Plays of domination and submission in Thomas!Bernhard's 'Ritter, Dene, Voss' (1986) and Werner!Schwab's Die 'Prasidentinnen' (1990)

When Thomas Bernhard wrote the play Ritter, Dene, Voss in the 1980s, he was already a well-established playwright. As the three siblings of the Wittgenstein family, the title characters, named after the renowned actors, represent the upper echelon of Viennese society and are haunted by their past. In Werner Schwab's first play Die Prasidentinnen, the three women protagonists are provincial, kleinstburgerlich, and share their secret fantasies for a better life. Disparate as the two plays are in regard to their social setting, they share on a more formal level a number of significant similarities. The focus of this essay is on highlighting structural analogies between the two plays, both of which demonstrate a masochistic structure of domination and submission in regard to three salient aspects: (a) the authors are bound to what they hate most: Heimat, (b) language tries to take over the bodies and vice versa, and (c) each character attempts to dominate the other two by being either submissive or overtly dominant.