THOMAS. BERNHARD

Old Masters (1985) is Thomas Bernhard's devilishly funny story about the friendship between two old men. For over thirty years Reger, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, thinking and railing against contemporary society, his fellow men, artists, the weather, even the state of public lavatories. His friend Atzbacher has been summoned to meet him, and through his eyes we learn more about Reger - the tragic death of his wife, his thoughts of suicide and, eventually, the true purpose of their appointment. At once pessimistic and exuberant, rancorous and hilarious, Old Masters is a richly satirical portrait of culture, genius, nationhood, class, the value of art and the pretensions of humanity.

Old Masters

Nathan Johnson

Genius and Austria do not go together, I said. In Austria one has to be mediocre in order to be listened to and taken seriously, one has to be a person of incompetence and of provincial mendacity, a person with an absolute small-country mentality. A genius or even an exceptional mind is sooner or later finished offhere in a humiliating manner, I said to Irrsigler. Only people like Reger, whom one can count on the fingers of one hand in this dreadful country, survive this state of degradation and hatred, of oppression and disregard, of that universal anti-intellectual meanness which reigns everywhere in Austria, only people with a magnificent character and a truly acute incorruptible intelligence. 

Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth. In all my life, therefore, I hardly ever hated anything with a fiercer hatred than art historians, Reger said.

I have always detested crowds, I have avoided them all my life, I have never gone to any meeting, no matter what, because of my detestation of crowds, just as Reger, incidentally, had not either, I hate nothing more profoundly than the multitude, than a crowd, I continually believe, even without seeking them out, that I am going to be crushed by the multitude or by the crowd. Even as a child I avoided multitudes, I detested crowds, the accumulation of people, the concentration of vileness and mindlessness and lies. Much as we should love each individual, I believe, so we hate the mass.

Anything that is said sooner or later turns out to be nonsense, but if we utter it convincingly, with the most incredible vehemence we can muster, then it is no crime, he said. Anything we think we also wish to utter, Reger said, and basically we do not rest until we have uttered it because if we keep silent about it we choke on it. Mankind would have choked long ago if it had kept silent about all the nonsense it thought throughout its history, any individual who keeps silent too long chokes, and mankind too cannot remain silent too long because it would otherwise choke, even though what the individual thinks or what mankind thinks and what every individual has ever thought and what mankind has ever thought is nothing but nonsense. Sometimes we are masters of speech and sometimes we are masters of silence and we perfect our mastery to the utmost, he said, our lives are interesting in exactly the measure to which we have succeeded in developing our mastery of speech and our mastery of silence.

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