Questions have arisen as the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Committee think about the case of Peter Handke and the relationship between literature and politics. I will comment on Handke's fiercely debated attitude to the Yugoslav wars, but also on whether Handke is an ideological author. For the sake of clarity: I do this in my capacity as a single member of the external Nobel Committee and not as the official spokesman of the Swedish Academy.
Is Handke's argument with the fascist Germany of his generation of parents in books such as Slow Homecoming , The Doctrine of Sainte-Victoire , The Chinese of Pain and The Repetition "Political"? Many would answer this question with yes. Issues such as remembrance, conscience, grief and anger are being negotiated by a writer who is not only a German-speaking Austrian, but also a member of a family belonging to the Slovenian minority in Austria. In my opinion, it makes sense to draw a clear line between a political, ideological, ethical searching discourse and the description and formation of a personal experience. Especially since the term "politics" in the current literary context is often used imprecisely and abstractly.
Let me start with some personal comments. For me it is crucial that Handke regretted the war in Yugoslavia, that he preferred a peaceful resolution of the conflicts. Something like that is swiftly said, but this very circumstance leads us to an immensely important discussion: could the war have been prevented, if so, how, and why did the exact opposite happen instead? In a way, this also explains Handke's attitude to Serbia in the Balkan conflict, which seems elusive to anyone who is not in the subject. The mere fact that Handke has Slovenian roots and yet should have taken sides for the Serbs, should cause many a headache, as well as the fragmented right-left scale underlying the Balkan conflict. Slovenia, the country to which it had a strong personal connection, was in a significantly more favorable economic position than Serbia during the conflict preceding the conflict, Handke said on June 17, 2006 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . In the interview, he also explains that the break with the Federation was in the situation then unsolid. He made it clear that he wanted to avoid civil war. How quickly the EU recognized Slovenia and Croatia as independent states saw Handke extremely critical. His point of view is comparable to that which many today adopt for the referendum on the independence of Catalonia; especially as Handke cites Catalonia as a reference in My Year in the No Man's Bay, when in the background of the story takes place a fictitious German civil war. In short, early on in his work, Handke clearly spoke out for peace, not for war, and he represents a fundamentally anti-nationalist point of view.
If one discusses his attitude, it is even more important to recall what a decisive symbol Yugoslavia had become for him on a personal level. This fact is also reflected in his work. This topic is problematic for many as it involves a strong idealization: critics often accuse Handke of transfiguring Slovenia and Yugoslavia, speaking as an Austrian rather than a Slovene. But we can also approach the subject from another angle, namely by reading Handke's books and getting to know him as a writer.
Unlike many who have commented on him in the last few days, we want to turn to his texts in search of answers - and there we will discover the antifascist attitude that permeates his entire oeuvre. This includes dealing with the legacy of National Socialism. Here we can draw parallels to other German-speaking writers; in one way to Thomas Bernhard, to another to Paul Celan. The special feature of Handke is the introspective conscience discourse in books such as Slow Return , The Teaching of the Sainte-Victoire or The Chinese of Pain : self-critical, the author deals with the idea that inherited ideologies are inscribed in his language and his view of the world , If we then turn our reading gaze to the key work The Repetition , we recognize how much emotional capital Handke has invested in the liberation war of Yugoslavia against the National Socialist occupying powers. This is the personal background against which Handke has stated that the regions should have stuck together like sibling peoples, side by side.
In the repetition served a maternal uncle served as a model for the brother, after which the narrator goes on the search and leads him to the karst in Slovenia. In the family it is said that the brother had deserted from the German army and joined the Yugoslav partisans to fight for liberation from the Nazis. Moreover, in the family background - the fictional narrator - the relationship with a leading political figure of the eighteenth century is woven, which is said to have led a peasant uprising against the Emperor of Austria and bears the same name as the narrator. In reality, his uncle fell on the Eastern Front, where he was forced to fight for a Nazi Germany with whom he had never identified, not least because of his Slovenian heritage. Handke in his probably most biographical work writes about this unfortunate misfortune , the affectionate portrait of his mother, who has taken her own life. The fictitious story of the anti-Nazi struggling uncle is also found in the dream game Still Storm . Another key motive is Slovenia against German-speaking rule, which also accompanies Handke's reflections on the Slovene language in Die Wiederholung . Against the background that Slovenia was historically dominated by larger empires and was powerless, Handke draws a picture of political "innocence"; a not unproblematic topic that, however, gains in clarity as we continue to read.
The topic of linguistic criticism pervades Handke's entire oeuvre. Slow Homecoming and The Teaching of Sainte-Victoire , in which he deals with the German language and ideological ballast, I have already mentioned. Furthermore, the texts contain traces of Handke's complex fascination for the philosopher Martin Heidegger - another reason to compare him with the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan. But is the topic "political"? A definition question. I myself take the opposite view: Handke is a radical non-political author, which can be most clearly demonstrated by the subject of the language criticism. Handke's work shapes an ideology-critical, ethically questioning attitude, a political program is not propagated. In many texts, the narrative ego seeks to distance itself actively from the ideological, from the world of values, from traditional symbolic orders and "the world of names" (as it is called in Slow Homecoming ), to new private, subjective or mythical ones in literature To create orders. Handke is often criticized for this approach as a subjective reverie - but just as he can be read as a radical, ideology-critical poetics.
