The play is set in the home of the Höller family on 7 October, the birthday of Heinrich Himmler, former SS leader. Rudolf Höller, at one time a camp commandant and for years a respected Chief Justice, is almost about to retire. The 7th of October is a very special day for Rudolf and his sister Vera. Their younger sister Clara, who is confined to a wheelchair, remains on the sidelines of this celebration. She is bowed down by the weight of the past and looks on sorrowfully as her family accepts the atrocities with open arms.

An ideological power game unfolds in the claustrophobic and incestuous home of the Höllers. A celebration based on guilt, resentment, denial and moral deterioration. And family ties that never can be broken. 

In Voor het pensioen, Bernhard charts postwar Germany’s impotence and hypocrisy with respect to its own Nazi past, its silence on its war culpability. He vents his revulsion via the alarming far-right rhetoric of his hard-line characters. At the same time, Bernhard concludes that we ourselves may not be much better.

Tom Dewispelaere’s choice of this play did not come out of the blue. The specific provocation was the disturbing normalization of a vocabulary and body of thought that is the direct successor to the far-right extremism of the 1930s and 40s. Many statements that we thought had been banished to the fringes of our political culture are once again at the centre of social discourse.

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. And how far people can go in their search for something to hold onto.