[1] The final play written by Bernhard, it premiered on November 4, 1988, and sparked one of the biggest theater scandals in the history of post-war Austria.
[3] Bernhard wrote his play as a tragic reflection on the obsessive politics of nationalism, the denial of the past and the continued antisemitism within modern Austria.
[4] Heldenplatz was also understood as a veiled attack on the election of Austria's president Kurt Waldheim, who called the play "an insult to the Austrian people".
A few days before their departure, considering that "now everything is worse than fifty years ago" and that "there are now more Nazis in Vienna than in 1938", Joseph Schuster commits suicide by throwing himself out the window from their apartment overlooking Heldenplatz.
The play includes a line about "a nation of 6.5 million idiots living in a country that is rotting away, falling apart, run by the political parties in an unholy alliance with the Catholic Church.