Peter Handke's Book Sparks Storm of Controversy
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Just the title was enough to set off a furor — “Justice for Serbia: A Winter Journey to the Rivers Danube, Sava, Morava and Drina.” When Peter Handke, one of the most influential German-language writers, published the long essay in January, it created an immediate storm in literary and intellectual circles across Europe. Handke, 53, a native Austrian now living in Paris, has a wide audience for his introspective novels and plays. His essay sparked debate going to the heart of Europe’s agony over what it should or should not have done to stop the Continent’s worst bloodletting since World War II.
A major theme of his essay — now turned into a book published by Suhrkamp of Frankfurt — is that the reporting of Western news media has drilled into readers’ minds an image of Serbs as aggressors in the Yugoslav conflict.
“In this war as in others, the roles of assailants and the attacked, the pure victims and the naked evil-doers, were too quickly assigned for the benefit of the so-called world public,” he wrote.
The war correspondents “are not only arrogant chroniclers, they are also false,” he added. “To bring the war closer to the clients, many international magazines, from Time to Nouvel Observateur, proclaimed Serbs in general evil and Muslims in general good.”
In Germany and Austria, barely a day goes by without a comment on the essay from a journalist, author or analyst — most of them attacking Handke. The critics say he ignores the atrocities perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs, who between April and November 1992 seized 70 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina and expelled more than 1 million non-Serbs, mostly Muslims, from their homes. The Guardian, an influential national British newspaper, devoted a full page to a story on “The man who loves the Serbs.”
Germans and Austrians have in particular been stung by Handke’s criticism of their countries’ swift readiness to recognize Slovenia and Croatia as independent nations in 1991, when the old Yugoslavia began breaking up. Handke’s essay was first published in two weekend installments by Munich’s highly regarded Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which called his descriptions “provocative, irritating and also liberating.” It said the essay was designed to stir debate and question assumptions about the war and how it was reported.
It succeeded. Handke then published the essay as a book, reversing the title to put “Justice for Serbia” at the end. It has shot to No. 1 in the Austrian best-seller lists. Next, he went on the road, giving public readings in Germany, Austria and Slovenia.
Austrian state television broadcast a discussion following a Vienna reading that set the whole nation talking. A spectator who said he had been in Sarajevo 22 times during the war asked Handke why he had not visited Bosnia. The author raged at the man: “Why do people always ask why I didn’t go to Bosnia? ... Are you the owners of suffering?”
Some of Handke’s most bitter remarks — in his text and at his packed readings — are reserved for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative German newspaper that took a strong anti-Serb line even before the war and is unabashedly pro-Croat. Handke also criticized Peter Schneider, an author who wrote articles on the Bosnian war for Der Spiegel magazine, for supporting NATO air strikes on Bosnian Serbs.
Schneider replied in Spiegel, challenging Handke’s contention that the Serbs were provoked into war by the secession of Croatia that left hundreds of thousands of Serbs as second-rate citizens in a land they did not want to live in. “Nearly all aggressors in history, not least Adolf Hitler, claimed they were reacting to provocation,” Schneider wrote.
Handke first wrote a book lamenting the breakup of the multiethnic Yugoslavia in 1991 after Slovenia’s secession. In November 1995, he traveled through Serbia, accompanied by the translator of his works into Serbo-Croatian. He went to rural areas, far from the front lines of war, and came back describing the Serbs as isolated and proud. “On my travels, at least, I did not see Serbia as a land of paranoiacs — much more as the huge room of an orphaned, yes, an orphaned, abandoned child,” Handke wrote. “ But who knows? What can a stranger know?”
Aleksandar Tisma, a writer who left Serbia for France in protest against Serbia’s nationalistic policies at the outset of the war, contends Handke’s work has been misunderstood. “It is the book of a man who is mourning after a country,” Tisma told the Frankfurter Rundschau. “Nowhere does Handke claim that Serbs committed no crimes. ... He experienced Yugoslavia as a beautiful, big, multiethnic country. It pains him now that this country has gone under, broken up.” Berserkistan is the world news service of
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WALDEN ON THE SEINE
A QUIRKY, HIGHLY WROUGHT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION BY PETER HANDKE, A SORT OF TEUTONIC SAMUEL BECKETTAuthor: By Bill Marx (Boston Globe)For a writer as zenlike as Peter Handke, ego is bound to get in the way of art. Initially acclaimed for his experimental dramas of the '60s, which dissect language games with Wittgensteinian fervor, Handke most recently has written gnomic fictions filled with loving descriptions of internal and external phenomena. Crystalline images of nature dovetail with meditations on the possibilities for the imagination in an age of techno-junk. Long considered one of Germany's leading writers (its world-class meta-fictionalist), Handke has honed a monkish sensibility that worships the God of the perfect sentence. Admirers of his austere prose -- at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world -- forgive his Teutonic earnestness and self-admiring geekiness.
