Auslöschung; Extinction

Auslöschung; Extinction, published in August 1986, was the last prose work to appear during Bernhard’s lifetime. The novel constitutes the culmination of Bernhard’s life-long preoccupation with personal and collective history via the topos of the inherited familial estate. The essential plot of Auslöschung is as follows: the patrician Franz Josef Murau, a native Austrian tutor of German literature living in Rome, learns of the death of his parents and brother in a car accident via a telegramme. The narrator is confronted with the fact that the death of his parents and elder brother has rendered him sole heir of the vast family estate of Wolfsegg in Upper Austria. The first section of the novel, entitled ‘Das Telegramm’ (The Telegram), which takes place in a primary sense entirely in Murau’s Rome apartment, sees the narrator trying to come to terms with the news of his parents’ death, as well as with his family’s Nazi past. The Wolfsegg estate was, at various points, home to the local branch of the Hitler Youth, the SA and two Gauleiter, whom Murau’s parents sheltered in the Kindervilla (children’s villa) after the war. In the second section of the novel, Murau returns to Wolfsegg where he spends much time deliberating what to do with the estate as the new heir, attends his parents’ and brother’s funeral, before finally deciding to give the estate away to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community of Vienna).

The novel offers the most sustained discussion by Bernhard of the post-fascist legacy, and the Austrian literary and cultural tradition, a spiritual estate which, in contrast to the physical estate of Wolfsegg, Murau is happy to be identified with. Auslöschung also contains Bernhard’s most overt posthumous homage to Ingeborg Bachmann, through the figure of Maria. Maria, who strongly corresponds to the biographical figure of Bachmann, embodies the protagonist’s own views with relation to the position of the writer and intellectual in modern Austria, compelled to spend their life in self-imposed exile because of profound unease with their own country’s political and cultural climate.