Handke so it happens is one of the great, preternaturally needy and assertive exhibitionists [ since childhood] and his work would not be so strong and defined without this powerful drive. He even displayed his naked psychic "self" in the accumulated involuntary jottings in "The Weight of the World" – 1975 – and did so again, in poetically sublimated, superior manner and in far more self-aware form, in the dramatic poem play "Walk About the Villages" [1982/1996 U.S. Edition, Ariadne Press]. There are reasons for this of course, for this need to be seen, which are out of the ordinary in the case of someone who continues to suffer from autistic liabilities. Since I cannot comprise the huge field of autism in a few sentences, Handke’s might be thought of as his having the nose of your best hunting dog, the ears of your favorite bat, the eyes [Handke suffers from bouts of periodic color blindness] of an eagle, but having no better equipment than the usual “processor” to accommodate all that extra-sensory input [making for some odd, discombobulating behavior and spoken spontaneous verbal outrages]. Moreover, his talent is that of an “idiot savant.” At his desk, or with pencil in hand, Handke is supreme. However, once you get a drift of how askew his liability can make him, the case allows for considerable understanding, in that you ignore his personal tics, and appreciate him for his work. However, since Handke's wont to show off has not exactly gone unnoticed since his first appearance on the world stage – walking demonstratively arm in arm with Umberto Eco at the Frankfurt Book Fair at the publication of his extraordinary novel "My Year in the No-Man's-Bay" [1994], taking the long way right in front of the screen during the performance of an Anselm Kiefer film [2004] are two graphic examples of this volume displacers behavior that come readily to my mind - some people regard his actions, both spoken and written, in defense of Serbia and in behalf of a federated Yugoslavia and of Milosevic as suspect, as being unnecessarily serving as advertisement just for Handke himself. For example, his once live in girl friend during his Salzburg years, the film actress Marie Colbin, released a statement during the second coming of Handke/ Yugoslav controversy, the one that paralleled the Kosovo war, saying that he probably welcomed this war what with his insatiable need for attention in the public sphere; he, a warrior at heart, who merely pretended to give voice to the lost souls; that she still remembered his climbing boots in her belly, on her head; that there was nothing special about him... an accusation to which Handke, these many years later, has failed to reply, but whose truth I do not doubt; they mesh with my experience of Handke's wish for power, control, domination, the autocratic, easily distempered side of him, pleasurable as long as it confines itself to the word, not so when he violently slaps his three year old daughter [see "A Child Story"] in another fit of temper that is elicited by endless irritation of his hyper-sensitivity; it fits the side of the man who as a child from age two to twelve was exposed to his stepfather's violent behavior: read or reread his most famous book, "Sorrow Beyond Dreams," and note what his mother's future biographer experienced during those years. Handke had pretty well succeeded in his most unlikely Ash Wednesday of self-abnegation, for nearly two years, until in Fall 2005 he started to creep back into public view with an interview to L'Observer, on the occasion of the French publication of his "Des Gredos" novel. However, even during that L’Observer interview, Yugoslavia appears to have been foremost on his mind when he said that Germany, France, NATO had perpetrated a nearly perfect crime in engineering the disintegration of his beloved Yugoslav unity - more likely than not he had the German Foreign Minister Genscher's unfortunate and ill considered recognition of the independence of Croatia, then under the Ustasha successor government of Tjudman in 1991, uppermost in mind, which, as Europeans know, removed one major obstacle to the centrifugal forces that sought to assemble around nationalist magnets of all kind. { FN-} The Croatian weekly Globus interview was held half a year later, and as of this writing in October 2006 is the very last of at least half a recent dozen to address Yugoslavia in the contentious interim between the start and the ebbing of the third Handke-Yugo war . It was an interview that followed on the heels of a veritable interview orgy that his visit to Pozarevac and the resulting demarche of his greatest play, "The Art of Asking," by the since demoted head of the Comedie Française, "Bozo" Bozonnet, had elicited; and the subsequent uproar over the awarding and then withdrawal [in the form of the City Council not releasing the Prize money!] of the Heine Preis to him by the City of Düsseldorf; a most interesting interview – it is, the Globus one, more of a description of an interview than an interview as such, not only for its recounting of our “forest madman's” behavior, but for Handke’s revelation that one other reason for his attendance of the Milosevic funeral was that he is planning – may have written at this point – a novel about M. as a tragic character, and wanted to absorb the atmosphere; which may of course make the whole debacle worth while. And if Handke really had such a plan, I have the most absolute confidence in my man as the fastest veritable atmosphere sponge on both sides of the Mississippi - just take a look at Handke's Alaska, the opening chapter in "A Slow Homecoming", where the essence of a near timeless - and necessarily and relievedly unconfiningly nameless place and river is deposited after just a couple few weeks visits. I-B

