SOURCE: “Thomas Bernhard: The Mask of Death,” in Modern Austrian Writing: Literature and Society After 1945, edited by Alan Best and Hans Wolfschütz, Oswald Wolff Ltd., 1980, pp. 214–35.

In the following essay, Wolfschütz traces Bernhard’s literary career and investigates the thematic and formal consistency found in his poetry, novels, and plays.

Thomas Bernhard’s early prose collection Ereignisse (Events, written in 1957) takes the form of a sequence of anecdotally-fashioned episodes each presenting a variation on that most central of concepts in modernist writing, the intrusion of ‘Schrecken’ of terror and horror, into everyday reality. In such a moment of shock the victim inevitably looks at his own existence and his relationship with the world about him in a new light, as, for example does the painter in one of Bernhard’s episodes; at work on his scaffolding high above the people in the street, he is suddenly...