Of Seven Fir Trees and the Snow: Early Stories

by Thomas Bernhard, Douglas Robertson (Translator)

These newly translated stories chart the making of a literary provocateur, one experiment and ethical dilemma at a time.

Before Thomas Bernhard became one of the most provocative voices in modern literature, he was a young writer testing the limits of form and subject. Of Seven Fir Trees and the Snow offers an unprecedented look at his evolution, from his earliest published work at nineteen to the emergence of his unmistakable voice. Translated into English for the first time, in these stories, Bernhard moves from stark naturalism to fairy-tale simplicity to the eerie, stripped-down surrealism reminiscent of science fiction. At the same time, he grapples with the fundamental ethical questions that would define his career: how does one navigate personal autonomy in a world fractured by the upheavals of the twentieth century?

Selected and arranged in chronological order by Douglas Robertson, this collection traces Bernhard’s transformation from an ambitious chronicler of Austrian rural life to a writer in dialogue with the broader currents of world literature. A rare glimpse into the making of a literary icon, this volume is essential reading for both longtime admirers and those discovering Bernhard’s singular genius for the first time.

Genres: Short Stories, Literature

200 pages, Hardcover

Published January 2, 2026

About the author

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian writer who ranks among the most distinguished German-speaking writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Although internationally he’s most acclaimed because of his novels, he was also a prolific playwright. His characters are often at work on a lifetime and never-ending major project while they deal with themes such as suicide, madness and obsession, and, as Bernhard did, a love-hate relationship with Austria. His prose is tumultuous but sober at the same time, philosophic by turns, with a musical cadence and plenty of black humor.

He started publishing in the year 1963 with the novel Frost. His last published work, appearing in the year 1986, was Extinction. Some of his best-known works include The Loser (about a student’s fictionalized relationship with the pianist Glenn Gould), Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and Woodcutters.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The shadows of clouds envelop the house which stands in front of the wooded area like a last sign of humanity, as the moon, holding its peace for fear of death, rises above the lake. The moon forsakes the blackened mountains and casts its beams onto the spine of the landscape. A feeble light reels out of the house and into the ditch, then moves erratically along the train tracks. It is Korn, taking flight from his abode. His footfalls increase in pace, as if the Devil were driving him across the waterlogged fields.

Of Seven Fir Trees and the Snow: Early Stories is Douglas Robertson's translation of a selection of 22 stories Thomas Bernhard's early work, which Robertson also curated.

Robertson had been publishing translations of pieces by Bernhard on his blog but in the last 5 years his renditions of previously untranslated or out-of-print pieces have been published, starting with his rendition of The Cheap-Eaters, then The Rest Is Slander: Five Stories, Save Yourself If You Can: Six Plays followed by this.

The first piece, The Red Light, dates back to 1950 when Bernhard (or 'Thomas Fabian' as he styled his work then) was just 19.

And it's fascinating to see the evolution of his work - the earlier pieces grounded and pastoral (The Red Light describes an innkeeper approvingly as a stalwart, capable landlady, Mrs Radacher ... She kept both her feet firmly planted in reality; she had never been one of those brooding types who occupy themselves with abstruse ideas), sentimental and at times religious - the title piece of this collection from 1952 is a 1 Corinthians inspired work, subtitled a Christmas fairy tale:

And what is this thing you intend to nurture?'
'Love, Father ... Hope and Love ...'I whispered, and of all the people in the world, I was the happiest

The first glimpse of a Bernhardian protaganist perhaps the narrator's interlocutor in Crazy Magdelena (1953): Even though he sometimes had quite uncommon if not insane views about life, its days and nights, its ascents and descents, and could never be persuaded to budget an inch from this extravagant ‘insanity’ on any point we were still the best of friends.

Robertson provides a handful of informative but unobstrusive notes, in particular calling out where themes in the stories are echoed in later works in the master's career. For example, the 1954 story The Decline of the West, based on and originally titled after Der Untergang des Abendlandes - the concept of untergang key to Bernhard's work, one of his most famous books, rendered in English as The Loser originally being titled Der Untergeher.

The strongest pieces were the longest - The Pig Keeper, from 1956, and 30 pages in length, from which the quote that opens my review is taken; and Occurences (written in 1959, but published in 1969), a 60 page piece consisting of pithy vignettes.

A handful of pieces date from the late 60s/early 70s when Bernhard really his his stride, and the most unmistakably Bernhardian was the 1970 piece As An Administrator at the Asylum: A Fragment.

My 3 star rating here is not absolute, but relative to Bernhard's general ouevre, which (as Sebald said of Krasznahorkai) 'far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing' as this would be far from the best place to with his work. But for Bernhard completists this a hugely valuable piece and hopefully Robertson and Seagull books will continue to chase down untranslated pieces.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 2 out of 5]

"We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have gone out of ourselves and we have gone away and we have gone down by coming down here, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left nothing behind and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents never informed us of or enlightened us about the fact that our life process is in reality nothing but a pathological process. We used to be up there, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal, and now we are down here, without our parents, and once again we are locked up in these walls of ours and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal." (206)

The reality is that I will order a newly published volume of Thomas Bernhard's work without question—in this case, a collection of mostly early and generally lesser-known stories published under the title of one of the more whimsical pieces (by Bernhardian standards): Of Seven Fir Trees and the Snow. Overall, the collection was quite underwhelming to me as far as the stories go in and of themselves. I'd characterize most of the pieces as germs which found fuller form in Bernhard's more substantial works—particularly the novels. Compare, for instance, the passage above (from Lowlands—the final story in the collection) to this one in Corrections:

"We enter a world which precedes us but is not prepared for us, and we have to cope with this world, if we can't cope with this world we're done for, but if we survive, for whatever constitutional reason, then we must take care to turn this world, which was a given world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that we're living in our own world, not in some previous world, one that is always bound to be of no concern to us and intent upon ruining and destroying us." (174-175)

To me, hearing the echoes and finding the connections to other works was probably the most interesting part of reading this collection.