One reason I expected Handke to have good reason to seize the opportunity to attend Milosevic's funeral - if only to find a somnambulistic way to go to Pozarevac in Spring 2006 - was because he had been hanging around the Milosevic trial off and on for years, had even published a little book in 2004 about the goings on there, "Rund um das Tribunal" [“Ring around the Tribunal”] which, though not lacking in the usual finely observed matters of all kinds, at the edge of the tribunal, reminded me a lot of my cat’s sniffing the hot sauce but only very tentatively, reaching into it with one of its paws; and which I found especially disappointing because I had hoped, in the dearth of information about the trial that became available [say, via Marlise Simons in the N.Y. Times, see links below] to have Handke as a source. But he is not. “Por que?” I thought, what's going on? Handke had visited Milosevic in prison, I do not know how many times, once apparently with Harold Pinter [or perhaps at the same time, it is not clear from his accounts, and Handke had subsequently spoken of Slobodan in tones of grave respect [“No, I would never address him familiarly as ‘Slobo”’] that were new to me in his public discourse; in his literary discourse one can find respect, piety, in one of his greatest if unknown works, "Walk about the Villages," the seminal work for everything that is to follow as of the early 1980s QUOTES [XX] There may be a relationship to the Milosevices dating back to earlier years of the disintegration, during which time Handke's plays were favored in Belgrade whereas now… There were even rumors that Handke would be a witness for the defense at Milosevic’s trial. In 2005, however, Handke put a stop to these rumors, rumors apparently strong enough to require disavowal, with his "Die Tablas des Damiel" LINK [PDF/ XX] where he explained that it was pointless to be a defense witness for someone who had been, de facto, condemned in advance. QUOTE. I would have to say that if Milosevic had been found guilty as charged, someone as deservedly prominent as Handke is in Europe appearing as a "character witness" – which is all he could have been since he was not present at any of those times when Milosevic allegedly conspired or permitted or ordered any of the crimes that he was charged with being responsible for - expressing his personal belief in the defendant's innocence, or that he was the "tragic character" that Handke has frequently held him to be, might at least have lightened the defendant's sentence, or helped shed a kinder and more differentiated and possibly more just light on this now no longer the latest universal interchangeable voodoo doll, incorporation of all evil for which the news media and no end of lazy righteous journalists [e.g. see Charles Simic in the Summer issue of the Virginia Quarterly: “Milosevic, a Worthless Man” for a particularly hideous example] and their flotsam, keep projecting onto this or the other subject in this again night mare dark age world. However, if Handke had actually appeared at the trial, might he not have drawn rather more attention, and in the difficult seat of a witness, than he himself was willing to stomach? For it is not that Handke has not intervened, in the similar instance of a Serbian who was arrested in Germany and condemned to prison because he failed to act to prevent a war crime during a massacre on a bridge in Serbia - an extension as it were of German Post WW II law to Yugoslav civil war circumstances [!]; and had done so subsequent to the man's sentencing; had even been "best man" for this Serbian at his wedding, in prison itself I think, and had subsequently used him and his story as a model for the character of someone driven nearly mad by the circumstances, by the bind that the goodhearted can find themselves in, during those civil wars; the character called "the forest madman", in "The Play about the Film About the War" [Die Fahrt im Einbaum: Oder das Stück zum Film über den Krieg http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com ] from whom Handke "split off," in that play, yet another characters who has gone completely bonkers… Yet another maddening war... the continuum of madnesses. However, I must say I agree with Handke, based on the trial material I have been able to obtain, which exceeds what the NY Times and other U.S. papers provided] that Milosevic's conviction was a foregone conclusion. His posthumous conviction in Belgrade, which Handke felt was the proper venue for his trial [as compared to the other defendants for whom in a recent interview Handke felt it was appropriate to be tried before the international tribunal in de Haag], is another matter, and so far I have seen no public comment of Handke's on this fairly devastating verdict that convicted M. of murder of his predecessor and of a Serbian foreign minister.. - I have communicated to my subject my interest in his possibly changed opinion on the matter in question, and perhaps I will have it before this rumination goes to press. So it was not as though Handke could not come to someone's defense, even of someone who had run afoul of the justice system of a country that now compensated to near world wide extent for its perversions of justice during those infamous twelve years of the short lived Reich! Moreover, Handke once penned the fairly Kafkaesque sentence that, if he were ever accused in court, he would find it difficult to defend himself - Kafkaesque in the sense of feeling too guilty, in general, so that a mere pin prick of an accusation will bring him down, place the bull of muteness on his tongue. However, Handke, who started expressing regrets about a variety of matters as of the late 70s, is not lacking in the sufficient grandiosity to absolve himself of the whelming weight of guilt, with the stroke of his pencil as it were. “Enough already of feeling guilty”... This just to indicate that Handke, too, is as Swiss cheese, richly riddled with contradictions, easy food for nasty hungry mice if they should choose to gnaw at him, as I will only when he behaves irredeemably! In other circumstances, such as literary feuds, Handke is more than able to avail himself of the publicly spoken word in defense and sometimes the most vicious and typically derisive counter attack, in what must be hundreds of interviews by someone who in person is rather reticent, or the written word, in little or not so recit passages, poison pills, excoriations that he inserts into his prose works. Handke is anything but a defenseless babe in the woods, too stunned by preternatural guilt feelings, to mount some of the most wonderful, gratuitous ad hominem or occasionally, pathetic counter attacks. SOME JUICY QUOTES Among the matters in the "Tablas" piece – yet another exceedingly well argued and observed piece by someone who failed to take his law school exams only because he was already a successful writer at age 24 [PDF/ XX] - and did not need to take recourse to the possibility of availing himself of the sinecure of becoming an Austrian Cultural Attaché to subsidize his time as a writer - that I found both striking and amusing was Handke's wonderful, funny admission how, trying not to be self-righteous, nonetheless his conscience somehow or other keeps finding a way of finding in his favor, of clearing him! Think of Dostoyevsky with an occasional salvaging sense of humor. QUOTE Pure Handke gold. Not that that put's Handke's self-righteous, guilt-driven strain to rest, anyhow not for long [FN-2]. In one of these numerous interviews Handke mentioned that he concluded that M. was innocent based on the smile that the huge list - everything including the kitchen sink - of crimes with which M. was charged elicited from the accused. Well, yes, that list of indictments might even have made a Hitler smile! However, smile or no smile, appropriateness or not of the de Hague tribunal, neither says anything about Milosevic's innocence or guilt, anyway not as far as I am concerned, it doesn’t. Handke has also expressed the belief that there does not exist a shred of written evidence linking Milosevic to the crimes of which he stood accused; and that these crimes were committed by Milosevic's underlings, without Milosevic's knowledge, and I wonder how Handke knows this; whether Milosevic's or his wife said as much to him, since he had a family invitation to the funeral, or whether this presumption is based on noticing yet another smile, or on inference from the trial material, which Handke felt lacked proof of any written criminal order by Milosevic. It is fairly clear to me that Handke wants to shield Milosevic, but I think more for reasons of what Milosevic represents inside Handke's psyche than for any great need that Milosevic had of Peter Handke. And quite beside the fact: even if Handke is entirely wrong about his estimate of Milosevic, as he might very well be, it neither takes or adds anything to my response to Handke's work, since Handke nowhere during his defense, or his simply bearing witness, his kind of witnessing, of a federated Yugoslavia disparaged any of the various tribes. The fact that an old-time adherent of Partisan Belgrade [two of Handke's Slovenian uncle's were such] has little liking for the Nazi-installed Fascist Catholic collaborative [of every dastardliness] Ustasha Croatian government or its newest incarnation, or the Albanian equivalent thereof, is to be expected; not all such memories can be wiped out during one life time. My heart beats to the same rhythm although for different reasons. The now Orthodox [he felt that the late Pope Jean Paul had done too little to oppose the NATO intervention during the Kosovo war] Handke recently said that he was someone who would try to follow in the steps of the Gospel, fortunately not altogether yet! But Handke's evident need to protect, shield the man who sought to hold Yugoslavia together is interesting and requires understanding, as do Handke's screams of pain when he compared, in absurd language, what was happening to the Serbs to the suffering of the Jews under Hitler. A lack of words for his pain: the why of that pain is what interests me. – Whereas I don't know enough about Milosevic to know whether he might interest me or not. For example, after perusing the two great analytic studies of Hitler's pathology by Dr. Ted Dorpat and Fritz Redlich Hitler even lost fascination as a case. I myself feel - based on several events where Handke manifested a then near instantaneous sense perception of personal evil - one among other reasons - that I can concede the possibility that Handke might just have a case in his frequently voiced opinion that M. is/was a tragic figure [see NY Times Magazine Interview LINK]; that is, that the former émigré banker - who does not appear to have the now all too familiar histology of being an already early deeply wounded childhood monster - that Milosevic was someone caught up in terrible squeeze plays, sequence of squeeze plays not entirely of his own making… Yugoslav federalism, socialist obligation, Serbian minority Nationalism in Kosovo; the difficulty of continuing Tito's difficult dance while the stupid economy was going down the tubes the more so after the end of the cold war when the U.S. stopped footing the bill for this, the U.S.' communist S.O.B s tanks whose guns were facing east; the Croatian laws that disenfranchised the Serbian minority… Lincoln, too, if the Union had lost the war between the states, would have been put on trial for many things he ordered and had done during his presidency. I look forward to the novel that Handke announced to the Globus interviewers as yet one further reason for his funeral trip. I am hot for it, I am panting. The only ultra nationalist moment in Milosevic's behavior that Handke concedes is the famous speech at the "Field of Blackbirds". {LINK} I myself, who would not have preoccupied myself with this topic and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, or not much more than with the disintegration of the Congo, had I not been engaged, and had it not taken me on a long detour away, from a long deeply absorbing scholarly appreciation of numerous other aspects of Handke's work and person, must express my astonishment why the Serbs of the great variety of Slavic and other tribes in that region, why their nationalism is any more reprehensible than Croatian, Bosniaker, Slovenian, Kosovo-Albanian.

