Vor dem Ruhestand. Eine Komödie von deutscher Seele

Vor dem Ruhestand. Eine Komödie von deutscher Seele, a play by Th. Bernhard, published in 1975. The former SS officer, protégé of Himmler, and concentration camp commander Rudolf Höller (‘hell’) has hidden for ten years in the basement of the family home and then succeeded in becoming Chief Justice, an office which he is now due to relinquish, having reached retirement age. It is the anniversary of Himmler's birth, which he has celebrated for years, donning his SS uniform, medals, gun, and pistol, drinking, and treating his crippled sister Clara like a concentration camp inmate. His other sister, Vera, like her brother a Nazi, supports the man's every whim. The orgy turns into a kind of exorcism, at the height of which he collapses and dies of a heart attack. After attempting to put her brother into civilian clothes, Vera telephones the family doctor, Dr Fromm (‘pious’).

Evil and hypocritical figures enact the family play, in which Clara, physically handicapped as a result of an American bomb hitting her school two days before the end of the war, takes the honest part of conscience, more through her silence than through speech. She thus intensifies the breathless self-analysis of Rudolf and Vera, which reverberates with phrases taught to them by their parents and the world in which they grew up. The play's motto hints at Bernhard's gruesomely ironic approach: ‘What is character but the determination of incident’ (Henry James).