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| Peter Handke |
Stand up if you support the Serbs
Austrian writer Peter Handke does, and his pro-Milosevic stance has enraged fellow artists. Ian Traynor reports
But Handke's standing as the flag-bearer of Germany's left-leaning '68 generation has been undermined by a succession of increasingly forthright pronouncements about the prevailing moral issue in Europe at the century's end: bombs and pogroms in Serbia and the response of western artists.
'It's a paradox that the remnants of the peace movement are running around with supporters of mass murder,' remarked poet and essayist Hans-Magnus Enzensberger.
His remarks were prompted by Handke's words on his return from a visit to Belgrade, likening the fate of the Serbs to that of the Jews under the Nazi regime. While the Balkan war convulses the German-speaking literary world - with novelist Erich Loest calling for a 'war congress of writers' to take place in Berlin in order to wrestle with the crisis - Handke's actions and statements have triggered fierce polemic and controversy across Europe.
A 'baptised and occasionally practising Catholic', Handke, 56, says he is quitting the 'current' Roman Catholic church in protest at the Vatican's views on the Balkan conflict.
He is also returning the 10,000 marks he received in 1973 as the winner of the Buchner prize, Germany's top literary award.
The writer has just returned to his home outside Paris after spending several days in Serbia, driving from Hungary to Novi Sad and Belgrade 'to get a feel for the country' and to 'retain my credibility' after years of voicing support for Serbia.
According to the Belgrade media, Handke received the Order of the Serbian Knight while in Serbia, the latest in a long list of decorations awarded in recognition of his propaganda value to the Milosevic regime.
'Mars is attacking, and Serbia, Montenegro, the Republika Srpska [the Serb part of Bosnia] and Yugoslavia are the fatherland of all those who have not become Martians or green butchers,' declared Handke.
His decision to return the Buchner prize money led Christian Meier, head of the German Society for Language and Literature, which awards the prize, to suggest it should be donated to Albanian refugees deported by Serbs: 'A Handke tent in a refugee camp that would be something.'
Handke's pro-Serb sympathies and his rage at the west go back to 1991 when the bloody dismemberment of the country began.
Handke's pro-Serb sympathies and his rage at the west go back to 1991 when the bloody dismemberment of the country began.
The son of a German soldier father and a Slovene mother, Handke was raised in the conservative southern Austrian province of Carinthia, an area he grew to despise while falling in love with what was then Yugoslavia, just across the border in Slovenia.
His affection for Slovenia turned to contempt when it became the first part of Yugoslavia to gain independence in 1991. Slovene nationalism, he railed, was 'the most wretched and lowest form of humanity'.
Three years ago, in a travel essay subtitled Justice For Serbia, Handke wrote lyrically and semi-mystically about life in Serbia and Serb-held Bosnia in the wake of the Serbs' brutal campaigns.
His fervour was not diminished by the recently ended three-year Serb siege of Sarajevo. He claimed that the Muslims had staged their own massacres in Sarajevo and had blamed this on the Serbs.
Nor did he believe that Serb troops had butchered thousands of Muslim men at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.
Instead, he found in Serbia a society that western sanctions had turned into a pre-consumerism idyll. He hoped (patronisingly to any urban Serb) that the country would stay that way.
When Nato threatened to bomb the Serbs last October, Handke promptly set out for Belgrade. 'My place is in Serbia if the Nato criminals bomb,' he stated. In February, during the Serb-Albanian negotiations in Rambouillet, outside Paris, Handke appeared on Serbian state television.
'Sometimes I would like to be a Serbian Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo,' he said.
'There is not a people in Europe in this century which has had to endure what the Serbs have had to put up with for five, or more, eight, years. There are no categories for this. There are categories and concepts for the Jews. You can talk about that. But with the Serbs, it is a tragedy for no reason, a scandal.'
The writer later apologised for his 'slip of the tongue' in comparing Serbia's fate to that of Jews during the Holocaust.
Handke relishes causing a stir and has courted controversy before. He has previously dismissed three of the holiest names in 20th-century German letters Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Franz Kafka as rubbish.
An early play from the 60s, Insulting The Public, consisted of four speakers haranguing, taunting and insulting the audience.
His faith is in the revelatory power of the Word, in the writer as a holy scribe and vessel of a larger poetic force. This is a constant running through several of his novels, from The Afternoon Of A Writer to My Year In The Bay Of Nobody, although he is also noted for his speechless dramas such as The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other, staged to critical acclaim by Luc Bondy at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival.
Susan Sontag, the American writer who spent several months in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war staging a performance of Waiting For Godot, said that Handke was now 'finished' in New York.
Alain Finkielkraut, the Paris intellectual, said Handke had become 'an ideological monster'.
Handke's 'glorification of the Serbs is cynicism', wrote Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek, while Bora Cosic, a Berlin-based Serbian novelist, has denounced Handke with exquisite irony:
'This writer, the Austrian, has his very personal style. The very worst crimes get mentioned rather sweetly. And so the reader completely forgets that we're dealing with crimes. The Austrian writer who visited my country found only very proud people there. They proudly put up with everything that happened to them, so much so that in their pride they didn't bother to ask why all this was happening to them.'
Handke has just written a play about the Bosnian war, and this is currently in rehearsal at Vienna's celebrated Burgtheater. But he is threatening to withdraw the work unless the chorus of media and peer criticism abates.
The play entitled The Journey To The Dug-Out, Or The Play About The War Film is to have its premiere in Vienna in June and be staged in Belgrade immediately afterwards.
'Handke is just being completely dismissed, in every respect morally, politically and professionally. It's all part of the war mood which I find a bit frightening,' said prize-winning novelist Martin Walser, rallying to the Austrian's defence.
'I can only say that any policy that leads to a war is the wrong policy.'
Life of Handke
Born on December 6, 1942 in Griffen, southern Austria.
Educated at the University of Graz, 1961-65.
His experimental poetry and anarchic, anti-authoritarian work win him a following among Germany's left-wing '1968ers'. Handke aims to strip away unnecessary words and challenge linguistic conventions, developing a spare, robust prose style.
In the 70s and 80s his work becomes increasingly introspective and autobiographical. At the same time his affection for Yugoslavia deepens.
Books:
Offending The Audience (1966), Self Accusation (1966), Prophecy (1966), Calling For Help (1967), Kaspar (1968), My Foot My Tutor (1966), Quodlibet (1970), The Ride Across Lake Constance (1971), They Are Dying Out (1974), The Long Way Round (1989), My Year In The Bay Of Nowhere (1994), A Writer's Journey To The Rivers Danube, Sava, Moraba And Drina, Or Justice For Serbia (1996).
Screenplays and stories:
The Goal Keeper's Fear Of The Penalty Kick (1970), Short Letter, Long Farewell (1974), Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1975), A Moment Of True Feeling (1975), The Left Handed Woman (1976), Slow Homecoming (1979), The Lesson Of Monte Sainte Victoire (1980), Across (1983), Absence (1986), Repetition (1986), The Afternoon Of A Writer (1987), Wings Of Desire (1987, co-writer).
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