Before engaging in some halfway complicated commentary on Handke's relationship to Yugoslavia and trying to provide the background to the Milosevic relationship in particular, and their reception in the literary world of journalism, it is good for the reader to have Handke's own words, so as to avert the kind of instant Pavlovian-Bozonnet type responses, or to put some of them to rest, that set in, in certain ill-informed quarters, at the mere mention of the name of Milosevic [and Handke], the sort of thing that made for the onset of the controversy when Bozonnet cancelled the production of the greatest of the variety of Handke's important plays when he happened to come, so he said, on mention of Handke funeral attendance, in La Liberation, as though he had not been aware of Handke's stance in this matter for the previous ten years; question, mine, also being whether Bozonnet, a major functionary, as so many of them do not, had even read the play that he took off the calendar, or had depended for judgment of this very great play, initially, on that of its French translator and director Bruno Bayen. - An aside: neither this play nor any of Handke's works ever entered into a discussion in France or Germany or in the English speaking world, into which some of these tempests spilled over, except to the extent of calls to dismiss them as deriving from someone who held the wrong political opinions; which were not just politically wrong, but because they were politically wrong the author had to be a monster who… was the equivalent of the monster whom he did not condemn; or during the revocation of the Heine Prize. The moralistic reproofs, these rants entirely concern what opinions you might hold, or not express [such as the journalistic demand to express sympathy with victims] or the company you keep, or what you must acknowledge, preferably without the least equivocation, are not allowed to deny, and must express in pretty much the same language rules that the proscribers prescribe, [to which Handke, perhaps finally sick of the fracas, then submitted what in fact he had never denied QUOTE], saying that yes Srebrenica was the most horrendous genocidal act to be perpetrated in Europe after WW II; and if you happen to lack the Good Housekeeping seal of approved opinion within this crew of idolizing home makers all your work is instantly out the window; you become that dog out in the rain, not even in the window. And the publications with self-appointed judge and juries and executioners ranges from Liberation to L'Observer in France, to the Guardian in the U.K., to the New Republic, the New York Review of Books and The Weekly Standard in the United States, the latest of which list, however, numbers among its contributors the sort of ex-Haight-Ashbury commie born again Bosniaker Muslim who will damn you simply because he disapproves of a film based on one of your books, and who neither reads, but only asserts… his and his journals assertable reality. Hey, anything goes! Just say it often and loudly enough! It is not just the Bush administration claiming that they make a reality of their own in a phantasmal world.

