Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard in 1987.
Born	(1931-02-09)9 February 1931 Heerlen, Netherlands
Died	12 February 1989(1989-02-12) (aged 58) Gmunden, Upper Austria, Austria
Occupation	Novelist and playwright
Nationality	Austrian
Period	1957–1989
Literary movement	Postmodern
Notable works	Correction Extinction The Loser Woodcutters
Signature
Website
www.thomasbernhard.org

Thomas Bernhard (German: [ˈtoːmas ˈbɛʁnhaʁt]; born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard; February 9, 1931 – February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.

Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen, Netherlands, where, at the time, his mother Herta Bernhard worked as a maid. Since the autumn of 1931, he lived with his grandparents in Vienna until his mother, who had married since, moved him, in 1937, to Traunstein, Bavaria. Bernhard's natural father Alois Zuckerstätter died in Berlin from gas poisoning in an assumed suicide; Thomas had never met him.

Bernhard's grandfather, the author , pushed for an artistic education for the boy, including musical instruction. Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer.

Bernhard's Lebensmensch (a predominantly Austrian term, which was coined by Bernhard himself and which refers to the most important person in one's life) was Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he cared for alone in her dying days and whom he had met in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the death of his beloved grandfather. Stavianicek was the major support in Bernhard's life and greatly furthered his literary career. The extent or nature of his relationships with women is obscure. Thomas Bernhard's public persona was asexual.

Suffering throughout his youth from an intractable lung disease (tuberculosis), Bernhard spent the years 1949 to 1951 at the sanatorium Grafenhof, in Sankt Veit im Pongau. He trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1955–1957) and was always profoundly interested in music. His lung condition, however, made a career as a singer impossible. After that he began to work briefly as a journalist, mainly as a crime reporter, and then became a full-time writer.