Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 but grew up in Austria. His interest in music and theatre led him to study at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has written a quantity of poetry, several novels, short stories and plays and three volumes of autobiography. He died in 1989.

'Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction-After Kafka's and Canetti's his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature.' George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement

Bernhard's description of Heidegger in Old Masters is unsurpassable: 'Stifter in fact always reminds me of Heidegger, of that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours. Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy, Heidegger and Stifter, each one for himself and in his own way, have hopelessly kitschified philosophy and literature. Heidegger, after whom the wartime and postwar generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime

Stamp used by Heidegger in his letters, October 1944, when he directed the philosophy seminars at Freiburg, taken from the cover of Heidegger l'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, by Emmanuel Faye.

I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him from the wool she has shorn from their own Heidegger sheep.

   I cannot visualize Heidegger other than sitting on the bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife, who all her life totally dominated him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted all his caps and baked all his bread and wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled up his sandals for him. Heidegger was a kitschy brain..... a feeble thinker from the Alpine foothills, as I believe, and just about right for the German philosophical hot-pot. For decades they ravenously spooned up that man Heidegger, more than anybody else, and overloaded their stomachs with his stuff. Heidegger had a common face, not a spiritual one, Reger said, he was through and through an unspiritual person, devoid of all fantasy, devoid of all sensibility, a genuine German philosophical ruminant, a ceaselessly gravid German philosophical cow, Reger said, which grazed upon German philosophy and thereupon for decades let its smart little cow-pats drop on it....

   Heidegger is the petit-bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy nightcaps, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else.