Within the comparatively rich and more sophisticated German feuilleton culture you could find a more differentiated range of opinion, from the very beginning, ranging outright righteous outrage to defense. However, the major papers and weeklies, excepting the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which had published “Winter’s Journey”, and particularly the F.A.Z. and Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit came down heavily and continuously on Handke [see LINKS] and have continued to over the years. During the most recent controversy the important writer and dramatist Botho Straus came to his colleagues defense with the kind of statement that itself was going to be controversial because it was misdiagnosed as giving Handke some kind of elitist carte blanche:

The debacle of a city council caving to journalistic outcry and not abiding by the decision of its own jury, however, seems to have made the writes of the F.A.Z. reflect on the consequences of this journalistic witch hunt, which has had some dire consequences for Handke, in that numerous bookshop now refuse to carry his work.[ see LINK] Even so, nary the mention of a book or play! Had they left no impression? Not even a one of the well formulated titles? After forty years? Prior to quoting a few statements of Handke's in their entirety, so that the reader can appreciate some contradictions in this amazing charnel house of a controversy, its third coming, and with little feeling, I want not to be so remiss as to fail to appreciate Handke as though he really were a postage stamp issued 100 years after his passing, and to point out his importance, within the logos and the theater, and prose, as though he were a mathematician or scientist, who might have had flippers, and six toes, three sausages dangling from his nose, but who in fact is remembered for his contribution, and I will later go more deeply into the two prior comings of this controversy, [FN-5 or +] why I think Handke coddles Milosevic, gives him more breaks than he would other figures. For, although Handke has access to people in power, such as the Austrian President, and is a fairly autocratic person himself meanwhile, an arriviste from early on, he has no compunctions about treating people in power, including his own deceased once very powerful publisher Siegfried Unseld to his patented "tinny derision" and unaccommodating critical portraits, or to salvoes of some of the mostly powerfully and fiercely wrought mud to be propelled from his Austrian Village origins. These explosions of our autist, with the not infrequent addition of Tourettism, Handke, apparently without further examination, disavows, as not being his true self; well not his best part of his self, I would agree, but evidence of the psychotic, the productive volcanic core of his being nonetheless, indication of his access to the threshold whence the great work, too. Furthermore, for someone who is excellent at derision, as a recipient thereof Handke is anything but, a dreadful chink in the armor, which makes for not end of continued verbally challenging fireworks that my image for all of this is one of those Breughel [Jr.] paintings where the villages are going each other with sticks and stones and scythes. What he actually said in P. QUOTE has since been misquoted and degenerated in their misquotation as they were passed from news organ to newsroom into the magical mystery tour of the blogosphere [LINKS]. Assuredly there would be consequences, though not necessarily such a compounding as the cancelling of a great play, and a city counsel, running scared after the decision of its jury has become controversial, withholding prize money for a prize which not long ago we said we were no longer interested in [but which it was then claimed would have been useful for a translator symposium, of translators of one’s own works into the 30 some languages in which it exists!] or whatever reason we pick out of the air as is needed to get ourselves of the hook of yet another contradiction, so that we can then say something as wonderful as QUOTE; and whose appropriateness – is Heine a Handke? – was underscored by the Prize Committee’s language TRANSLATE/ LINK

HANDKE TEXT IN ENGLISH

To whatever degree you concur with Handke's setting straight of the record of language, and I happen to agree - but it would make little difference if I did not - with most of his specifics, his statement says little if anything about Milosevic real guilt, how extensive or not. Handke, however, could also have issued a statement, expressed his condolences from Paris. Life is long and compunctions are few. Handke can get just about any statement publicized. The appearance at P., an act of public theater, I would think was also a calculated media event. The media need him as much as he needs them; if not one star then another… A classic in your own life time, which means that you are not much read, famous for being famous – he has that kind of power, that kind of access since he, who had dreamt during his youth of appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel, and of addressing the world, was first discovered by the hungry mirror in 1966, two hungers lying in wait for each other. If anyone knows how to appear on the world stage it is the fashion conscious Peter Handke, and knows that you need, occasionally, to withdraw behind the curtain! Coy as only a star, occasionally sulking. “Play the game.” [W.A.T.V.]… and Handke would appear for the third time… on the cover of Novo, but now that Günter Grass had seriously damaged himself with the admission that he had allowed himself to be drafted into the Waffen SS for 45 days and for reasons of peculiar guilt feelings had become that extra righteous conscience, Handke, and his quickly resurrected righteousness, cannot be far off from finally appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel itself??? No harm of course if all this controversiality led to the reading of his works, to the improvement of the central Europe! Which it has not in the past nearly fifty years since the first appearance of Count Sivec-Schönherr-Handke from Griffen on the world scene! However, no matter how exhibitionistic Handke may be, to whatever extent he, too, is a domineering, power hungry, space displacing autocrat, has any bearing on his literary exhibitions nor on whatever truth value his very different poetic, non-journalistic responses, records have, and – I think this is one of the chief rubs – his by and large non-Goyaesque descriptions of what he beheld during his several trips, whereas most everyone wanted him to scream "oh the horror of it" so they even missed the amazing moment when he actually did: QUOTE FROM “SOMMERLICHE…”

