Category: German Literature

A Few Thoughts on Kleist’s Style

Heinrich von Kleist is one of the most extraordinary German writers of an age when German writing was already shaping world literature. However, it took a long time for the world to get used to him. Goethe famously snubbed him, and Kleist’s biography tends to be haunted by its ending – he died in a suicide pact at age 34. Before that death, however, he managed to produce a small body of work – his complete works, including letters, fits snuggle into a single two-thousand-page volume – which time has only elevated in stature.

For Kleist did not fit in within his world. Stefan Zweig, the early-twentieth-century Austrian writer, wrote a book entitled Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon, which suggests something of his character and his kindred spirits. Kleist’s writing, which I have long struggled to get into, has at last opened itself up to me. I have conquered his dreadfully long and torturous German sentences for the first time, and now I am able to see for myself what the fuss is all about.

Heinrich von Kleist

Kleist wrote dramas, and he wrote short stories, and he wrote a couple of interesting philosophical essays and journalistic pieces too. This post will focus on the short stories. At Cambridge I read Penthesilea, his tragedy involving Achilles and the eponymous Amazonian queen, but I could not understand it. Last month I read The Broken Jug and The Schroffenstein Family, both of which are early dramas which had moments of cleverness but were nevertheless a little contrived. I will read his more mature dramas, including Penthesilea again, in due course. But it is his short stories – eight of them, all written near the end of his life, that have motivated me to write today. For they are really something special.

In addition to his suicide pact, everyone likes to mention that poor Kleist had a rather significant mental breakdown in 1801. This is what scholars like to term the “Kant Crisis”. Kleist had been reading the aforementioned German philosopher and had accidentally broken down the foundations of his own world. It happens. Kleist learned from Kant that we are unable to penetrate through our sensory perception of the world to things as they really are. As he explained it to a friend, it’s as though everyone is wearing tinted glasses – our world is distorted, but we cannot know how, and we cannot know what the real world is actually like. Objective truth becomes impossible; at least Kleist saw it that way. Connections to others are fleeting, trust is impossible. Our world is only misunderstanding heaped upon misunderstanding. All this broke Kleist the man but it made Kleist the writer.

Style

Deceitful Reportage in Michael Kohlhaas

So what is this writer? Awful, is one way of describing him. His stories are made up of long, winding sentences, that occasionally bring German grammar up to its limits. These long sentences fit into paragraphs that go on for pages at a time. This does not make for easy reading. The two previous times I read Kleist’s prose, at school and then at my first year at university, I was crushed by it. The language was too complex, the syntax and lexis arcane. I had a feeling that I’d like Kleist, but I couldn’t reach him. Perhaps if he’d been born fifty years later, I thought, he’d have learned how to use speech marks and add a new paragraph here and there, as so often do his translators.

And yet these sentences and these paragraphs serve a purpose. “Michael Kohlhaas”, the longest novella, has the subtitle “from an old chronicle”. It tries, consciously, to be a kind of reportage. Kohlhaas, a real figure from the age of Luther, is blown up by Kleist into a titanic figure. A horse dealer who is wronged by an aristocrat, Kohlhaas burns the man’s castle to the ground and goes around pillaging half of Germany, just to get a kind of justice. Kleist pretends that the work is history, referring to “the chronicles whose comparison allows us to write this tale”. But the tale has little to do with the historical Kohlhaas, and Kleist’s approach seems designed more to derail our idea of history as something clear-cut and definite. The narrator informs us at one point that the sources disagree, and decides that he cannot really say what happened. At another point he mentions an emotion in Kohlhaas’s heart but refuses to say what it is. We are left with an allegedly objective document that falls apart.

Then there is the narrator himself. A man who refers to “the poor Kohlhaas” and only a moment later heaps insults upon him, the narrator provides no ballast. Though occasionally he appears to see into Kohlhaas’s heart, just as often he makes us see only a gesture, or a facial expression. As with some of my favourite books – Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Conrad’s Nostromo – Kleist presents us with a mysterious central character who we look upon, but rarely into.

