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to allow one humiliation after another to be heaped on me and then I had read out what I thought was my harmless text whereupon the Minister had gotten angry and left the hall in a rage and now his vassals were coming for me. The entire mob in the hall, all people who were dependent on the Minister, who had grants orpensions and above all the so-called Cultural Senate, which probably attends every prize ceremony, all of them rushed after the Minister out of the hall and down the broad flight of stairs. But all these people rushing away after the Minister didn’t rush away after the Minister without first giving me a dirty look, as I was apparently the cause of this embarrassing scene and the sudden wrecking of this ceremony. They cast their dirty looks at me and rushed after the Minister and many of them didn’t stop at dirty looks, they also waved their fists at me, most of all, if I remember correctly, the President of the Cultural Senate, Herr Rudolf Henz, a man then between seventy and eighty, he rushed at me and waved his fist and then chased after the Minister with the others. What have I done? I asked myself, suddenly left standing with my aunt and two or three friends. I wasn’t conscious of having done anything wrong. The Minister hadn’t understood my sentences and because I had used the word
State
not in a subservient way but in a highly critical context, he had leapt to his feet and attacked me and had run out of the Audience Chamber and down the broad staircase. And everyone else, with the meager exceptions already mentioned, had rushed off after him. I can still hear the way the Minister slammed the door tothe Audience Chamber shut, I have never heard anyone bang a door that loudly. So there I stood and didn’t know what to say. My friends, three or four, not more, and my aunt had moved over to me and had no answer either. The whole group turned toward the buffet that was still flanked by two waiters provided by the Sacher or the Bristol, gaping with shock, and wondered what was going to be done with the totally untouched spread. It’ll go to an old age home, I thought. The Minister cold-shouldered you, not vice versa, said one of my friends. It was well said. He cold-shouldered everyone, I said. The Minister slammed the door to the Audience Chamber so hard, I thought, the panes must have given way. But when I investigated the door to the Audience Chamber, it turned out that not one pane was broken. It had only sounded as if the panes in the door to the Audience Chamber had broken. The newspapers next day wrote about a scandal that the writer Bernhard had provoked. A Viennese newspaper, which called itself the
Viennese Monday
, wrote on the front page that I was a bug that needed to be exterminated.

The Anton Wildgans Prize *
    Anton Wildgans, like Weinhaber, is a Hölderlin of the Vienna suburbs who fits the soul of the people to a T. The prize that is named for him is funded by an industrial association that has its headquarters on the Schwarzenbergplatz in Vienna in a magnificent palace of the later nineteenth century. A week before I was to receive the Austrian State Prize, the president of the industrial association, Mayer-Gunthof, long since dead, informed me that the relevant jury had decided to give me this year’s prize, which is tosay the prize for 1976. The president ended his letter with the customary formula that he was extremely pleased to be able to share this news with me. At the given moment, I receive the invitation to the ceremony. The prize is endowed with twenty-five thousand schillings. I didn’t give any thought to Wildgans, for I estimated him lower than my writer friends on the jury who, for whatever absurd reason, had hit upon the idea of awarding me the Wildgans Prize for 1976. In Austrian acting schools, it’s customary for the students to have a constant diet of Wildgans and above all they’re already learning a passage from
Armut
for the entrance exam and they spend their