the misfortune of the world.



You sometimes give the impression of biting the hand that feeds, for example when you describe Heidegger as a "weak-minded pre-Alpine thinker" and...



He didn't feed me. Why should he have fed me? But he's an impossible character, he has neither rhythm nor anything else. He lived off a few writers, he cannibalised them, to the last, what would he have been without them?



I was thinking of the word "Lichtung" (clearing).



That word existed before Heidegger, 300 and 500 years before. He was nothing, a philistine, gross, nothing new. He's a perfect example of someone who unscrupulously eats all the fruit other people have jarred and who gorges himself, thank God, which makes him sick and he bursts. Gets stomach ache.



You have spoken of a love/hateway it is, I believe. With faith. As it were.



*



Thomas Bernhard's works have been extensively translated into English. Here a bibliography. His major novels include "Old Masters. A Comedy," "Yes," "Extinction," and "Gargoyles."



The interview, conducted in 1986, originally appeared in German in the Autumn 2006 issue of Kultur & Gespenster. A shorter version was published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on October 22, 2006.



Werner Wögerbauer teaches in the German department at the University of Nantes in France.



Translation: Nicholas Grindell.

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