The story further displays a defiance of objective truth by being filled with rumours – where is Kohlhaas and his band of rebels? – and mistakes. The justice system, supposedly on Kohlhaas’s side, and supposedly designed to help us reach Truth, proves hopelessly corrupt due to the influence of the aristocrats (mockery is made of the justice system in The Broken Jug as well). We repeatedly get the impression that around Kohlhaas are forces that he cannot understand and cannot predict, whether they are the scheming aristocrats or bandits using his name to further their own ends. In this, Kohlhaas becomes a kind of microcosm of humankind’s place in a not-fully-knowable universe, and a surprisingly modern work.

God and Perspective in “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, “The Foundling”, and “The Earthquake in Chile”

“Michael Kohlhaas” uses a documentary style that ultimately undermines itself. Elsewhere, Kleist explores the importance of perspective in questions of truth. “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, is a shorter story that is quite enigmatic. Four brothers arrive in Aachen with the intention of destroying some religious images – the time is at the height of Protestant fervour. They gather together a band of men and head to their target church, but during the mass, instead of giving the signal to attack, the brothers are overcome by the power of music. They begin to pray, and pray, and pray. They are brought to a madhouse, and there they stay, living out a long and somewhat strange life. The music that they heard was played by a nun that was apparently sick, but had miraculously recovered in time to perform. However, it later transpires that she was sick after all, and that her replacement’s identity is unknown.

What exactly has happened? We encounter much of the story through the eyes of the brothers’ mother, who travels six years later to Aachen in search of them. From one of the band of rabble-rousers she learns one version of the story, from the abbess another – and from other inhabitants of the town, still more versions. Nothing is clear, from who played the music to what happened to the brothers. We encounter a truth that has been shattered beyond repair, something Kleist makes clear by using numbers. We cannot reach the truth of a story where there were both definitely three hundred and one hundred rebels at the ready – we can only select a version that makes most sense to us.

And what does it mean that the brothers were converted? Is it an act of God? Perhaps, but we cannot be sure. They are catatonic, capable only of repetitious prayer. Although they appear to be happy, this is not the sign of a benevolent God – certainly not the kind of God that most of us look for. The boys’ mother is converted to Catholicism at the story’s end, but it’s a conversion that seems slightly absurd to us – we cannot understand her. We know what she experienced, of course, because we read about it – but we do not know how she interpreted it or how it touched her core.

God lies at the heart of Kleist’s most exciting works. Does he exist, and what is he like if he does exist? Kleist’s style reflects a refusal, a brutal refusal, to answer these questions. In “Saint Cecilia” we see an apparent act of God, but one that only makes God seem stranger than what we’ve been led to expect – it disorientates us. In “The Foundling”, another extraordinary story, a merchant takes in an orphan after his son dies and raises him as his own. And in return for all this unconditional, Christian kindness, he is treated with an almost satanic cruelty. It does not make sense. It challenges that Christian-moral firmament upon which our worldview rested in Kleist’s day, and still mostly rests in our own day. The tragic conclusion of “The Earthquake in Chile” takes place in and outside a church, but it is brutally violent and fit only for an old-testament God in one of His worst moods.

Conclusion

Any good story has an element of ambiguity, but Kleist’s ambiguity seeps through to his very formal approach to problems. We see events and characters from multiple angles, in a style that appears to be factual, but all this does not take us any closer to resolving our issues. On the contrary, it makes them even more acute. We have a God who seems to exist, but rather than providing a bedrock upon which to build a certain surety, Kleist uses his God to make us even more confused about what we think of as truth.

I admit that the style is frustratingly dense at times, and the sentences need attacking with a hacksaw, but if one can get over these hurdles, they will find in Kleist a writer who is very much worth reading. He is a figure who is disquieting in the extreme and strikingly contemporary. More posts on him to follow.

A Book Without a Soul – Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader

I read The Reader, by the German author Bernhard Schlink, because – surprise, surprise – it was on my reading list. However, I’d been meaning to read it for a while. I actually bought myself a copy of the German while still at school – the book is short, and at the time I thought that I’d have plenty of time, energy, and desire to read German literature in the original language. I read the first few pages and gave up. But now my German’s better and I do, sometimes, read things in that language now, and even occasionally enjoy doing so. Still, I was in Russia, and my German copy is at home, so I read Der Vorleser in English on my Kindle to save myself time.

