One of the more contentious moments in the contentious history of German letters occurred some fifteen years ago in an argument over a theater emergency light. A play about the evil side of creation called The Ignorant One and the Insane One had begun its premier run at the 1972 Salzburg Festival. In the final scene, a diva, fresh from trilling Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria, drops into despair as she converses with her hopelessly alcoholic father. The soprano mutters her apocalyptic lines—“Light is a curse . . . exhaustion, nothing but exhaustion”—and the stage directions call for a dimming set. But while the Festival association had no trouble with a gloomy stage, it balked at the demand that every bulb in the theater hall be extinguished. A bitter fight ensued, and all performances after the first were canceled. The playwright himself fired off an angry telegram, calling the officials’ action a “breach of confidence without example.” For his work, dimming spotlights didn’t suffice.

Things just can’t get black enough for Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian author whose work caused the trouble in Salzburg. For more than a decade, Bernhard has depressed audiences from Vienna to Wiesbaden with his pained portraits of modern existence. One of the leaders of a post-19605 group that brought a vogue of absurdism to the German literary scene, he has produced some eighty works, a collection of poetry, plays, and prose whose theme might be summarized as “life is a prison or madhouse.”