II-A

I myself especially admired Handke’s courage, of someone “born to terror,” [who used to be only unanxious, calm with pencil in hand:] in the 1996 “Winter’s Journey,” his second book on the devolution of Yugoslavia, but the first to make waves, to point out the extraordinarily simple-minded media witch hunt that, as of a certain consensual point, made Serbia, Serbian nationalism responsible for that complicated, multi-dimensional cascade of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In his first book on the topic, “Ninth Land,” this writer [the illegitimate offspring, born in Griffen in the ancient Austrian province of Carinthia, bordering on Slovenia, of a woman of the Slovenian minority and a German Army paymaster stationed in Griffen in the early 40s] argued – and still does [see links] - touchingly, so I found, but not convincingly - that Slovenia with three million inhabitants was too small to be independent, that it would quickly turn into an Andorra-like shopping mall, that there had been no war [as in “Milosevic started four wars.”], but a ten day skirmish during which some Slovenian beer bellies had killed half a dozen young soldiers of the Yugoslav Federal Army, an issue that Milosevic saw no point in pursuing; but anyway, that with its independence, its affiliation with European capitalism and NATO, Slovenia had lost its perfume, for him who had spent many a day walking through its hills and river valleys and many a night in one or the other of its many Dolminen, those vari-sized sandstone sinkholes for rabbits of all kinds: No arguing with that really; if the charm is gone, I well recall a dream, that’s it. Meanwhile Handke has for a surrogate Spain, large stretches of which he, one of the last great walkers on this earth, appears to have traipsed [see the best parts of the “Del Gredos” + the essays “On Tiredness” + “On the Jukebox” XX] However, no matter that Handke appears to have been right about Slovenia quickly turning into another mall, I was not entirely convinced that that would make much of a difference to walking the Karst / Carso or spending the night in its Dolminen, which were unlikely to turn into bazaars selling carrots, to someone less nostalgic about WATV QUOTE; they certainly had outlasted many a human denominator; and Handke, whose biography unlike Goethe’s will be able to be recounted not in terms of the women he was involved with but of the landscapes he, the rootable, memorialized, has given a fine account of them in “The Repetition.” What I liked about “Ninth Land”, as well as about the first part of “Winter’s Journey” is that, initially, both books are rationally well argued, “Ninth Land” in its entirety. Handke states his reasons, they are charmingly self-referential in the instance of “9^th Land,” devastating in the instance of “Winter’s Journey” - its very reception proved Handke’s point: the witch hunt for Serbians - if you did not join, they will turn you into a witch yourself. At the time he wrote “Winter’s Journey” he emphasized the French craze to blame the Serbs, something that has persisted throughout the decade of the inception of the controversy to the point where 100 or so French mind workers, not a one of whom would last a day in a coal mine, supported Bozonnet’s decision to single-handedly dismiss… well, it isn’t just any old play, not even “The Play about the Film about the War,” [see anon] the conceptually great – everyone has their say - play that the Yugoslav controversy elicited from Handke, but a true pilgrimage of the human spirit play… with Percival as a ragged near idiot… a forever receding horizon for the future of human kind… during whose five hour you experience a different time, Handke’s greatest strength, his overpowering ability to put you, at least during the reading of certain of his books [“The Repetition”, “Absence”, “One Dark Night I left my Silent House”] and of a number of his plays, through his very different, more materialistic, that is also materialistically affecting, use of language and signifiers, in an altered, open state of mind that refreshes, if freshenable, all your senses; that is, a “rational”, step by step, catharsis if ever there was one outside the consulting room; Handke the successor to Brecht whom it will take the same sixty years as it took Brecht to finally have his Central Park success, but unlikely in cabaret fashion.

I don’t think that Handke, to whatever degree “Winter’s Journey” was meant to provoke, could have imagined the near unanimity of the media condemnation in Germany and France, and then in the U.S., a mis-reception that I think he facilitated by his thorough media spanking and his irruptions of verbal violence when challenged, whereas the kind of rational, laborious, analysis of the flow of propaganda - that has, meanwhile, been provided - of the way the western Media insured the domination of their preferred version of the Yugoslavia story, use by the Croat and the Bosnian Muslims of the same Washington P.R. firm that “sold” the Iraq war and its shock and awe [xx]- would have been both less provocative, some of it tiresome in the extreme to detail, but would not have availed his opponents the easy opportunity to describe his book as a rant, which it is anything but in any other respect; and anyhow, a good rant now and then, why not when appropriate or when all kindly approaches have failed; or that Handke who, like me, consumes two hours worth of newspapers a day, while claiming to despise journalistic language and the entire journalistic approach, even guns after the excellent journalists working in Yugoslavia, say Chris Hedges of the N.Y. Times, or Michael Danner. - Handke has been a whole sale condemner since the day he first spoke in public, one reason, perhaps the chief reason for his controversiality, since the wholesale condemnations are as gauche… as unexpected… as odd as only an autist’s behavior can be; whereas as a writer, if he wants to, e.g. in “The Repetition”, few know to differentiate as emphatically. “Winter’s Journey” publication, in two installments, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1996 set off the controversy; and it did not help, except the paper itself, that the S.Z. provocatively titled this travel account plus media cussing and rational argument “Justice for Serbia”, emphasizing just that one aspect. Thereupon Handke set off on his famous reading tour, sometimes in company of his fellow Austrian playwright, Peter Turrini. The controversy then spilled seriously over to the U.S. and I will confine myself – largely - to its even more primitive version here. The German fracas had certain memorable moments as where Peter Schneider, who carried the critic’s torch in Der Spiegel, claimed to tighten his pants before he set out to write, while Handke, a Mignon-ephebe in his youth, whose masculinity initially was so questionable that that gross bully Alan Ginsburg demanded of me to help him make a pass at Handke, who is proud how geil his formulations are, claimed that, as compared to Schneider, he kept his Hosenbund nice and loose! “I’m hot already, I don’t need to heat up my balls.” After the mis-reception of the text Handke went on a Central European reading tour of it, and on some occasion he and his backers, the Austrian playwright, Peter Turrini, did not take kindly to opposition question from the audience, whereas at others he kept his cool. During a public discussion in Madrid, Handke’s violent streak threatened to light forth, and he was reported to go for an extended walk in the country side. During the second coming of the controversy, on the occasion of pre-emptive attack on the Serbian infrastructure during the Kosovo war, Handke not only traveled, demonstratively to Belgrade PHOTO, but engaged in what can only be described as a series of running interviews with his eager media hunters, during one of which he disavowed the German Philosopher / Sociologist Jürgen Habermas title as philosopher for a single sentence in a long piece in Die Zeit [see LINKs] defending the NATO war. I happened to have translated a volume of Professor Habermas’ essays and during that time familiarized myself with nearly all his sometimes exceedingly laborious work and so had taken the trouble to work myself through Habermas’ tortured language in that essay, too, and had concluded that, once again, we had a German philosopher, who if pressed by the state would find a way to justify just about anything. Habermas subsequently commented that he thought NATO was merely going to administer a slap, not such a spanking – alas, our liberal philosophers and what they know about the demonstration show of an armament industry. When an interviewer pointed out to Handke that the writer poet essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger endorsed the NATO action, Handke exploded in the kind of ad hominem attack that entirely failed to address the issue, but in a manner that I concluded that this fusillade had lain well prepared on his tongue for many years, it’s just not the sort of well formulated rejoinder that comes trippingly out of the spontaneity mine: QUOTE. Again, it was someone whose work I knew well, and had translated quite a few, in some instances, magnificent essays. I could not make rhyme and reason for the intensity of the attack except to put it off to Handke’s envy of Enzensberger’s ability as an essayist, and, possibly, to Enzensberger’s nearly suave ability to argue his points calmly; to listen; all of which Handke is unlikely to learn to do. If it were for Enzensberger’s chameleon like ability to change colors with the changing winds, Handke might have a point; or that Enzensberger’s days as an interesting poet passed after his first three books in a long and varied career. All three persons are published by the same once formidable Suhrkamp Verlag. Anyhow, my misanthropist is certainly not currying anyone’s favor. Bully for him! II-B

