By GABRIELA BRUSCHINI GRECCA*
Commentary on the staging of Thomas Bernhard's play directed by Frank Castorf
Burgtheater, Vienna, 19 December 2024. Almost ten months after the premiere of a new version of the play Heldenplatz (“Heroes’ Square”), the controversial play by Thomas Bernhard, performed by Berlin director Frank Castorf, returns to the same stage – this time, with a duration reduced by almost half. On February 17, the audience at the Burg was treated to a play lasting a little over five hours, amid boos, whistles and some applause after the end¹.
At the December reception, which I attended in person, after a shortened version of approximately 2h25min, there was brief applause and the audience soon emptied the theater. All without much excitement. Or, as Theodor Adorno would say… with a contemplative tranquility?
A Heldenplatz by Thomas Bernhard
Heldenplatz (1988) was Thomas Bernhard's last play, written and performed a few months before his death. The events underlying the construction of the plot refer us to the Schuster family, of Jewish origin, who were forced to flee Austria in 1938 and returned to Vienna in 1968. The Schuster family then decided to return at the insistence of the mayor of Vienna, so that university professor Josef Schuster, the patriarch of the family, could once again assume his chair.
However, neither he nor his wife Hedwig are able to readapt. Josef, on the one hand, faces hostility from fellow university students. On the other hand, Hedwig – also called Frau Schuster throughout the play – constantly hallucinates hearing the clamor and applause coming from Heroes' Square in 1938, when Hitler invades Austria and arrives in Vienna to a warm welcome from countless Austrians. The square from where Hitler decided to announce the Connection (the annexation of Austria to Germany), which gives the title to Thomas Bernhard's work, is located opposite the Hofburg imperial palace, from where the Habsburgs ruled and which currently houses the Austrian National Library, the Riding School, among other museums, treasures and even the presidential office.
The “heroes,” represented by two giant statues on each side of the square, are tributes from Franz Joseph I to Eugene of Savoy and Archduke Karl – two military men who, at different historical moments, became icons of war and “saviors of the fatherland” in the eyes of the Austrians. In Thomas Bernhard’s play, Herr and Frau Schuster live in an apartment facing this square.
Twenty years later, in 1988, Josef decides, against his wife's wishes, to return to exile in Oxford. However, when all the preparations are complete, Josef throws himself out of the apartment window. He commits suicide, believing that Austria is still as Nazi as it was – and worse – during the years of the annexation.
All of this is the material of the play's past – which, however, does not pretend to be a bourgeois drama, autonomous and self-referential. On the contrary, the present of the remaining members of the family is completely dependent on the past that cannot (and should not) be erased. Much of the events are already addressed in scene I, through the dialogue between two maids, Frau Zittel and Herta, who are brushing shoes and ironing shirts while discussing what happened to their boss, as well as his character.
All subsequent scenes in Thomas Bernhard’s play, which take place after the professor’s burial, continue to be permeated by the shadows left by the suicide, which always return as a signifier to the remaining family members, as well as themes linked to escape, exile and return – at the same time as these, the living, spend endless monologues (a characteristic of all of Thomas Bernhard’s fictional and non-fictional work) portraying Austria as an annihilating country, where “you have to be Catholic/ or National Socialist/ everything else is not tolerated”, and “imbeciles from Styria idiots from Salzburg/ […]/ intellectual life in this city/ has practically suffocated at this low level/ […]/ the city of Vienna is nothing but a stupid infamy”.
A Heldenplatz by Franz Castorf
A Heldenplatz by Berliner Franz Castorf, from 2024, could not challenge the horizons of the original play more. At first, when the curtains open, the very construction of the stage space makes the spectator feel like they have come to see the wrong play: the stage, which rotates, is made of enormous sets with scaffolding behind each of its parts, in addition to a four-walled construction that imitates a house that can actually be entered and exited. This will later be Frau Schuster's house; however, the rest of the stage's composition refers to... Americans.
The part of the set that faces us the most recreates a block in front of Borough Hall Station in Brooklyn. There is a Coca-Cola advertisement very close by. On the left side, a huge representation of a dress hem with legs upside down, possibly Marilyn Monroe. On the right side, the iconic image of Al Capone with a cigar represented in the middle of the American flag. At times, when the stage turns a little more to the left, it is possible to see small posters from 1939 calling for “true American patriots” to a mass rally at Madison Square Garden, also in New York.
Finally, a sign, which never faces the audience in any of the stage rotations, which are not complete, it is possible to read backwards the question “Encourage yourself?” – a symptomatic linguistic deviation from “Are you alone?” (should we kill him/her/them?). The lighting is dim and spotty; the atmosphere is quite dark and, at times, foggy.
