Description
Book SynopsisThomas 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 Austria's most controversial authors. He wrote Heldenplatz in 1988 as a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Hitler's 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.
Trade Review"""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 ""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 "" - 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,"
