About the work
Heldenplatz is the last play by Thomas Bernhard, premiered on 4 November 1988 at the Vienna Burgtheater under the direction of Claus Peymann — on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Austria's "Anschluss" to Nazi Germany and the centenary of the Burgtheater. The play caused the greatest theatre scandal of the Second Republic.
Plot
The Jewish professor Josef Schuster, who fled the National Socialists to England in 1938 and returned to Vienna decades later, has thrown himself from the window of his apartment on the Heldenplatz — the very square where Hitler was received by the jubilant crowd in 1938. As his housekeeper, his daughters and his brother prepare the funeral and the wake, they settle accounts with Austria in long, monologic tirades: with its unbroken antisemitism, the repression of the Nazi past, and a society in which, in Schuster's perception, there are "more Nazis than in 1938". The shock of recognition — the voices from the Heldenplatz still ringing in the widow's ears — drives the mourning toward a disturbing climax.
Cultural significance
Heldenplatz is Bernhard's most radical reckoning with his homeland and became a political affair even before the premiere: the tabloid press and politicians demanded its cancellation, and there were protests, dung heaps in front of the Burgtheater and calls for resignations. The premiere became a key event in Austrian cultural history and an emblem of the country's painful confrontation with its past. Bernhard died a few months later; in his will he forbade the performance of his works in Austria.