After three, at times quite archaic years, in Mexico, as I was re-immersing myself in the world of global horror stories in 1094, it was with some real pathos that I set forth, as part of the larger Handke project, to try to follow this parallel campaign that shadowed the larger Yugoslav battles, from my far away vantage of Seattle. By now, its third coming in 2006, I feel like an old hand at retrieving information – in “real time” - via the world-wide web and the news sources available on line. It was not so at the inception of the controversy ten years ago. My prior investigation of Handke’s origins and his psychology came immediately into good stead in 1996. I had put the single-minded Handke project on something of a hold during my years in Mexico, had come up North once a year to the Austrian Symposium at the University of California Riverside and given one lecture and chaired a few sessions; had kept up with my rabbit’s indefatigable yearly productions; had withdrawn my analytic monograph on my subject because, much as I knew, some critically important matters made no sense, and would not – or at least far more - until I found out that Handke was autistic; on my return North had given a lecture on Handke’s language saving the world [!] at San Diego State. A then mutual friend, the excellent writer and all around Don Juan Erich Skwara’s winged foot, but especially loose mouth disease kept me abreast of the goings on Chez Handke - indeed, as expected, my man was once again emotionally withdrawing from yet another wife, another blow-up was only a question of time; hopefully not another “Moment of True Feeling” and ”Nonsense+Happiness” like fuguing crisis; another girl, not the wished for, prematurely proclaimed boy, would have to be baby sat! I realized that Handke, who at one time shared or used Gottfried Herder’s romantic nationalism to support his wish for ever more languages, for the logos to articulate itself - with tight borders separating small principalities, bad roads that made for good people [the opposite of the principle of the open road, one of Handke’s many conflicts] - contradicted himself with his endorsement of a centralized federation. I had found out that the two figures, the two relatives longed for in “Die Hornissen”, Handke’s first novel, were two uncles who had been WW Yugoslav Partisans and that their wartime letters were heirlooms in the Sivec family household in Griffen, Carinthia [9] the porousness of that border; “Die Hornissen” [1965] a difficult book, suffused with longing, on the part of someone whose finest side, I eventually concluded, not only from the immense portion of mother love he had imbibed already intrauterine [plus a modicum of anaclytic depression], also derives from the then psychically internalized position of what anthropologists call “the avunculate,” for the two dead missing uncles [!]. I was aware, most keenly, of the importance of the famously cussing, violent-tempered forever geil, groping, well into his eighties, Grandfather Sivec within Handke’s psychic economy, that already in childhood he had been a surrogate father figure, the more so because Handke had all the good human childhood reasons to hate his stepfather, the only thing with whom Handke seemed to share was a last name; though as one delved more deeply into Handke’s psyche, the stepfather, as negative model for Handke’s sexuality, had bequeathed unpleasant consequences to his stepson while exposing him for a dire decade, as of age two, to the horrors of violent drunken primal scenes. I realized what psychic work, labora verimus, it had been to internalize, absorb, join this hot-tempered figure, insteading him - in the re-writing, re-imagining of “Sorrow Beyond Dreams” that is “The Repetition” - while finally learning Slovene, preparing his own Slovene-German dictionary, well enough to be able to translate - for the hated father figures in “S.B.D.” - where Handke also shows contempt for his real father when this Herr Schönherr shows up to take his neglected, but not forgotten, offspring on a high school graduation trip: that arrogant portrayal in “S.B.D.” one of numerous later regrets [10]. Handke had done this job of the internal sea change in his being, best as I could tell, entirely without the facilitating assistance that a good analyst might have provided in such an undertaking. – That this grandfather figure, meanwhile, might want some revising, updating would appear self-evident. “The Repetition, ” the rewriting of “Sorrow Beyond Dreams”, the second entry, was as much a key text for me as Handke’s first novel “The Hornets” which he had written, aged 24, on the Yugoslav, now Croation, Island Krk, [“I croaked in Krk” just has to be a Croation rock tune?]. That entire, quite extensive background, well aged by now within the good oak of my revisable memory vat, also provided me with a clue, not just to Handke’s favoring a united Yugoslavia, since Granddad already endorsed it in the plebiscite 1921 [as a form of continuation of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the K.u.K.; while its post WW II version, for Handke, who with all his success has never quite gotten his childhood poverty, the culture of poverty out of his system, it presented an alternative, at least an imaginable, counter-formation to the E.U.], but also the hint of an explanation of a possible transference affection of Handke’s onto the Big Bad Woolf from P.; why Handke is so protective of him, for I don’t think Handke’s attempt to salvage Milosevic is an instance of Handke’s perversity, or of his sheer, near-automatic contrariness, uppitiness, or obstreperousness, or of the side that, in “The Repetition” adopted the name of a Slovenian independence fighter Kobal, of the rebel that Handke can be too – though he denies being a rebel in one of these recent interviews, perhaps just testing the interviewer’s knowledge {see links} – Filip Kobal, Handke’s surrogate self in “The Repetition” who is on his way to Slovenia, to Ljubljana, to locate an uncle who has gone there to study horticulture, an ultra sensitive, slightly depressed Percival on his way to becoming a gentler pastoralist. “The Repetition” is a book with the kind of syntax that can put you, the person sensitive to syntax, who really reads, for Handke’s syntax enforces reading, in touch with the “God of Slowness”… the god that heals a sick [and angry] heart better than any medicine as it walks the dusty roads. Nothing, or perhaps everything that the flippant, the Brit-Twits really need. Also: large, wonderful sections of the lives of several characters in “No-Man’s-Bay” are set in Yugoslavia, along the Dalmatian coast, in Dubrovnik. Oh how amazing it was to have that now, 2006, truly noxious juiced writer, Salmon Rushdie, who at that point knew nothing but what he had absorbed during the media witch hunt – which had started to focus near exclusively on what was transpiring in Sarajevo -interrupted, overshadowed in self-display during a European book tour by both the war and the Handke controversy, call Handke “fool of the year” for having his say in a matter on which Handke might of course not be entirely right, but was deeply equipped to know. Rushdie’s outcry was typical. But I think it was preceded by “Sarajevo Susan,” as I think of Susan Sontag [as per “Hanoi Jane”] with respect of her theatrical self-display during the internecine strife in that city, as essayist and person and general good egg much beloved by me except as novelist, who had been helpful in convincing my colleagues at Farrar, Straus in taking on Handke’s early plays there, and who, after her stint in braving danger in Sarajevo, as though stepping out of the Godard film that must have been playing inside her head all along, was to play “hiding, dashing in and out of doorways while there is shooting going on” [LINK]; and, during the Kosovo war, say something as horrendous as “And now the Serbs are the victims” in the chief organ for hunting Serbian witches, the NY Times Sunday Magazine,

