Notes
1. The Vienna Woods
Vienna has been named most livable city in the world for a few years running. Of course the art collections, gorgeous architecture, and dazzling cafes are part of the package--but so is the Vienna Woods. I cannot think of another city that has a green biosphere encircling it in the way Vienna has. It really is surprising driving into the city--or even flying into it--to see the green woods unfolding around it. And there are bees and animals and a fairly extensive animal preserve with boar and deer...
Those sweet and melancholic woods of firs, pines, birches, ashes, and famously of lindens and horse chestnuts... and the taverns with their "fresh wines that don't travel very well..." The wines from the woods are really something perfect. To walk from Kahlenberg to Leopolndsberg and to drink white Austrian wine under the chestnut trees by moonlight is a magical experience. And the author is right that you can hear the woods in all music --from Beethoven To Mozart. I thought his chapters on Auden, as well as the wonderfully told chapter on the double suicide (or was it?) of the crown prince Rudolf and his girlfriend, were particularly wonderful to read. Mayerling and Grinzing... sigh~~
All countries should set aside a significant percentage (I leave that open to each case) of land to be turned back to wild and kept as a reserve and half of those preserves should be forests (where possible)... Cities should look to Vienna for ideas for creating biospheres. Vienna's is the real thing... but even if we started again and waited... cities could aim for a greenbelt surrounding the city center to help alleviate the impact. To breath... There are foxes and skunks, boars and deer--right there in the city in the preserve.. and everywhere bees (Hives are kept even on the opera house roof). I loved reading the author's reminiscences about his childhood in Austria and also to know that those woods are still there--where they continue to inspire people!
2. Bernhard’s relentless focus on the inner world of his characters is not surprising given that Vienna is the birthplace of Freud's revolutionary "talking therapy."
Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychiatrist Eric R. Kandel, in his book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, looks at fin-de-siecle Vienna in light of the tremendous excitement generated at the time by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In both art and science, says Kandel, intellectuals found themselves less trustful of surface appearances and sought to delve inward to try and uncover a deeper truth. For example, Freud suggested that a patient in excruciating back pain might actually be experiencing psychosomatic pain because of an emotional trauma that the doctor needed to uncover. We certainly see the inward gaze in the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, in which unconscious drives can be found lying beneath the surface. Architect Otto Wagner, in addition to his marvelous church, was most famous for his postal saving building in Vienna—a building that defied understanding at the time. In not covering up structural elements and eschewing the decorative, he aimed at a rational functionality that allowed the building to "show its true face." And even his highly decorative church showed a definitive break with tradition; for the decorative elements were rationally conceived to serve the function of easing the emotions of the mentally ill patients of the hospital.
3. Bernhard and Wittgenstein: Even language, our principle tool for understanding the world and each other, was an unstable construction. To my mind, this illumination and vivid illustration (a kind of demonstration) of Wittgenstein’s subversive philosophical project was Bernhard’s tour de force.
Wittgenstein looms large in Bernhard's novels. The philosopher not only appears in the title of one of Bernhard's most famous works, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, but various members of the Wittgenstein family haunt the pages of his books. One of the best books I read last year, called the House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, was written by British novelist Evelyn Waugh's grandson Alexander Waugh (talk about family sagas!) It is a fascinating look at the tumultuous history of the Wittgenstein family. Much like the Ephrussi Family (of Edward de Waal’s Hare of the Amber Eyes fame) or the Rothschilds, the Wittgensteins were Jewish industrialists, who had more than their fair share of tragedies. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, their suffering included "suicides, madness and quarrels." And history bears this out; as the family suffered terribly under the Anschluss, after which three out of four Wittgenstein brothers would commit suicide.
