In contrast to many who have commented on Peter Handke in the past few days, they now want to turn to his texts in search of answers. For in it one will discover the anti-fascist attitude that permeates his entire oeuvre, Henrik Petersen is sure of that. The Swedish translator is an external member of the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature. In a statement that is exclusive to the SPIEGEL, he expressed himself on Thursday for the first time to the disputed award of the award to Handke - a highly discrete process in the Nobel Prize award process,
Read the full statement by Henrik Petersen in the text.
"Early on in his work, Handke clearly spoke out for peace and not for war, and he represents a fundamentally anti-nationalist viewpoint," the statement said. Handke is a radical apolitical author, writes Petersen. His work is characterized by an ideology-critical, ethically questioning attitude that a political program is not propagated. This approach is often criticized Handke as subjective reverie - but just as that can be read as a radical, ideology-critical poetics.
Some of Handke's maneuvers were not defensible
Regarding the war in Yugoslavia, it says: "In the Balkan request, Handke performed a kind of political kamikaze maneuver, probably fully aware of the risks." For Petersen it was crucial that Handke regretted the war and preferred a peaceful solution to the conflicts. Handke's basic thesis was that the Serbian side in the German and Austrian coverage of the Yugoslav wars had not had a say.
"The way in which Handke articulated his critique was precarious, clumsy, and sometimes led to downright absurd comparisons," says Petersen. Although Handke seemed to be shooting reflexively against everything he considered an unshakeable consensus, some of these maneuvers simply could not be defended. "But a warmonger is not Peter Handke therefore", he writes: A hard world needs writers who can compete with her. "Great literature has to be rewarded," says Petersen. In 50 years, Handke will be among the most natural laureates ever awarded by the Swedish Academy.
"No attack on humanity or civil society"
Mats Malm, the Permanent Secretary and spokesman for the Swedish Academy, together with lawyer Eric M. Runesson, also an academician, defended awarding to Handke in the Swedish newspaper "Dagens Nyheter". This had expressed "provocative, inappropriate and unclear statements in political matters". But that was not an attack on humanity or civil society. There is also no evidence to support the claim that Handke had praised the bloodshed and the war crimes denial when attending the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic.
That the writer had delivered a funeral oration for the Serbian politician accused of genocide before the International Criminal Court had been a major criticism of Handke's award in recent days. Its partisanship for the Serbs during the wars in the former Yugoslavia had sparked controversy in the literary scene and in the feature pages.
The book prize winner Sasa Stanisic, for example, said in his speech on Monday that Handke had "spoiled his own prize". He lamented Nobel Prize award to Handke, "because I was lucky enough to escape what Peter Handke does not describe in his texts." During the Bosnian war, Serbian militia had massacred civilians in Stanisic's hometown of Visegrad, and there were ethnic cleansing, evictions and rape.
Faced with these allegations, Handke responded on Tuesday to journalists indignant: "I am a writer, come from Tolstoy, I come from Homer, I come from Cervantes, and leave me in peace and does not ask me such questions!"
