Eve of Retirement (Vor dem Ruhestand, 1979) is one of Thomas Bernhard's most historically specific plays; it is also one of his most ritualistic. A play of doubleness and unsynthesizable tensions, it is both realistic and metaphoric, structured both causally and cyclically, enacting a consciousness of historical specificity and ritualized changelessness. Steeped in public history, it simultaneously ritualizes history through private memory. This doubleness, the coexistence of historical and ahistorical consciousness, of development and stasis, time and timelessness, is what will interest me here. I will claim that multiple temporal codings, knowingly echoed in every gesture and object of the play and epitomized in the ritual celebration, both reflect and implicate the history and memory of its audience.
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Jeanette R. Malkin (1995) studied this question.