The only thing that doesn't change is the giant background image, behind all these rotating elements: a gigantic photograph of an enthusiastic crowd at a Nazi rally, giving the salute.
In the first moment of the play, the aforementioned actor Marcel Haupermann comes to the front of the stage, looks at everyone and shouts: “Boo!” Three times Haupermann directs this boo to the audience, in crescendo. He welcomes the audience in an enigmatic way, and then three more ear-piercing boos. The audience bursts into laughter, as if the actor’s resource announced the beginning of a comic plot. Ironically, this is precisely the moment when the actor asks the audience if “is it when the auditorium is in darkness that, in Vienna, the ‘should-be’ changes?” (“Wenn der Zuschauerraum dunkel ist, soll das der Moment sein, in Wien sich das Muss sein verändert?”). In fact, that day, during the performance, at various moments, nervous and/or out-of-context laughter was frequent in the most confrontational moments of the play, in addition to situations in which the clear project was to use humor.
What character does Haupermann play at the beginning? And what about the older actor (Branko Samarovski) who passes by in the background chatting quietly on a telephone for the first fifteen to twenty minutes of the play? And the decadent lady (Inge Maux) who joins them? We fail miserably in trying to induce an immediate correlation between the trio (as well as three other actors who will appear later) and the characters in Thomas Bernhard's dramatic text.
Added to the lack of identification of the setting is the lack of traceability of who the actors on stage are actually representing. Only later do we gradually discover that each of the six actors plays multiple characters, alternating roles in each scene – the changes in which are mainly marked by the rotation of the scenery on stage. Only later will the actors reproduce the dinner scene – which, in the original text, is the final one – when everyone is at the table and, at the end, with background audio reproducing the screams of the crowd in Heroes' Square, Frau Schuster abruptly falls her head on the table and Bernhard's play ends.
In Frank Castorf's version, however, in addition to being an intermediate scene, even the way it is shown is completely unusual: the actors enter the aforementioned house erected in the middle of the stage and, inside it, the actors begin to be filmed by cameramen in real time. The spectator cannot see anything that happens inside, leaving the rest of the stage less dark and completely empty of movement. Instead, a large screen comes down from the top of the stage and transmits, live, the scenes from inside the place – using cinematographic techniques, such as Close in the actors' expressions.
Another moment when the original characters from Heldenplatz appear towards the end of the play, but even there the director resorts to the unusual: he brings us a Josef Schuster wrapped in bandages and coming from the world of the dead to tell us about having given up protesting – a phrase said, in the original, by his brother, Robert, in the Volksgarten (“I have protested so much in my life / and it was of no use”). A little earlier, it is the actress Marie-Louise Stockinger who also connects us a little more to the source text: playing the Schusters’ daughter, Anna, we hear the most memorable lines of Heldenplatz, who tell us that “there are more Nazis in Vienna today [1988]/ than in 1938/ you will see/ this will end badly/ you don’t even need to be very/ intelligent to know/ they will come out again/ from all the holes/ that were covered for forty years/ just talk to anyone/ and in a short time you will realize/ that they are a Nazi”.
Apart from these precise and recognizable situations, the rest of the Heldenplatz Castorp's work is added to several other texts and references. I remember at least one song in Yiddish performed by Inge Maux, at the specific moment when she (also) plays Frau Schuster. In an interview contained in a brochure that spectators can buy right after entering the Burgtheater, Frank Castorf reveals the use of intertextuality – a resource that, by the way, is characteristic of his other theatrical adaptations.
So, in addition to Heldenplatz, the viewer also hears from the characters' mouths excerpts from a travelogue by the young John F. Kennedy, who was in Munich in 1937 and was fascinated by Hitler and the Germans – by their “order” and by being “too good” at what they were doing². For Castorf, “Kennedy traveled through Germany with tourist curiosity and a desire for fun, admiring the cleanliness of the small medieval towns along the Rhine. There was also a dose of ethno-pop, with stereotypical views about different peoples and traces of a latently anti-Semitic education that he had apparently received.”
There are also other texts constantly intersected with the play written by the American Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), who dedicated his fictional and autobiographical work, in addition to criticizing anti-Semitism and the rise of the Nazis, to the cultural and multi-ethnic life that characterized New York in the 1930s. The stories used are “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn","The Proud Brother"and "Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time” – all published in the collection From Death to Morning (1935). Wolfe, in fact, had complexes about being a descendant of Germans, especially after the rise of Nazism, which is very much in line with Thomas Bernhard's concerns regarding his “origins”.
