Thomas Bernhard’s earliest fiction has long lingered in a half-light—visible enough to be noted, obscure enough to be dismissed as juvenilia. In Of Seven Fir Trees and the Snow (2025), translated by Douglas Robertson, these early stories, written between 1950 and 1973, finally step forward. They reveal a writer already probing the boundaries of form, questioning narrative ease, and searching for the rhythm that would later define his style. Arranged chronologically, the collection offers a roadmap to the workshop of a not-yet-fully-formed Bernhard, who already suspects that language itself is both his material and his adversary. In his earliest work, Bernhard writes as a keen observer of provincial Austria—the mountains, the villages, and the war’s lingering trauma—in a mode that is often classified as Heimatliteratur or “regionalist fiction.” Yet this framework collapses under scrutiny. These are not pastoral celebrations or folkloric idylls, but stories shaped by the postwar Austrian landscape of denial, moral evasion, and carefully cultivated amnesia. “The Red Light” (1950), for instance, recounts a mountain accident in the Salzburg Alps during World War II. Disaster announces itself only obliquely, suggesting a sense of catastrophe beyond comprehension or even visibility. In the aftermath of National Socialism, Austria positioned itself as Nazism’s first victim rather than its collaborator, which allowed social continuity without reckoning. In this climate of willful repression, Bernhard’s early fiction begins its restless exploration of language. While these stories do not yet attack Austrian society directly, they formally register an uneasy suspicion that inherited traditions of narration have become compromised in their eagerness for resolution.
This unease intensifies in “A Winter’s Day in the Mountains” (1954), where Bernhard’s impatience with narrative conventions becomes unmistakable. The story follows an unnamed narrator wandering through snowdrifts and expressing his solitude through a limited but obsessive set of motifs: snow, ice, hay barns, and wood. The technique of repetition—later one of Bernhard’s signatures—appears here in embryonic form. Words and images recur, slightly altered, until they become uncanny abstractions. Snow, for instance, functions in the text as a metaphor for purity, erasure, isolation, memory, endurance, and the paradoxical coexistence of communal belonging and extreme solitude, yet it is also a structuring force that simultaneously levels and estranges. On the one hand, it smooths over distinctions—between bodies, spaces, and temporal layers—producing a surface of apparent continuity. On the other, this very uniformity intensifies the narrator’s isolation, rendering him increasingly aware of his distance from the community he seeks to reenter. Beyond the accumulation of descriptive detail, the narrator’s repeated return to images of snow—“There lie your brothers and sisters, covered in meter-thick snow. … Nothing has anything to do with mourning,” (40-41) and later, “the divine snow-covered landscape,” (42) and “the hue of its wall is barely distinguishable from that of the snow” (42)—builds a shifting constellation of perception in which loss, belonging, and estrangement are continuously reconfigured. In this sense, repetition enunciates not only a semantic dissonance but an ethical one: Each recurrence reactivates an unresolved confrontation with the past and resists its stabilization into coherent or consoling meaning.
This ethical dimension becomes more legible when situated within Bernhard’s broader postwar concerns, in which guilt is neither explicitly articulated nor narratively resolved but remains diffuse and structurally embedded. The use of the second person in “A Winter’s Day” further complicates this dynamic: The recurring “you” disperses agency and destabilizes the subject, implicating a generalized voice that both remembers and fails to account for what exactly is remembered. In this context, repetition can be understood as the sound of responsibility—language returning insistently to what it cannot fully articulate. Yet this repetition also sustains a double movement, registering an insistence on not abandoning the past while simultaneously exposing the subject’s inability to assume or integrate it. If it marks a form of ethical commitment, it equally stages that commitment’s failure. This double movement is at its most tensile in the text’s return to the phrase “well acquainted,” which initially evokes intimacy—“You are well acquainted with the morning…with the tree…with the village” (40)—before giving way to estrangement: “It is too late. You are no longer one of them. You have become different” (41). This failed redemption—which subtends Bernhard’s early works as a whole—can be interpreted as an attempt at moral rehabilitation and an acknowledgment of its limits in the same gesture. What emerges is an irreparable sense of isolation, sustained through a form that refuses both narrative closure and moral reconciliation.
