The Stranger Inside the Word: From Thomas Bernhard's Plays to the Anatomical Theater of Elfriede Jelinek

Summary

It all looks so familiar, said Bernhard Minetti, one of the great German actors of the twentieth century, after the 1976 premiere of Vor dem Ruhestand, Bernhard's stinging “Comedy of the German Soul,” as he subtitled his play. It features a contemporary German judge and former concentration camp commander on the eve of his retirement celebrating Himmler's birthday together with his two sisters as they had done every year. Minetti was known at that time as the quintessential Bernhard actor through his definitive performances in Die Macht der Gewohnheit (The Force of Habit), Die Jagdgesellschaft (The Hunting Party) and Minetti, Bernhard's homage to his favorite actor. Bernhard Minetti, however, rejected the role of the camp commander when it was offered to him. Perhaps it was too familiar to the actor who first established himself during the Nazi years in Berlin's Staatliches Schauspielhaus under the patronage of Hermann Göring. Some of Germany's most influential critics hailed the play both as a first exposure after the Second World War of the persistent Nazi mentality among Germans and as a triumph of Bernhard's comedic vision. When the play was performed in Minneapolis in 1981 at the renowned Guthrie Theatre, only two people were laughing according to the production staff who listened backstage through the intercom: the Rumanian director, Liviu Ciulei and the play's Austrian born translator and production dramaturge (myself). Politically correct audiences were reluctant to laugh at a scenario that depicts an unrepentant Nazi, his devoted sister with whom he sleeps once a year in honor of his idol's birthday and a younger, wheelchair bound sister, an anarchist and quadriplegic who was struck as a child by an American bomb that hit a kindergarten in World War II. Not that Germans or Austrians reacted with unanimous mirth. None of Bernhard's plays had ever been crowd pleasers or unqualified critical successes. The bizarre, yet strangely familiar settings with characters who obsessively hold forth in monologues to defiantly monosyllabic partners elicited as much bored ennui even among admirers of Bernhard's prose as they irritated post-Brechtian activists who expected theater to take an active part in the changing of society.