/lit/ - Literature

Are all things one all-encompassing thing? What is the consensus here?

>>18064013

He was required to join the Deutsches Jungvolk, a branch of the Hitler Youth, which he hated.[2] Bernhard's natural father Alois Zuckerstätter was a carpenter and petty criminal who refused to acknowledge his son.[2] Zuckerstätter died in Berlin from gas poisoning in an assumed suicide in 1940;[3] Bernhard never met him. Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer. George Steiner describes Bernhard's schooling as "hideous... under a sadistically repressive system, run first by Catholic priests, then by Nazis".[4]

Bernhard's Lebensmensch (a predominantly Austrian term, which was coined by Bernhard himself[5] and which refers to the most important person in one's life) was Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he cared for alone in her dying days. He had met Stavianicek in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the death of his beloved grandfather.

Suffering throughout his teens from lung ailments, including tuberculosis, Bernhard spent the years 1949 to 1951 at the Grafenhof sanatorium in Sankt Veit im Pongau. He trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1955–1957) and was always profoundly interested in music. His lung condition, however, made a career as a singer impossible.

In 1978, Bernhard was diagnosed with sarcoidosis.[7] After a decade of needing constant medical care for his lungs, he died in 1989 in Gmunden, Upper Austria.