Bernhard’s early texts also reveal the author’s ambivalence toward realism. In one respect, these stories are grounded in the fraught realities of postwar Austria: poorhouses, schoolhouses, and hospitals, described in language as stark as the realities they depict. From its opening lines, “The Poorhouse of St. Laurin” situates the reader within a landscape marked by duration and continuity: “From the poorhouse, which had been standing at the top of the hill there for centuries, there ran a footpath leading to the broad street that stretched all the way to the centre of the big city—and from there you could find your way to anywhere in the world” (29). This is a social world peopled by nuns, old men, and old women, “like wizened trees” (29) and whose heads “were white like the crowns of the young cherry trees when the sun shone on them” (29). Human figures dissolve into their physical environments, and the impoverished institutions that make up these environments in turn comment on the structural weakness of language itself—they are where sentences go to die. The story reads like an allegorical blueprint for Bernhard’s later narratives, where social structures double as psychic prisons: “After that you would see all the old people sitting on the house benches, embroidering and knitting, thinking and singing, and a number of them looked exactly as though they were thinking about nothing but their approaching death” (30). These communal gestures are simply ways to pass time before dying, but the tone with which the text observes them feels more melancholic than strictly moribund. Bernhard’s early protagonists do not quite register as fully individualized subjects, least of all the monstrous egoists of his later novels; rather, they emerge elliptically, if also in occasional flashes of luminosity, and appear increasingly indistinguishable from the world that they inhabit. This melancholia is invoked by both the human subject and how she becomes mediated in the social by way of her function, routine, and habits. The episode of the spinning wheel, for instance, stages grief as the felt loss of the skill that the woman once embodied. But even as the narrative takes on a more overtly allegorical form, it never becomes coldly schematic. On the contrary, it focuses on sensory details (the whiteness of cherry blossoms, the “bloodshot eyes” beholding the world each morning) that hypostatize the fraught affective conditions of communal life, emphasizing the melancholic sociality of a poorhouse as both a symbolic and a literal space for collective grief (29).
Central to Bernhard’s literary evolution is his growing interest in the fragment, not simply as formal device but as philosophical stance. As Bernhard will later insist in Old Masters, “our age has long been intolerable as a whole. … [O]nly when we perceive a fragment of it is it tolerable to us.”[1] The fragment, in other words, is the only tolerable unit of perception for a consciousness that attempts at registering its historical situation. In “Of Seven Fir Trees and the Snow” (1952), this ethos is housed within a Christmas folktale. However, the narrative’s allegorical structure—the seven fir trees embodying Beauty, Truth, Purity, Reason, Faith, Hope, and a frail, lagging Love—reveals an intuition about the moral desolation that will later dominate Frost. The text’s serenity is deceptive: Beneath the crystalline snow and night-sky reverie runs a current of existential unease, a sense of paralysis and decay that destabilizes the idyllic Heimat setting. The encounter with the three saints anticipates Bernhard’s later dramaturgy of the monologue: Cryptic mentors speak in elliptical, hesitant formulations, offering not explanation but a circular, self-questioning rhythm of thought. One instance occurs in the scene in which the mentors attempt to speak about love. When the narrator enumerates the seven virtues, “love” is preceded by a pause, followed by an “and,” and then another hesitation, as if the word itself resists utterance (16-17). Language falters at the point where meaning should crystallize. What follows is a dialogue riddled with ellipses, repetitions, and evasive answers, circling around love without ever defining it: “because… because it’s so sickly,” or,
“Nobody takes the trouble to minister to its needs. Nobody has any time . . .”