The Reader is the story of Michael Berg, a young man who falls in love with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. One day she suddenly disappears, and when he meets her again it is in a courtroom, where she is being tried for working in concentration camps during the Holocaust. This forces Michael to re-evaluate their relationship and confront a kind of complicity for having loved her. As you do. Anyway, the novel forms part of the German postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) that I’ve written about elsewhere. In particular, The Reader raises questions about guilt and responsibility. How far can we blame Hanna for her actions, and all of that.

Well, let’s find out.

The Relationship – First Love

Young Michael Berg, aged just 15, gets hepatitis. He collapses vomiting on the way home from school. Luckily, however, a woman is there to help him. “When rescue came, it was almost an assault”. This woman is Hanna Schmitz, an ideal German beauty and in her thirties. When Michael recovers, after a long time in bed at home, he finds Hanna to thank her for her trouble. Except instead of just thanking her, he falls in love with her. When he sees her changing her stockings he goes red and runs away. But he comes back, and this time helps her move some coal. He gets covered in black dust and she suggests he has a bath. After the bath she puts her hands on his erection and initiates their physical relationship.

Being a modern reader who tends to value consent, this struck me as an inauspicious start to a relationship. Of course, for Michael, it’s great. The two create a ritual of showering and making love, and when he goes back to school it is with newfound confidence, because he now feels comfortable around girls. He starts skipping lessons at school to go and see Hanna, and even plans a biking holiday for them both at Easter, which they both actually end up doing. Everything seems wonderful. Michael even has the cute habit of reading her stories, mostly significant Enlightenment works by stodgy German authors. Anyway, she laps it up.

The Relationship – Dating a (literal) Nazi

Of course, things aren’t as wonderful as they seem. Michael narrates The Reader from far in the future. He already knows what will happen to their relationship, and he struggles to fully enjoy even these recollections, knowing what he eventually does about her. “Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily”. But even beyond hindsight, there’s a lot going wrong. She “took possession of [him] as a matter of course” during sex (I’m not critiquing anybody’s sexual preferences, but it’s an important point), and seems to view everything as a “power game”. The relationship quickly becomes abusive. Michael starts apologising for things he never did, taking on blame, surrendering. During their bicycle holiday, one morning she even hits him with her belt.

In some way, their relationship plays out in miniature the experience of a nation under fascism. Hanna is controlling, violent, and demands devotion. Michael gives it to her, accepting horrible conditions in the name of love (for the state). She is “single-minded” – there’s a lack of internality to her, something Adorno describes as common to the authoritarian personality type. When Michael thinks about his love for her there are lots of images of submerging, which also connects to fascism’s demands for a loss of self and identification with the state.

Moving On

One day Hanna disappears. Michael sees her while he’s out with his friends, but he doesn’t approach her. The next time he goes to her flat, he finds it empty. The aftermath of the relationship is just as nasty as the thing itself. Michael ends up sleeping with people he doesn’t love; he refuses his dying grandfather’s blessing out of an obnoxious nihilism. Hanna has left him a mess. But he does get into university, and there he studies law. One day he takes part in a seminar which involves going to a local court to watch the trial of some concentration camp guards. And it is here where we, in the second part of The Reader, meet Hanna again.

A Sham of a Court

Hanna, while they were together, never really spoke much about herself. Whenever Michael asked something she’d dismiss him – “the things you ask, kid!” – or else answer with difficulty – “it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers”. Now, at the courtroom, he learns the truth. Hanna had worked at the camps. What was more, while transferring prisoners from one camp to another as the war ended, she and her colleagues through negligence ended up killing almost all of them, for a fire broke out in the church where they were locked up for the night and the guards never opened the doors to free them.

Schlink, a professor of law in real life, introduces the reader to the challenges of retroactive justice. At first, for the students, the idea is an intellectual one. Hanna broke the law of the time, but the law was not applied to her then as a guard – does that mean she should go without punishment in the present? But this theoretical, intellectual problem becomes a personal one when Michael sees her among the defendants. However, even in the court it’s hard to feel we’re dealing with a real trial. Among the lawyers are ex-Nazis, and at one point Hanna rightly asks the judge “so what would you have done?” He can only bluster an answer. The idea that everyone in Germany is complicit in the Nazi atrocities, directly or indirectly, is a one challenging component of some postwar German thought.   