Ludwig was not the only man of talent in the Wittgenstein family. For also dear to Bernhard's heart was Ludwig's brother, Paul-- who was quite famous at the time as a concert pianist. Having lost his right arm fighting in the First World War, he worked furiously to learn how to play with just one hand and later commissioned special pieces by such composers as Strauss, Korngold, and Britten. Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is the best known of these special compositions. In some ways, however, despite sharing a name with pianist Paul, the character Paul in Bernhard’s novel in Wittgenstein's Nephew served more as a stand-in for the great philosopher.
Gitta Honegger, in her beautifully written biography, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian, discusses the various ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein shows up in Bernhard's works. This can be seen most vividly in what some people consider to be Bernhard's masterpiece Correction. In this novel; a brilliant scientist attempts a life --in true Wittgensteinian fashion-- of "showing not telling." The protagonist builds a conical house in the middle of an Austrian forest for his sister-- the person he loves more than anyone in the world. Rather than producing a house that his sister might actually want to live in, he creates something in which all of his mathematical ideas can be expressed. The sister moves into the house and immediately dies. The scientist then commits suicide. The novel begins with the nameless narrator arriving at the conical house in the forest to sift through all of the documents and designs for the project that were left behind. This house, says the narrator, is a "thought dungeon" in which only thoughts permissible by the house can be thought.
In fact, the real Ludwig Wittgenstein had also built a house for his sister Margaret--and this house was also an expression of Wittgenstein's thoughts and values. And for this reason, Margaret declined to ever live in the house, declaring that, "Even though I admired the house very much, I always knew that I neither wanted to, nor could, live in it myself. It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods than for a small mortal like me." According to Waugh's biography of the Wittgenstein Family: Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig's brother, disliked it, and when Margaret's nephew came to sell it, he reportedly did so on the grounds that she had never liked it either. Honneger suggests that Bernhard consciously sought--not to explain Wittgenstein-- but to act out his philosophies; specifically to try and illuminate in language, the limits of language itself.
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Wittgenstein is well-known for his truth tables, which sought to delineate the way in which statements were true or false only in so much as they correspond to an outer world of fact. But was Wittgenstein a positivist in the way he has been portrayed?
Wittgenstein himself distanced himself from all positivist interpretations of his work, vehemently rejecting Bertrand Russell's introduction to Tractatus--claiming Russell had misunderstood the entire project. Indeed, his penultimate aphorism 6.54 states:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Philosophers Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin back in the 1970s in their book Wittgenstein's Vienna, suggested that Wittgenstein, building on Kierkegaard, believed that there is a higher truth than "facts" --which, in the end, do not speak to an objective real world at all, but only the world as we perceive it. This higher world is one of subjective truth. This would be the realm of art and religion, and of particular note, of ethics. We arrive at this subjective truth, says Janik and Toumin, only indirectly through "fables, polemics, irony, and satire" And this is the only method to "see the world rightly." Wittgenstein stated that absolutely central to this project-- indeed, without which no truth could be illuminated—is a dismantling of all one’s preconceived notions. This is the kicking away of the ladder.
Was this not Bernhard’s greatest talent as well: to stand at a critical distance from all his society held dear and question the values and preoccupations of his day? Bernhard made a career of not just dismantling but of thoroughly undermining Austrian values, trying to uncover a deeper truth. He did this in the form of “fables, polemics, irony and satire.” The culmination of the fin-de-siecle project of progress and renewal through questioning, he delved under the surface of those things Austrian held dear. Even language, our principle tool for understanding the world and each other, was an unstable construction. To my mind, this illumination and vivid illustration (a kind of demonstration) of Wittgenstein’s subversive philosophical project was Bernhard’s tour de force.
Notes on Bavarians Bernhard, Kiefer and Sebald.
Books
Thomas Bernhard: Old Masters, Old Masters Graphic Novel, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yes, Correction, Goethe Dies
Gita Honngeger Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian
Kandel: Age of Insight
Carl Schorske: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna
Paul Hofmann: Vienna Woods
Alexander Waugh: The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
Wittgenstein's Vienna
by Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin
Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
by Edith Sheffer
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