Heldenplatz: 1 (Oberon Modern Plays) - Softcover

"""Bernhard's dialogue already evokes so stirringly and with such cliche free precision what it feels like to live in the shadow of the Holocaust"" - Robert Shore> - The Metro ""What is initially strange continues to be strange, but the sheer strangeness becomes mesmerising, and then marvellous... Deftly translated by Meredith Oakes and Andres Tierney"" - Jeremy Kingston, The Times "" - it is as much an absurdist comedy as a piece of toxic rhetoric - this is an important European play that pins down a particularly fearful moment in Austrian history with ferocious elan."" - Michael Billington, The Guardian,"

Thomas Bernhard is widely considered to be one of the most important German playwrights in the post-war era. Highly acclaimed, he has written over twenty plays and novels and gained a reputation as one of Austria's most controversial authors. He wrote Heldenplatz in 1988 as a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Hitler's Germany. Highly controversial in Austria, the play concerns a Jewish professor who returns to Vienna after the Second World War and discovers that his fellow Austrians are as anti-semitic as ever. 'Heldenplatz' is the square in Vienna where the Austrian-born Hitler made his first speech after the Anschluss.