His writings are quite recurrent in the first part of the play, in which the actors Haupermann, Saramovski and Maux are in front of the aforementioned Borough Hall station and, at a given moment, people from the play's technical support come to the front of the stage bringing a wagon made of cardboard and fabric, inside which the three actors enter and pretend to be three Jews fleeing from Vienna to New York through this surrealist wagon, while they talk about the difficulties they have faced, tear the fabrics and joke about the possibilities of an effective plan to escape death.
However, Thomas Wolfe was also chosen by Franz Castorf for two other reasons: because of the way he is diametrically opposed to Thomas Bernhard – the former, more diffuse and indirect in his expression of ideas than the latter, the chief troublemaker – and because several of his writings touch on the idea of the impossibility of the exile's return, something experienced by Josef Schuster from 1968 until his suicide in 1988 and which is not directly seen by us, the spectators, in the original play. With this, the senses of Heldenplatz broaden their horizons and branch out in previously unimaginable directions.
But a section of German-language critics saw a problem in Franz Castorf's intertextual idiosyncrasies: Castorf's play had given in to an excessive entanglement with American issues, making the original a memory, and taking up little of Austria. Perhaps, one can speculate, a good part of the fans of Heldenplatz Today, we have become accustomed to reading it in complete adherence to the controversy that permeated its production and staging context: the play had been commissioned from Thomas Bernhard by the then director of the Burgtheater, Claus Peymann, in order to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Burg in 1988 – coinciding with another historical milestone: the memory of the 50th anniversary of the Annexation.
Josef with “ph”?
As Alexandre Flory reports in the preface to the most recent translation of Heldenplatz by Christine Röhrig (2020, Temporal publisher), the expectation of the official events that took place in Vienna in that year of 1988 was to reinforce the cultural imaginary of Austria as “the first victim of Nazism, in a forced annexation”. Furthermore, Flory emphasizes that “[t]he events sought, in particular, to forget the scandal of the election of Kurt Walheim to the presidency two years earlier, in 1986” – president elected even though his participation in the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization, had been proven.
Against the omissions and the stopgaps, Thomas Bernhard puts in the mouths of a Jewish family – the Schusters – warnings such as “but just because you once ate well/ in a restaurant/ or had a good coffee in a café/ you must not forget/ that you are in the most socially dangerous/ of all European states/ […]/ where human rights are trampled upon/ […]/ For people like us the cemetery has always been/ the only way out”. In Franz Castorf’s adaptation, the elements linked to Judaism are even more exacerbated: from the aforementioned use of Yiddish and some songs to the costumes.
The scandal, as Alexandre Flory reports, followed the play before, during and after its production. In another text, a 2010 article on the “formal provocation” in Heldenplatz, the long-time researcher of Thomas Bernhard's dramatic and novelistic production summarizes some moments that set the tone for what happened: “Theatre critic Sigrid Löffler obtains excerpts of the play, leaked during rehearsals, and publishes them in the magazine Profil – which, according to many, would have happened with the implicit consent of Bernhard and Peyman – in August and September 1988, two months before the premiere, which creates a scandal due to the characters' invectives against Austria and the Austrians […] Newspapers such as the Neue Kronen Zeitung and politicians such as Vice-Chancellor Alois Mock, as well as former Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, position themselves against the production of the play, while Education Minister Hilde Hawlicek and authors such as Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Scharang and Peter Turrini defend freedom of expression. […] Defamation campaigns against Peyman and Bernhard emerged, which, in a way, caused the text of the play to be updated, so to speak, on the real stage of Austrian public opinion, even before the performance, as HÖLLER (2001: 7) said: “From one moment to the next there were efforts to boycott the performance and demands were made for the expulsion of the author and the director, as if the theater had managed to prove the play’s provocative assertion that the years 1938 and 1988 were interchangeable.”
In this sense, in fact, it is as if Marcel Haupermann's repetition of “Boo!” came to communicate that, in some way, the adaptation continues where the original left off – and not because of the diegesis itself…
For some of Thomas Bernhard’s current admirers, or for critics who have some respect for his work, it seems that the view of the Austrian author’s last play is unable to free itself from a certain “folklore” created around its reception. Which also provokes reflection: if Bernhard’s literary production aims precisely to put the most uncomfortable assertions possible into the mouths of his characters (and narrators, in the case of the novel), what does this swallowing of his words to the point of becoming a fetish mean? Of “nest-pooper” (Nestbeschmutzer) the object of the imposed enjoyment?