When Hanna is asked why she didn’t let the prisoners go free, she says that it would have been impossible to restore order. Faced with her duty as a guard and her duty as a caring human being, she chose the former. The Reader does engage a little bit with German philosophy, old as well as new. Michael’s father is a professor of the subject, and has written on Kant and Hegel. I’m no expert on Hegel, but I know enough about Kant to say that he placed a huge amount of emphasis on doing one’s duty.

While the categorical imperative probably has an answer to the question of whether we should let prisoners die or fail at our jobs, I think there is a subtext about the inadequacy of philosophy in The Reader. Early on in the novel Michael notes that “behaviour does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided”. In reality, neither Hegel nor Kant could create a philosophical system capable of coming to terms with the questions of collective guilt and responsibility that the Holocaust raised. When Michael eventually asks his father for advice about the case, he does not get the answer he wants from him either.

The Reader and the Listener

The twist of The Reader, which is relatively obvious, is that Hanna can’t read. She ended up in court because she ignored court summonses, and she hit Michael on their bike tour because he left her a note she couldn’t understand. In the courtroom the other guards blame her for writing a report on the atrocities, and she accepts responsibility for it. It turns out she’ll do anything to avoid the shame of others learning that she can’t read. In fact, she ended up in the camps because she was avoiding the possibility of promotion at her old job, a promotion that would have exposed her illiteracy.

For Michael, this raises the question of whether her illiteracy could “be sufficient reason for her behaviour at the trial or in the camp”. He knows that he could tell the judge, saving her from getting a huge prison sentence. But he hesitates. His father tells him that it’s more important to protect her dignity, her sense of self, than to save her from prison. In the end, Michael watches her get sentenced to a far longer sentence than she perhaps deserved.

After Court

Michael’s life after graduation is a failure. He hides from the world, becoming a professor of legal history. His wife separates from him. But one day he decides to write to Hanna, or rather to read to her. He sends her recordings from various books, so that she can listen and enjoy herself at prison. She eventually learns to read by following in the books his words. Michael’s attitude towards illiteracy in some way reflects the problem of Nazism itself, and the way it took hold over the German people. “Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation”. She has come to think for herself.

The final section of The Reader I shan’t spoil here. It is difficult and morally challenging. We are not asking ourselves “who is to blame”, because that’s a relatively straightforward question. The much harder question The Reader poses is “how much are they to blame?” This is an area of uncertainty, of gradations. I don’t have a clue myself what the answers might be. But Schlink orchestrates his novel carefully, and in doing so he makes sure we ask ourselves what we think. That’s commendable, in its way.

Conclusion

The Reader is on my university reading list for the same reasons it’s often read at German schools: it’s short, it’s morally complex, it’s historically relevant. It’s not unlike those pre-made meals you can buy at the supermarket – ready to eat (or analyse), but there’s something missing when you compare them with other meals (or books). You know, it might just be that it has no soul. I know that sounds ridiculous, especially when we’re talking about a relatively engaging love story with some guilt and redemption sprinkled on top. But what I mean is that I felt the book was too short – its themes, their weight, overwhelmed the human element it tried to explore.

That’s not to say you can’t write about people’s complicity in the German past in a short novel – Grass’s Cat and Mouse does it perfectly well. But the Holocaust is perhaps a little much. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I felt the book was written for its themes, rather than its characters, or the story. And when you have that impression, it’s hard to enjoy it. The characters lose their internal energy; they seem like automatons, just advancing the themes. The feeling is in no way as bad as reading Tolstoy’s later works, but it’s similar. The Reader just feels too simple, too formulaic, in spite of its great themes. It feels like a book you read at school. I enjoyed it at the time. I even went out and bought my girlfriend a copy as soon as I finished. But it’s hardly a book I’ll revisit.

