I grew up in the neighboring town of St. Veit im Pongau, where Thomas Bernhard was known to have stayed to cure his lung disease in the Grafenhof lung sanatorium, and my father and my grandfather grew up here.
It is the region about which the author writes so aptly in his novel “Frost” from 1963 that it is “populated by very small, full-grown people ... who can be called idiotic.
Not taller than four feet on average, they stumble between cracks in the wall and corridors, created in a frenzy.
Staggering between summit peaks and slopes, we learned to ski before “walking”, and with these sentences taken from the novel “Frost” the hotels, the cable cars and the local tourism association advertise a winter holiday in the Salzburg mountains to this day.
The writer Thomas Bernhard has become the namesake of her love-hate relationship ...