In 1988, it was desirable to talk about Austria as Hitler's first victim in order to cover up the election of Kurt Waldheim. In 2024, we would be in a new logic of wanting to talk about the late Kurt Waldheim in order to cover up the fact that the extreme right won the general parliamentary elections in Austria for the first time since the Second World War – with Herbert Kickl leading the “Freedom Party of Austria” (FPÖ), founded precisely… by former members of the SS³? And gaining momentum through strong anti-immigration propaganda.4? It seems to me that there is a persistence of a collective symptom: in short, the refusal to take a parallax view. In favor of a contemplative tranquility of the now fanatics of Thomas Bernhard and the fantasies that they seek to co-opt at the expense (and, certainly, very much against the will) of the author.
One last provocation – without judging the value of the piece, but on the framing5 relating to Franz Castorf having “got lost” in an “excess” of American references, “escaping” from the original text. Apart from a generic statement that could be made about the shadow of the predatory return of Trumpism in recent months or about the expansion of the theme of anti-Semitism as something that does not concern a single country or a single space, but the issue is even more concrete in what it seems (not least because much of the mess between the European Union, European anti-Semitism and Palestinian genocide has been quite stirred up and excited in recent years by another Josef, the one with a “ph”, Biden).
The title of Matthew Karnitsching's article Politico of the European Union is self-explanatory: How Hitler's homeland became Israel's European BFF⁶. Again, a slightly more parallactic view would do the Austrians some good, as they really have severe problems understanding the word “reparation” (not that we Brazilians could teach them anything in this regard…), since, in a short space of time, they went from talking about “disapproval of Hamas” to withdrawing all humanitarian aid from the Gaza Strip (returning a few months later).
At the 2023 General Assembly, the United States and Austria voted side by side, with only eight other countries, against approving a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, surprising, for several reasons, even the now almost seventy-year-old Declaration of Permanent Military Neutrality – a condition for the Allied occupation to be able to vacate the country in 1955 and the second Republic of Austria to return. In my view, the difficulties with reception do less than denounce the difficulty Europeans have in dealing with the multifaceted representation of the crises that characterize the contemporary world – one of the reasons why they are possibly being beaten by the far right.
(The next day, I open a small Viennese newspaper, free in all train and subway stations: ¾ of the page is taken up by a small, sweet-faced fairy, throwing some dots of glitter in the central message: “thanks to you, reader, the year 2024 was magical”! [“Dank Ihnen war 2024 zauberhaft”]).
Therefore, the reinterpretation of Franz Castorf at the very least helps to spark reflections on this entire story that begins in Heldenplatz and ends in Jerusalem: the damage caused by the failure to repair Nazism remains, and it is in the confused position within contemporary capitalism and in the flirtation with the radical populist right that the damage spreads. Thomas Bernhard, who, in essence, always spoke about this without even being appointed to do so, emerges even more gigantic.
(For those interested, in Burg, the next section of the Heldenplatz by Frank Castorf is scheduled for February 06th, and, according to the website, the five-hour version will be performed again (with an interval).
*Gabriela Bruschini Grecca is a professor in the Department of Literature at the State University of Minas Gerais – Divinópolis unit.
Notes
¹Review from the day after the premiere, by Walter Mayr: https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/frank-castorf-thomas-bernhard-heldenplatz-was-diese-regisseure-den-schauspielern-antun-kritik-a-b293171e-0ed5-4993-9662-bbeec13f9d1d.
²The notes from this visit are in the book Unter Deutschen: Reisetagebücher und Briefe 1937-1945, organized by Oliver Lubrich in 2013. There is some commentary on some parts of the work made by Marc von Lüpke-Schwarz to Deutsche Welle, with a translation into Portuguese available at https://www.dw.com/pt-br/livro-revela-rela%C3%A7%C3%A3o-de-kennedy-com-a-alemanha/a-16910118.
³Some data in Portuguese: https://www.dw.com/pt-br/fp%C3%B6-a-turbulenta-hist%C3%B3ria-de-um-partido-de-extrema-direita/a-48797532.
4 Just look at the package of anti-immigration measures on the party's own website: https://www.fpoe.at/asylstopp-jetzt.
5The flood of backlash against the five-hour version of Heldenplatz Castorf's were summarized by actress and writer Gabi Hift to Nachtkritik: https://nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23466:heldenplatz-burgtheater-wien-frank-castorf-inszeniert-thomas-bernhards-skandaltraechtiges-stueck-in-hochform&catid=80.
⁶https://www.politico.eu/article/adolf-hitler-homeland-austria-became-israel-europe-bff-palestine-conflict/
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