Chopping Down the Bourgeoisie – Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters

I am not, on the whole, a fan of what I would call “closed-box novels”. Those torturous first-person narratives which Beckett and Murnane and so many others like to write, where our main character is generally floating in space, very rarely lucky enough to be trapped in a small box. From within this cramped environment they ramble, complain, whatever. But given how far detached from our own world theirs is, I get very little from them. Such narratives neither bring us closer to our fellows, nor do they ever appear to have any positive message to impart at all. Just pessimism and cynicism. If I wanted that, I’d go outside.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters is in some sense one of these closed-box mysteries. The main character spends most of the narrative sitting in a chair at a party, reminiscing or else thinking ill of those around him. A little later he has a bite to eat, sits and listens to an actor discourse, and finally goes home. What action there is lies within his mind until very late in the story. Though it is unparagraphed, and though it has a certain peculiar disconnection from human life that reminds me of Beckett, I ended up enjoying the novel. There was some light within its caverns, and the writing is also (trans. David McLintock) far funnier than I had expected.

I suppose I would like to open the box, and explain briefly what value to us in the real world this novel might have.

Plot Introduction

Woodcutters is set in Bernhard’s native Austria, in the Vienna of the 1980s. Our narrator is a writer, temporarily back in his homeland from England, where he appears to be in self-imposed exile. While in Vienna he accidentally encounters the Auersbergers – a married couple and old friends from the 50s, whom our narrator now despises, and they give him an invitation to “an artistic dinner” that he somehow fails to decline. He also hears of the suicide, by hanging, of their mutual friend, a woman called Joana. The action of Woodcutters takes place during this dinner, the same day as Joana’s funeral – first as our narrator sits alone on his chair, then during the dinner itself. The guest of honour is an actor from the Burgtheater, the most important Viennese theatre, but he is running late. Among the various guests is also Jeannie Billroth, another writer who the narrator despises.

Joana

The narrator’s treatment of his old friend’s suicide is rather ambiguous. As with most of the people in Woodcutters, Joana had once had a great impact on the narrator’s life, but since been abandoned by him. She had had a hard life, coming from the countryside to Vienna to be an artist but then ending up simply doing movement classes with actors. She married, but then Fritz, her famous fabric-making husband, ran off to Mexico without her. And so she drank, and drank, and the narrator is more surprised to hear that she had recently still been alive than that she had died. Why exactly she ended her life is unclear – what final thing brought her to go to the countryside and hang herself. But the narrator says he had always known she would hang herself, because she had dreams and dreams are not fit for this world.

Joana had been the narrator’s friend, and he had taken no interest in her these past ten or twenty years. Whether or not there is any guilt there is hard to say, but the cynicism of the narrator shouldn’t be confused with authority. At the funeral, which takes place in the village where Joana grew up and died, the narrator encounters John, Joana’s companion. At first he hates him, considering him an ill-educated peasant, but as he recollects the funeral his opinion changes, and he realises that in comparison with the bourgeois trash that were also there, John was actually a good man. He had organised the funeral, he had done his duty and looked death in the face in the way that the endlessly posing Viennese never had. And that, of course, is better than nothing.

Auersberger

Just now looking through the German Wikipedia page for Woodcutters I discovered to my surprise and, I think, horror, that these characters all have quite clear analogues in the real world. In many cases Bernhard did not even bother changing first names. That is a surprise because Woodcutters is full of characters with changed names. Joana was originally Elfriede, for example, and Auersberger’s name has also been pruned by him to make it sound more aristocratic. Everyone here is trying to be someone other than themselves.

The Auersbergers, “Auersberger” and “his wife”, are the hosts of the party. They have not changed in the thirty or so years that the narrator has had the misfortune of knowing them. The man is a composer, from the school of Anton Webern; his wife is a singer. Auersberger had promise, had genius perhaps, but now he is simply considered one of Webern’s many successors. He has a drinking problem, and occasionally goes for drying-out cures.

Their marriage is not happy – none in the book is. They are sustained by her money and these social events. They are, to quote our narrator, “perfidious society masturbators”. They have destroyed an entire village – the source of her wealth – by their indolence. As they do no work, they are forced to gradually sell parcels of land from her inheritance, which leads to land development. And no doubt by not working they are also doing a lot of damage to their souls. Everything about the Auersbergers is fake, dishonest. I particularly enjoyed the several pages where the actor talks about The Wild Duck, the play by Ibsen that he had been in, and not one person save Jeannie and the narrator has actually seen it. But in addition to the fake names there are fake books, fake libraries, fake relationships. Their whole world is false.