“Any time?” (17)
Here, meaning accumulates through hesitation. Significance gathers in aborted gestures and silences rather than in speech. Toward the end of the story the saints speak pensively while shaking their heads; “[t]hen there was complete silence.” (17). As Michael Billenkamp suggests, we might understand Bernhard’s formal experiments as an attempt to “make thinking visible.”[2] In this regard, the visionary imagery in “Of Seven Fir Trees and the Snow” anticipates the author’s later, more persistent interest in perceptual extremity in the inner rupture of experiences that go beyond articulable narration. The story marks an early point where Bernhard’s writing turns from conventional rural narration toward the fragmentary, metaphysical, and linguistically unreachable. Snow falls not as meteorological fact but as an image of what language can never fully retrieve. When the narrator describes the “white expanse of infinite extent at the horizon” and the way “the crystalline snow crackled under my firm footfalls” (15), he conjures a landscape that is perceptible but disorienting, disarticulate, and incomplete.
Bernhard later expands on this tension between landscape and language in the second volume of his memoir, Der Keller, where the theater becomes an ontological episteme: “Nature is the theater in itself. And human beings, within this nature-as-theater, are the actors—from whom not much more is to be expected.”[3] But an earlier pivot could also be traced to “The Pig-Keeper,” in which a man named Korn’s descent into despair is narrated in a style that feels relentless in its unvarnished austerity. The tonal break from Bernhard’s other early stories is unmistakable: “He has suddenly started hating everything, every person, every train, every scrap of earth. He curses the earth because he knows that it will pitilessly devour him. Mercy is not mercy by any means” (72). The atmosphere darkens, and even the most rudimentary gestures strain under the weight of perceived judgment: “In the morning he goes out and sticks his hand into the crack in the wall. It keeps getting bigger and bigger. Every train enlarges the crack, and so does every frost” (73). Korn’s own voice emerges as one that is obsessive, even crazed, and charged with moral intensity: “I’ve got the power of life and death over my pig… I can do what I like with it. It’s my pig! I bought it, I fattened it, I love it, I hate it, and nobody will sell it but me. That’s right: nobody but me! But I don’t want it to perish today, not today. It must die on Good Friday” (75). But this intensity also softens under the pitying gaze of the narratorial eye: “He kneels down in the muck. … He slides his hand into the pig’s mouth; he can feel the animal’s hot tongue inside it. He picks up a clump of straw and wipes the blood off the animal’s snout… Korn shudders at the sight of the animal… and he shudders even more at the thought that he was the one who dealt it those terrible blows” (75). “The Pig-Keeper” offers an early portrait of a Bernhard who would ruthlessly dismantle Austrian mythologies and attack national pieties in turbulent monologues. This transition into the Bernhard that we now recognize is gradual, but the voltage rises steadily.
The later Bernhard—of The Loser, Correction, and Old Masters—is already audible in these early stories. However, the collection offers something rarer than mere foreshadowing: It reveals the continuous labor behind the myth of a sudden emergence. Here, Bernhard’s language feels more forgiving than that of his later novels, yet we can still sense him testing its formal, tonal, and affective limits. These early writings also underline the historical dimension of Bernhard’s lifelong project—they emerge from the debris of a postwar Austria desperate to forget its complicity, and they refuse to offer redemption by way of an aestheticized suffering. His early protagonists, like their author, are witnesses without comfort. Their solitude emerges from a heightened awareness: They see what others refuse to see. Korn’s awareness of his own capacity for violence (“Why did I beat you?,” 75) and his internal refrain of disgust (“I have failed,” 82), for instance, attest to the discomfort of dwelling in truths that the rest of society rather forget. It is tempting to read these stories merely as apprentice work, but that would overlook their distinctive achievement. Each story tests a new way of saying no: to sentimentality, to moral ease, to the illusion that language can redeem suffering. What endures in these stories is not what is said, but what stutters and refuses completion.
Notes:
[1] Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, trans. Ewald Osers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 18.
[2] Michael Billenkamp, Thomas Bernhard: Narrativik und poetologische Praxis (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 256; translation by Maria Manti.
[3] Thomas Bernhard, Der Keller: Eine Entziehung (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), 137; translation by Maria Manti.