Voor het pensioen

The play is af at the home of the Höller family on Oct. 7, the birthday of Heinrich Himmler, former SS leader. Rudolf Höller, once camp commander and for years respected president of the court, is about to retire. Oct. 7 is a high day for him and for his sister Vera. Clara, their younger wheelchair-bound sister, is on the sidelines of this celebration. She is weighed down by the weight of the past and watches with sorrow as her family embraces the atrocities.

An ideological power play unfolds in the claustrophobic and incestuous home of the Höllers. A party that is about guilt, resentment, denial and moral decay. And about family ties that can never be broken.

In Voor het pensioen, Bernhard addresses the impotence and hypocrisy of postwar Germany in the face of its own Nazi past, its silence on the war debt. Through the unsettling far-right rhetoric of his ossified personages, he ventilates his disgust. At the same time, Bernhard notes that we ourselves may not be much better.

Tom Dewispelaere is not staging this play at random. The concrete reason is the disturbing normalization of a vocabulary and a body of thought that is the direct heir to the right-wing extremism of the 1930s and 1940s. Many statements that we thought had past event banished to the margins of our political culture are once again at the center of social debate.

With Voor het pensioen, Thomas Bernhard gives us more than a history lesson. It is an invitation to keep thinking about how the shadows of the past continue to haunt us in the present. How far people will go in their quest to hold on.