, resignations, calls for a boycott, threats of violence, real violence, performances marred by hecklers, all while Bernhard’s health was rapidly deteriorating and signifying his early death.