Auersberger, though, is terribly funny. He has drunk far more than he should and his wife keeps trying to force him to go to bed, whereupon he kicks her. But the best line in the book, I thought, comes when the discussion turns to suicide’s prevalence among the Austrians at that time.

“The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him.”

This gives a good idea of the humour in Woodcutters. It is cruel, but it is also shockingly funny. Yet I cannot leave Auersberger like this, because his particular character goes too far. The narrator is cynical, is brutal. But Auersberger – at least to me, reads as someone far more sinister, considering the context of politically unrepentant Austria in postwar period. When he starts talking about how “the human race ought to be abolished”, or “we should all kill one another”, it suggests a kind of unreformed Nazi nihilism, at least to me. So too does his destruction of chairs and wineglasses. He is good for a laugh, but not when you start thinking about him.

Jeannie and the Actor

Considering it is a broadside against Viennese bourgeois society, art naturally enough sits at centre of Woodcutters. Our narrator time and again refers to the way that Vienna consumes talented artists and turns them into mediocrities – Joana and Auersberger are but examples of this. Only Fritz and – we presume – the narrator, were able to escape the Austrian capital’s pernicious influence, and then only by fleeing abroad. Jeannie Billroth, who the narrator once served as lover, is one who has not escaped Vienna’s clutches. Styling herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, she is in the narrator’s eye a phenomenal mediocrity. Her days, he suggests, are spent pandering to politicians to secure pensions and prizes. After all,

“Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honoured grave in the Central Cemetery”.

If Jeannie is as untalented and inauthentic as everyone else at the party, the actor is almost the opposite. He arrives incredibly late, pays decorum no heed, but though he is for the most part boring, he is nonetheless himself. When Jeannie asks him, not once, not twice, not even three times but repeatedly until he cannot ignore her any longer, whether he could say, “at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfilment”, he at last snaps. He hates the party, hates the people there, and hates Jeannie above all. What he wants, what he truly wants, is “to go into the forest, deep into the forest… to yield oneself up to the forest” and be a woodcutter.

The actor, who had described to the uninterested listeners how he had holed himself up in a mountain shack in order to learn his lines and truly feel his role, is the real artist. Of course, he is as petty as the rest of them in many ways, and he does appear slightly ridiculous. Here is the wonderful description of him eating. It is truly amazing how Bernhard manages to convey the rush of the artist’s spooning in his language:

“Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favourite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades.”

Truth-telling and Cynicism

Why mention the spooning? Because it makes the actor look ridiculous. It undermines him, and Woodcutters as a whole is about undermining people. It is about, in some sense, telling the truth.

“For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us.”

It is only, obliterated by another person, that we can ever reflect upon ourselves honestly and turn away from the incorrect path that we are on. Sometimes, not even that is enough. In another moment that had me write “big oof” in the margins the narrator turns to a very drunken Auersberger, quite randomly after the dinner, and say

“that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth.”

Big oof indeed.

Can we ever break out of the cycles that we are in? Are we condemned to them until at last, confronted with the sheer awfulness of other people, we finally snap? The cynicism of the narrator is not without its purpose. There is at least a kind of hope, if only for himself, that life can be better than an artistic dinner in Vienna. And as the novel ends he runs – literally runs – determined to make something of his experience that isn’t just a complaint. There is something to be valued here.

Conclusion

Woodcutters is the first work of fiction by Bernhard that I have read. I remember once starting Frost and stopping, but after Woodcutters I have already ordered another novel. Woodcutters is not quite the closed-box I thought it was. It is hilarious in a way that is relevant to us all, living as we do in a bourgeois cultural milieu (you are on this blog, after all). It is not too long either, and easy to read. Bernhard’s style has his narrator constantly going in circles, searching for perfect barb with which to pierce his old friends’ bubbles. And these barbs are not the end. There is a sense, a limited sense, that underneath the cynicism and the misanthropy there is a good world and a good life to be found, just not the one we live in and not the one we’re living.

But that’s what we have books for. To show the way to something better.