Thomas Bernhard Chatbot

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You can no longer ask Thomas Bernhard what he thinks of the world. At the Literature Museum in Vienna, you can try anyway.

Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) is one of the most important writers of Austrian postwar literature. He wrote novels such as “Frost,” “Correction,” and “Extinction,” as well as tragicomic plays, and he wrote in a language that is unmistakable in its pull of repetitions, escalations, and exaggerations. At home he was considered a “Nestbeschmutzer” (one who fouls his own nest) and a master of invective; internationally he has long been regarded as an author of world-literary stature: his works have been translated into more than forty languages.

Since 30 April 2026, the special exhibition “Putting the Thinking Cap on Dullness”. Thomas Bernhard Today at the Austrian National Library has been showing manuscripts, letters, photographs, and finds from the literary estate, which has been held at the ÖNB since 2023. Alongside original furniture and typescripts, the show relies on playful approaches: a city-insult quiz, a station for building your own Bernhard-style compound words, playlists by international authors, and the Thomas Bernhard Chatbot.

The chatbot was conceived for the exhibition and explores the question of how artificial intelligence produces literature. BILDWERK was responsible for the technical implementation. The concept and design of the station were developed by the museum.

Facing the Bernhard Bot

Visitors put questions to the chatbot and receive answers that replicate the rhythm, repetitions, and tone of Bernhard’s prose. The basis is the author’s collected prose. The answers are accordingly nasty: asked why we live, the machine delivers a full-blown tirade on habit, cowardice, and precautions taken for dying. How strongly the Bernhard tone comes through can be adjusted in levels.Is Bernhard’s style really as easy to imitate as is often claimed? And what distinguishes a machine that builds sentences from a human being who writes? The chatbot makes these questions tangible: anyone who uses it quickly notices what it gets right and where it fails.

Is Bernhard’s style really as easy to imitate as is often claimed? And what distinguishes a machine that builds sentences from a human being who writes? The chatbot makes these questions tangible: anyone who uses it quickly notices what it gets right and where it fails.

What does Thomas Bernhard say about Bildwerk??

“Bildwerk, you say? A company that makes images that move, and machines that talk as if they had ever had anything to say that had not already been said before by others, and by those others before by still others, and so on, into infinity, into wretchedness, into mindlessness. And yet I must confess, and it pains me to confess it, that these people have made me, the dead man, speak, something the living in this country have not managed in fifty years, to make me speak without burying me again right away. That is, if one considers it carefully, and I consider everything carefully, the only achievement I have come across in this century that I do not utterly despise. Utterly! Almost do not despise, I should say. An enormous step forward.”