Trakl is Austrian, yeah, born and raised in Salzburg, my town. His birth-house is here, sign outside, and, a museum now. I believe. I've never been in there. Was a drug addict and had an incestuous relationship with his sister, it's rumored. I was always scared by his big nostrils:
Thomas Bernhard is an interesting, but completely other matter altogether. Everybody seems to like him after discovering, and he is fascinating indeed, in person and in work, although I always found him more fascinating as a (media)person. Famed for the endless sentences of his later novels (pages and pages and pages long), mostly monologues by "Outsiders" (outside of everything), ranting against everybody and everything, hitting again and again against the catholic church, the Austrian state, socialism, stupidity of mankind, darkness all around us, death is near, death is everything, the coldness, the illness, the malady ... etc.
He really made it somehow, producing the picture of being a strange philosophical media hating reclusive and at the same time being in all the media all the time for his scandals, processes ... etc. Biggest with "Heldenplatz", a play about Austrias Nazi-past. The "Heldenplatz" is in Vienna, Hitler marched in and let himself be praised there for "connecting" Austria to Germany in '38. Until into the early 90`s the official Austrian version was, that Hitler took us over as the first victim of his madness, we had no chance, didn't wanted (of course) ... etc. Truth is different, Hitler
was Austrian, people stood there praising and screaming for him without somebody putting a gun to their heads.
Bernhards play shook that up and it was HUGE scandal. Shortly after that he died, being sick in one way or other for almost all of his life.
He really
is the post-war-literature in Austria up to this day.
Thomas Bernhard
