Heldenplatz [Paperback]

Thomas Bernhard is widely considered to be one of the most important German playwrights in the post-war era. Highly acclaimed, he has written over twenty plays and novels and gained a reputation as one of Austrias most controversial authors.




Bernhard wroteHeldenplatzin 1988 as a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Hitlers Germany. Highly controversial in Austria, the play concerns a Jewish professor who returns to Vienna after the Second World War and discovers that his fellow Austrians are as anti-semitic as ever.

Heldenplatz is the square in Vienna where the Austrian-born Hitler made his first speech after the Anschluss.




InHeldenplatz, Bernhard's final play, he explores the shared isolation of people who have lost their bearings, along with most of their illusions.

Meredith Oakes, an Australian playwright who has lived in London since 1970. She has written plays, adaptations, translations, opera texts and poems. She taught play-writing at Royal Holloway College and for the Arvon Foundation, and wrote music criticism forThe Independentin London andThe Daily Telegraphin Sydney, and is a regular contributor to magazines includingThe Listener.

Bernhard's dialogue already evokes so stirringly and with such cliche free precision what it feels like to live in the shadow of the Holocaust Robert Shore - The Metro

It is as much an absurdist comedy as a piece of toxic rhetoric - this is an important European play that pins down a particularly fearful moment in Austrian history with ferocious elan. Michael Billington, The Guardian

What is initially strange continues to be strange, but the sheer strangeness becomes mesmerising, and then marvellous... Deftly translated by Meredith Oakes and Andres Tierney Jeremy Kingston, The Times