During his lifetime Thomas Bernhard's texts provoked more than the usual share of scandals. But perhaps the most enduring scandal will turn out to be his very last text, his will, which ordered that everything he had written, whether published during his lifetime or as part of his Nachlaß (literary estate), could not be performed, printed or even recited for the duration of legal copyright within the borders of Austria, “wie immer dieser Staat sich kennzeichnet.” Bernhard had taken care not to reveal the contents of this will before he died; in fact, he even stipulated that news of his death not be announced until he was buried. This parting slap in the face of his native country thus came not only as a surprise, it came from the hand of a dead man, whose laughter rang out from the grave.

To be sure, it was absurd laughter that had elements of a bad and willfully unpatriotic joke. But then so did most of Bernhard's literary works. In his last play Heldenplatz, one of the members of a Jewish family that was driven into exile in 1938 and has returned to Vienna fifty years later characterizes the country as a pigsty with only “black” (fascist) and “red” (socialist) pigs living there:

Contemplating his decision to return to Austria, one of the characters, Schuster, concludes that it had been an absurd idea after all: “Das Ganze war ja eine absurde Idee.”