Thomas Bernhard – Heldenplatz

Thomas Bernhard's play ‘Heldenplatz’ was a contract work: For the 100th anniversary of the ‘new’ Vienna Burgtheater, which opened in 1888, director Claus Peymann asked Bernhard to write a play. But 1988 was also the commemoration year of Austria's ‘Anschluss’ to the Third Reich that had taken place 50 years earlier. Bernhard's drama deals with the surviving family members of the formerly expelled mathematics professor Josef Schuster, who, after returning to Vienna, hunted by the resurgent nationalism and anti-Semitism, commits suicide in March 1988.

Due to an indiscretion that has not yet been fully clarified, parts of the text reached the press weeks before the play’s premiere. Bernhard's sweeping attack against Austrian fascism, catholicism, and socialism led to the biggest theatre scandal of the Second Republic. At the premiere, the audience had both applause and boos for the author.

This most spectacular drama by Bernhard has now been documented in its genesis. Based on the first edition of the work, published in 1988 in the 'Bibliothek Suhrkamp' (BS 997), this new edition provides for the reproduction of all text levels preserved in the Thomas Bernhard estate, all of them presented with diplomatic transcriptions. This way, Bernhard's stylistic process in particular can be traced.

Based on the model of the edition of ‘Wittgensteins Neffe’ (‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew'), published in 2021,’ (wn.ace.oeaw.ac.at), the text is made accessible through comments and registers. Reports and reviews from the most important media sources are cited to illustrate the work’s extremely broad reception history which is displayed with bibliographical data and visualised in an interactive timeline.

The aim of the project was to present Bernhard's linguistically developed provocative power and its public consequences against a contemporary historical background.