The negotiations lasted a long time, and now the last step has been taken to finally elevate Thomas Bernhard (1931 to 1989), with whom Austria had had such a hard time during his lifetime, to state poet.

With strong support from the Ministry of Culture, the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) is acquiring the estate of one of the most influential authors of the post-war period for 2.1 million euros – Bernhard is read and played around the world.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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The estate opens up many perspectives for publications, digital editions, online presentations or events, says the ÖNB, which will look after Bernhard's literary legacy in the literature archive in the Michaelertrakt of the Hofburg and in the literature museum in Johannesgasse.

Director General Johanna Rachinger calls the estate "one of the most important additions in the history of the Austrian National Library".

One is aware of the responsibility "to secure this inventory for research and the general public in the long term".

The bundle includes all published and unpublished works, all notes and autobiographical notes.

We are talking about an inventory of almost thirty thousand pages with manuscripts, handwritten corrected typescripts and galley proofs.

There are also fifteen archive boxes with correspondence alone, including those with Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Marlen Haushofer, Elias Canetti, Peter Handke, Hans Werner Henze, Claus Peymann, Siegfried Unseld and Carl Zuckmayer.

The correspondence with Thomas Bernhard's "Lebensmenschen", the upper-class, well-off Viennese civil servant widow Hedwig Stavianicek, which certainly aroused many, not only Germanistic desires, includes 381 letters from Bernhard and 245 letters from Stavianicek.

It can only be viewed for a period of ten years with the consent of the heirs.

This primarily refers to Bernhard's seven years younger half-brother, the former internist Peter Fabjan from Gmunden am Traunsee, who, as the universal heir, has taken care of the estate and posthumous fame for thirty years with tenacious perseverance - which did not always go so smoothly , as some Viennese like it, because Fabjan didn't want to bend down, clearly related to his half-brother.

Most recently, Fabjan had presented a "report", "A life at the side of Thomas Bernhard".

His mission can now be considered accomplished.

The package for the National Library also includes the writings of Bernhard's grandfather, the writer Johannes Freumbichler (1881 to 1949).