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minniesmiscellanies 's review for:
Holzfällen. Eine Erregung
by Thomas Bernhard
1*
Any and all entertainment value this book might have springs from its turbulent publication history, so here we go:
Bernhard was a famously difficult personality; he often described Austria and especially Vienna in the ugliest terms and was of course both rewarded and punished for it by the Austrian population who bought his books en masse in order to rant against them in reviews. In this book he went a little bit too far, lowly insulting famous people of the rich Austrian cultural life, people who had up until then been on decidedly friendly terms with him and even financed his writing for decades - and he made the mistake of either not veiling their identities enough or just straight-up using their real names. The couple who served as inspiration for the Auersberger couple found out via a mutual literary critic friend after the book had already been published and delivered to bookshops and dragged him to court over it, which resulted in the only court-ordered confiscation of books in the history of the Second Republic. (Yes, that included actual police going into bookshops and seizing cratefulls of Holzfällen.) Bernhard defended his book, rather embarrassingly, as not being autobiographical at all, and in a fit of revenge forbid his publisher to sell any and all of his writings on Austrian soil - until the Austrians had learned to appreciate his insults to them, presumably. It all ended, as these scandals do, with a big fat plus in the publisher's account books, and not much more; the parties solved the matter between themselves, the insulted couple allowed the book to be sold without a single retraction and Bernhard allowed his publisher to deliver to Austrian bookshops again.
And they lived happily ever after.
Any and all entertainment value this book might have springs from its turbulent publication history, so here we go:
Bernhard was a famously difficult personality; he often described Austria and especially Vienna in the ugliest terms and was of course both rewarded and punished for it by the Austrian population who bought his books en masse in order to rant against them in reviews. In this book he went a little bit too far, lowly insulting famous people of the rich Austrian cultural life, people who had up until then been on decidedly friendly terms with him and even financed his writing for decades - and he made the mistake of either not veiling their identities enough or just straight-up using their real names. The couple who served as inspiration for the Auersberger couple found out via a mutual literary critic friend after the book had already been published and delivered to bookshops and dragged him to court over it, which resulted in the only court-ordered confiscation of books in the history of the Second Republic. (Yes, that included actual police going into bookshops and seizing cratefulls of Holzfällen.) Bernhard defended his book, rather embarrassingly, as not being autobiographical at all, and in a fit of revenge forbid his publisher to sell any and all of his writings on Austrian soil - until the Austrians had learned to appreciate his insults to them, presumably. It all ended, as these scandals do, with a big fat plus in the publisher's account books, and not much more; the parties solved the matter between themselves, the insulted couple allowed the book to be sold without a single retraction and Bernhard allowed his publisher to deliver to Austrian bookshops again.
And they lived happily ever after.