First in the forest. After Peter Handke learned of his Nobel Prize, he walked for four hours. His first reaction to the committee's call was, "Is that true?" Handke later spoke to the AFP news agency about a "courageous decision" by the Swedish Academy.
At least it's one that does not meet with undivided approval. The award Peter Handkes has triggered very different reactions. In his native Austria, Federal Chancellor Kurz ("Business Card for Austria in the World") and German President Alexander Van der Bellen congratulated: "We owe much to Peter Handke and I hope he knows that."
What a day! A "happy" day - at least for the Austrian literature, for the literature at all. With Peter #Handke, an author has won the #Nobel Prize, whose quiet & haunting voice has been designing worlds, places & people for decades, the fascinating ... (1/3) https://t.co/MZMucLTxYR
- A. Van der Bellen (@vanderbellen) October 10, 2019The Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek responded with a "great!" to the message and added, "He would have been in front of me in any case." Finally, the prize will be awarded to someone "who they will finally be proud of in Austria".
The German director Wim Wenders wrote a laudatory speech to Peter Handke, which states: "Who else has carried the weight of the world with nothing but trust in the words?" Handke had written the screenplay for Wenders' film "The Sky over Berlin".
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Nobel laureate Peter Handke: In search of the "true sensation"However, others also look at Handke's controversial political statements - especially his partisanship for the Serbs during the wars in the former Yugoslavia and his funeral oration for Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic, accused of genocide before the International Criminal Court.
For example, the German Minister of State for Culture, Monika Grütters, honored Handke as "one of the most important contemporary German-speaking authors", who, however, with his provocative appetite "had so many political taboos broken" . The literary critic Denis Scheck said that Handke proves that one can run totally politically and at the same time write world literature. "The political correctness has received a crashing slap in the face," said Scheck.
The Bosnian-born writer Sasa Stanisic, who is nominated for the German Book Prize with his book "Ursprung", wrote on Twitter: "'Poetic' is not a quality feature for the evaluation of literature" and ordered Handke's text "Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer Winterlichen Reise "as personally particularly painful.
Handke's personally most painful text for me is "Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winlichen Reise", because it thematizes the massacre of Bosniaks in my hometown, Višegrad. I will spare you the momentum. Instead, the Eindordung: https://t.co/BZRgmljgFg
- Saša Stanišić (@sasa_s) October 10, 2019The US Department of Authors' Association PEN writes in a statement of "deep regret" about the election of Peter Handke as Nobel Prize for Literature 2019. "We are speechless about choosing a writer who has used his public voice to curtail historical truths and to assist the performers of a genocide. "
The organization "Mothers of Srebrenica", in which relatives of the victims of the 1995 massacre gather, accuses the selection committee: "It should have known who this man is." Munira Subasic of the organization said, "The decision hurt and insulted us, and we lost sons, husbands and brothers."
There were harsh criticisms from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Former Kosovar Foreign Minister Petrit Selimi described Handke as a genocide denier on Twitter and asked whether the Nobel Prize Academy also considered Handke's speech, which he delivered at the funeral of Milosevic, as part of his literary opus.
In Serbia, on the other hand, Peter Handke is celebrated. Minister of Culture Vladan Vukosavljevic said that the author had earned the prize much earlier, but "then politics has mixed their fingers in between". Handke was honored as a "friend of Serbia" .
On Thursday, Handke gave an interview to the Serbian state television. There he thanked the Serbs for their support and said in Serbian: "Tonight we will drink a schnapps and white wine."
