Wittgensteins Neffe

With his 1982 work on the history of a friendship, Bernhard takes his autobiography, the description of his childhood and youth in five volumes, further into the years 1967 to 1979, and during a stay in a sanatorium his friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, which had begun in passionate discussions about music, deepened. Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, graduated from the Theresianeum in Vienna and then studied mathematics. Since the age of 35, his nervous disease has broken out again and again. Initially very well financially secured by the wealth of one of the richest families in Austria, he gave his fortune carefree to friends and the poor, until he himself vegetated away in poverty. In the last years of his life he became more and more lonely, only connected with his friend Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard's notes have become the report of the story of Paul Wittgenstein's death. For twelve years he had watched his friend die. And through this observation, Thomas Bernhard's self-observation has also been intensified - so that the portraitist's image also acquires strong contours through the person portrayed.