"Der Keller. Eine Entziehung (1976)" reveals, like almost no other novel, why Thomas Bernhard became the man he was. On Saturday, 19 November 2016 at 7.30 p.m. at Schloss Spitz in the Wachau. In a staged reading, Doina Weber transforms this story of a path towards a new, meaningful existence in freedom, and lets the audience experience a largely unknown, vital, almost child-like and playful side of Thomas Bernhard. Clementine Gasser complements the reading congenially on the cello.
If you watch the television recordings of his interviews, audience discussions and public honours — and especially those of the still-young author Thomas Bernhard — or indeed one of his late interviews during a warmed-up, more relaxed phase of conversation, one curious detail stays with you again and again: a small, fine smile that suddenly lights up behind his serious, thinking face, mid-word, and goes on glowing ironically for the rest of the sentence... sometimes even lingering longer, for an entire thematic passage, or flickering on, surfacing and submerging, from question to question, from assertion to assertion.