Date: SUNDAY, August 16, 1998
Page: E1
Section: BooksYet for someone who worships selflessness with passion, Handke yields to the temptation of autobiography, let alone sociability, with the ease of the truly self-involved. His first foray into nonfiction, 1984's ``The Weight of the World,'' was a sordid journal whose revelations focused on the inevitable sadism of creative introversion. That book's depiction of the long-distance loneliness of the artist was tersely echoed in 1989's moving ``The Afternoon of a Writer,'' an 86-page novella on regeneration that was about not `` `I as writer' but `the writer as I.' '' Here Handke disregards conventional narrative and characterization, exploring panic with an icy ambiguity that prefers consciousness over conscience. Still, even with the philosophical disclaimers and quotes from poets Goethe and Holderlin, the alienated mind behind the curtain is Handke's.
Whatever the metaphysical cloud cover, Handke has never been shy about his ``I.'' In 1967, the fledgling author made international headlines at a Princeton University literary conference, attacking the writing of giants Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boll as ``mere description'' of social issues. Just last year, his slim nonfiction work, ``Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia,'' accused the Western media of demonizing the Serbs: His strident criticism and rhetorical sloppiness caused an international furor, sparking accusations of stupidity and moral obtuseness. After this book, Handke will never be read the same; even hearty fans have become suspicious of what lies beneath his shrill rejection of the modern and adoration of the primal purity of the peasantry.
In his fiction, Handke has fashioned the paradoxical ``I'' into a game of authorial hide-and-seek; the elusiveness of his irony shields him from the strident preaching that mars his nonfiction. Published in Germany in 1993, ``My Year in the No-Man's-Bay'' is Handke's most autobiographical fiction yet, a long confessional chronicle from an arch miniaturist, stuffed with his formidable strengths and frustrating weaknesses. At times devolving into the bloated noodlings of a monomaniac, the fat, meandering tome is not where a reader new to Handke should begin. (Among his early books, ``A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,'' a brittle remembrance of his working-class mother, remains indispensable. His most impressive recent achievement, 1988's ``Slow Homecoming,'' brings together three novellas that succeed in their aim ``to capture a harmony with language, and to pass it on contagiously.'')
For admirers with sufficient Handke under their belt, ``My Year in the No-Man's-Bay'' amply rewards picking through its haystacks of overwriting. Eccentric, self-indulgent, and lyrical, the book is a post-Holocaust ``Walden'' written by a nature-loving grouch. Our frazzled narrator is ``Gregor Keuschnig,'' a pseudonym for a lawyer turned writer who, like Handke, is now in his late 50s. Like Handke, he is obsessed with experiencing the thrill of fusing perception and imagination, observing nature by escaping the distractions and inhumanity of the modern urban world. The volume's three sections draw on Handke's interactions with a place -- a western suburb of Paris, where the author has lived after travels in Spain, Japan, the former Yugoslavia, and Greece.
The first portion has Keuschnig (a typical Handke protagonist) yearning to experience the zing of metamorphosis once again, deciding to spend a year completely alone, his start-up cogitations festooned with wry references to Handke's books, his first marriage, and to his child, though Handke's daughter becomes a rebellious 22-year-old son named Valentin. Keuschnig also imagines the seasonal pilgrimages of his son and six friends, who are referred to mostly by their professions (``the reader,'' ``the priest,'' ``the painter''). These mysterious figures are characters lifted from Handke's novels, satiric send-ups of his buddies and enemies, and aspects of the writer himself. (``The Painter'' makes an unsuccessful film; Handke directed the movie version of his story ``The Left-Handed Woman.'') In the conclusion, Keuschnig meticulously details his year of stalking new sensations and sights in the countryside, capping his experiences of mushroom hunting and flower spotting by uniting at Christmastime with his son and friends in a restaurant filled with ladders and an owner who barks out such cryptic wisdom as ``The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope.''
Handke hopes that the poetic insinuations of his epistemology will make up for plotlessness: ``The metamorphosis -- is it going to turn into a struggle again after all: between me, the monster of awareness, and me, the Tom Thumb of narration?'' The monster can be an angel. Gorgeous passages detail Keuschnig's discovery of the music of a huge hive of bees lodged deep in a cliff wall (``and I wished we might all have such ringing in our ears, in our skulls, in our hearts, for me and you in the hour of our death'') and describe a hornet who'd flown into a snail shell on the ground ``pushing and rolling it along. . . . It was now ripping and stripping the rotten flesh from its walls.'' But Handke is indeed a midget when it comes to storytelling, and the book is stuffed with self-indulgent rhetoric about urban alienation, weird political statements, bleak attempts at humor (``which made me think they had at home not so much piggy banks as piglet banks''), and a penchant for pomposity that will infuriate those who find that all his personae proudly parade the same smug detachment from the everyday world. Krishna Winston's translation is fine, though Handke pushes her up against the linguistic wall in such awkward concoctions as ``language-eyes.''
In a sense, Handke acts out the fantasies of readers and critics, who, in the face of modern technology, seek to allay their fears by turning reading and writing into a religious fetish, a mystical quest for wholeness that, if carried too far, turns into microscopic self-worship. At one point, Handke fondly lists the pencils he used to write ``My Year in the No-Man's-Bay'': ``Thank you, white pencil from the honeymoon hotel in Nara, Japan! Thank you, twenty-second black Cumberland pencil!'' Still, like fellow grim quester Samuel Beckett, Handke dares to lose himself in no-man's-land: The silliness and shrillness of his solipsistic tub-thumping is the irksome byproduct of the beauty he brings back alive.