Thomas Bernhard, Gerhard Fritsch: Der Briefwechsel

Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and an adored grandfather. Tormented as a young student in rightwing, Catholic Austria, Bernhard ran away from home aged fifteen. At eighteen, he contracted pneumonia. Placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, he observed with unflinching acuity protracted suffering and death. From the age of 21, everything he wrote was shaped by the urgency of a dying man's testament - his witness, the quintessence of his life and knowledge - and where this account of his life ends, his art begins.

Raimund Fellinger, geboren 1951 im Saarland, arbeitet nach Studium von Germanistik, Linguistik und Politikwissenschaft seit 1979 als Lektor im Suhrkamp Verlag, seit 2006 als Cheflektor.