The decisive factor was Handke's encounter with the French painter Paul Cézanne. In his late landscape painting, he critically examined all preconceived ideas about what lies behind the terms "nature" and "landscape" in critical - and handke - highly present - oriented ways. And so, once again, we have reached a point that can be read politically , starting from the current paradigmatic definitions of the word in relation to literature. Yet it touches on a much deeper, fundamentally human dimension: on the one hand it concerns how we experience the world through our perceptions and sensory impressions, and on the other how we rate these impressions - voluntarily or involuntarily - through language. By means of a hyperbole typical of him, Handke describes how Cézanne "appears to him as a human teacher - I venture the word: as the human teacher of the present time". In his own landscape descriptions, Handke seeks to undermine the rectifications of language and the entire symbolic order - from historical narratives and urban myths to any ready-made explanatory models for understanding the world. Handke is the great antitourist of literature. And even in the context of globalization, the topic has by no means lost significance; it returns in Handke's later great epic The Picture Loss or Through the Sierra de Gredos .
Anyone who wants to read the linguistic critical Handke nevertheless political, finds exactly here - in his unwillingness to be ideological - a strength. An example: Handke's landscape descriptions in Slow Homecoming and last but not least in My Year in the No Man's Bay could well be read as a new tradition of nature writing and interpret or apply politically in this context. But political propaganda is nowhere in the texts.
In the Balkan request, Handke performed a kind of political kamikaze maneuver, presumably fully aware of the risks. His basic thesis was that in the German and Austrian reporting on the Yugoslav wars the Serbian side had no say. The manner in which Handke articulated his critique was precarious, clumsy, and sometimes led to downright absurd comparisons. These texts are problematic in several respects and can only be cited to a limited extent because all statements are closely linked with arguments that Handke hopes will be interpreted as a whole.
In her article Justice for Peter Handke? from 2013 analyzed Karoline von Oppen, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Languages & International Studies at the University of Bath, an essay widely cited in political handke discussions. There is talk of a wintry trip to the rivers Danube, Sava, Morawa and Drina or justice for Serbia . This text was published in January 1996 on two consecutive Sundays in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and repeatedly interpreted as - scandalous - partisanship for Serbia in the Bosnian war. Von Oppen's analysis assumes that the essay was published after the end of the war and that its literary resources in the German-Austrian context and against the backdrop of a mid-nineties in Germany's current debate are polemical and provocative. In short, the essay has been written in a specific context and takes on a completely different meaning if it is discussed separately.
In 2007, Handke won a lawsuit against the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur , which had accused him after his visit to the memorial service for Slobodan Miloševi the approval ("approuver") of a genocide. However, this has not stopped the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter from publishing an article a few days ago in which the Danish author Carsten Jensen Handke calls "an open advocate of genocide and purging". Furthermore, Handke advocated "bloodshed," according to Jensen, who by the way brags to have read any of Handke's books ever. The article is nothing but colportage. In recent days, Handke was often convicted and portrayed as an ideologue and warmonger.
It is quite obvious that in some articles about the wars of Yugoslavia, Handke does not even try to act as a credible political commentator. And although he seems to be shooting reflexively against anything he sees as an unshakeable consensus, some of these maneuvers simply can not be defended. But a warmonger is not Peter Handke therefore. He is not an Ezra Pound.
If you would like to know more about what Handke actually said about Yugoslavia, I recommend Lothar Struck's remarks in " Der Yugoslavia". Peter Handke in the field of tension between literature, media and politics of 2013 and other articles of the German literary scholar.
As with Olga Tokarczuk, there are also essays by Handke that the Nobel Committee has read and commented upon, but which did not play a role in the detailed discussions of the work. There were other individual texts in the foreground. Also in the central works - some of which I have quoted - which formed the basis of the discussions, Handke addresses themes such as history and violence. And in a literary grandiose way. A hard world needs writers who can handle it. Great literature must be rewarded.
On the day of the announcement, Ulrika Milles said on public television in Sweden that in times of disinformation it was a shame to award Peter Handke the Nobel Prize for Literature. In my opinion, the opposite is the case; In a time marked by disinformation, the Nobel Prize to Peter Handke has proven to be an extremely timely choice. One day, the reactions to Handke's Nobel Prize will be the subject of a historical treatise.
A few weeks ago I was in the gallery in the Börshuset, where the portraits of all Nobel laureates hang, and involuntarily paused before the portrait of Samuel Beckett. I noticed that Beckett got the Nobel Prize exactly half a century ago, in 1969. In fifty years, when someone in the same gallery stands in front of Handke's image, Handke will be - just like Beckett - one of the most obvious laureates ever awarded by the Swedish Academy. I am convinced of that.
Henrik Petersen
Read all current developments on the case of Peter Handke
