Exercitatio Austriaca

Thomas Bernhard’s protagonists are practicing all the time. The rigorous practice procedures, however, have no goal other than perfection. The study approaches the described diagnosis with a two-part approach, which brings together results from the subjectivity debate of the 20th and 21st centuries with the aesthetic consequences resulting from the historical situation in Austria after 1945. This leads to the description of an abstract concept of practice which is used to analyze Bernhard’s novels and plays. Based on this, the questions – how the constitution of literary subjectivity in Austrian post-war society is undermined in Bernhard’s literary representations and how this manifests on the surfaces of the texts – are examined.