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=belgrade&n=10&dp=0&sort=newest&daterange=full&d=nytdsection%2b&o=e%2b&v=Magazine%2b&c=a%2b

witch hunters galore among the Benetton ads, Roger Cohen the lead hunter,

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0B10FD355F0C718EDDAE0894D9404482

marlise simons
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?frow=0&n=10&srcht=s&query=MARLISE+SIMONS&srchst=nyt&submit.x=24&submit.y=15&submit=sub&hdlquery=&bylquery=&daterange=full&mon1=01&day1=01&year1=1981&mon2=09&day2=30&year2=2006 --

milosevic

“And now the Serbians are the victims”, Susan Sontag wrote in the N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine, a statement that on the face it proved her ignorance of the half a million Serbs displaced from Croatia, not to mention the Serbian victims in Bosnia, and the Serbian victims in Kosovo, proving her entire, total complete ignorance of the complexity of the disintegration and all around violence. How American I feel like saying to find a single culprit, to get exercised in that fashion if I did not know that there also exist, still, occasionally, American diplomats, such as Richard Holbrooke, who found the big bad wolf a more possible partner, during the Dayton Peace Talks and afterwards, then Izobetgevitch of Bosnia, or Tudjman of Croatia; as compared to the journalist pack, with editors as lead dogs. On that stage of parading important worthies, if nothing else, fallible, singular Handke had at least chosen not to be part of the gang of what he termed humanity hyenas. He might be in opposition, but was the only one to stand out, and to deliver far better honed and memorably vicious verbal salvoes. Susan Sontag had proclaimed she would never again read another Handke book, it was dubious that she had read any recent ones for her then appreciation of this author. The controversy transferred intact from Germany to the New Republic whose literary editor apparently thought nothing of letting Handke’s chief German antagonist Peter Schneider write an entirely predictable review of “Winter’s Journey”,

The Writer Takes a Hike. (3/3/1997)
By: Schneider, Peter Reviews the book "A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia," by Peter Handke and translated by Scott Abbott.

and then refused to run a letter by Professor Abbot refuting Schneider’s claim that Handke denied the crimes committed HTTP://WWWW.HANDKEYUGO.SCRIPTMANIA.COM

found a hired gun in J.S. Marcus who, for Handke’s position on Serbia, questioned the value of his entire work, [“even the best”, without being able to qualify what made them good to begin with], misrepresented any number of them or gave them the most cursory of shrifts while examining Handke’s then latest, “One Dark Night…” for incipient pro-Serbianism and, finding none, dismissed it as “dream writing”; that is, while failing to appreciate the heretofore unheard of feat of putting the reader into the dream syntax of its protagonist [see Freud, Lacan, etc.], while missing, as it were, the Easter Egg of some blue and white UN semis dragging their wrecks northward on the Salzburg Autobahn! - Handke, naturally [!] I feel like saying, at that time entirely opposed the U.N. intervention in Bosnia, as he would later NATO’s in the pre-emptive Kosovo War, and of course NGO fostered democracy-seeding [Handke, in “village” matters, is a true “nativist”!], knows how to stick a nasty little dig, as “wish fulfillment,” even into a “dream book”! the Yugoslav humanity salvaging campaign altogether the preamble to the Iraq war for many of the war hungry humanity hyenas, the road-ragers among the lumpen, who might look to the troubles in their own country, the millions incarcerated there by the privatized prison industry, etc. etc. - Marcus on the witch hunt, and the NYRB refused to run my corrective:

Mary McCarthy had been right about the editors there, if you ran afoul of the party line of those big village intellectuals; another good reason not to be in New York while the N.Y. Review pulled out all stops to endorse yet another dreadful Sontag novel, one of their own; not, it appears, that such pro domo advertising allayed Susan’s anxieties in that respect since, until the bitter end, she kept claiming that “in Europe” they appreciate them. My ass they did or do! A bad show all around. And once the switches are set, the rest of the country falls in line, like sheep bleats getting thinner as the echo is handed on until it is as thin as rice water by the time it trickles west coast to the Seattle Times – a fine mixed metaphor if ever there was one. {XX} McCarthyism of the left I would say if what was going on wasn’t something far older and more common. “One has to remind oneself occasionally,” Teddy kept saying, “that intellectuals are not the worst of people.” But with consequences such as Scott Abbot being unable to have his translations of the other Handke Yugoslav books published by a University Press so that, unless you read German, you have no access to the voice that is being shouted down; not to speak of the performance of Handke’s plays. Farrar, Straus, faithfully, goes on publishing the politically not overtly overly contentious novels.

Handke does not really deny anything that occurred in Yugoslavia, something of which he has been foolishly and ignorantly accused by people who have not read his work, he does something more interesting, why in Gods name would he deny? [see below] However, he regards Yugoslavia through the same somewhat wishful prism, a now wider prism, with which he regarded Slovenia, a possibility that remained unrealized, something that might have been. Or who condemn him because they are not versed in the literary convention in which some of the Yugoslav writings are cast, nor have the faintest idea of how well versed this walker of the entire Dalmatian coast is of the region [SEE NZZ INTERVIEW], but have their own firmly held view, however arrived at, of what went down during the disintegration between 1989 and 2006. Yet if you inquire of them how they came to their view are like the ordinary blokes who’ve relied on T.V, and the papers. What work it is to be more completely informed than the passive absorbers! Something more complicated is upon us in this instance than outright denial or relativization, of which Handke has been accused, too. In that most interesting interview with the Croatian weekly Globus, Handke, the forest madman chef extraordinaire in the kitchen of his castle, asserts that it cannot be possible that anyone might have attacked, bombed, shelled destroyed something as wondrous, a jewel, the center of Dubrovnik ... after all, he had celebrated his 45th birthday there! It was a statement that left me breathless with astonishment, not only for Handke's once again extraordinary self-referentiality, but because this wishful assertion was the repetition of a statement from “A Winter's Journey,” the book that he wrote in 1996 that set off the furor, where he reports that his then wife, now again mademoiselle Semin [with whom he was then on a rather belated wedding trip, typical of south Slavic mores, child left with yet another grandmother] asked him if he wanted to deny everything. That moment in “Winter’s Journey,” for those who know Handke's way of writing, is a wonderful admission of his wish if only he could deny, something that, in special circumstances, such as the bombing shelling of Dubrovnik he then tries to once again ten years later! and does shortly after having made all the requisite admission and in the standard language so as to be admitted back into the club. {see above} – Handke, who is more capable of surpassing denial through realistic transformation in his prose – and through alterations of the audience’s state of mind in the theater - than any artist of that kind whose work I know, excepting possibly Adalbert Stifter, occasionally does seek to disavow what cannot be disavowed; and I once saw him doing so in person, that kind of splitting goes way back into the earliest childhood; Handke knows how to lie like the worst of them; he even admits that he lies like the dickens when he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar; and does perhaps also in the case of Milosevic, about whom he does not feel neutral or has no feelings one way or the other as Handke also claims to some interviewers. It has occurred to me, who knows Handke’s life history back to the midwife’s report of his birth [no problems, head first, no umbilical cords to strangle the little beast! – FN-6] that that capacity to be capable of disavowal was a very early psychic survival mechanism of his under special circumstances – thus any admissions will have, preferably, to be made through indirection, sort of like peeking at matters out of the corner of your eyes [as Handke also does for reasons of his autistically overly sensitive sense of vision], his Euripedean dramas do not show the horror onstage; glancingly, instead of head-on: in “A Winter’s Journey” Handke expresses his chagrin at what has occurred in the following manner: standing by a destroyed bridge by a river trough which the corpses floated not long ago he reports skipping angry stones over the water - evidently a signifier that did not suffice for his critics. Instead his detractors picked on the adjective “noodle yellow” as being impermissible under the circumstances. Nothing idyllic please, Mr. Handke. In “A Summer’s Addendum”, the sequel to “Winter’s Journey”, Handke, speaking of not denying anything, has a Serbian, at the sight of Srebrenica - whom he apparently saw, but who then figures as his own mouthpiece, overtly theatrical metaphor - express the wildest outrage to the extent of not wanting to be a Serbian, over and over and over – which, originally, elicited from me, who had been closely following Handke’s progress during these events, the then written thought HTTP://WWWW.HANDKEYUGO.SCRIPTMANIA.COM

“who in God’s name ever asked this son of a German paymaster and a woman of the Slovenian minority in the Austrian province of Carinthia, who detests Germans and fat Austrians, and who not that many years before had chosen, worked like the devil to create a Slovenian identity for himself, who had learned Slovenian to the point where he could translate the work of some of their great writers and poets into German, to assume the identity of a Serbian!” That was before I had it all puzzled out! So the persistence of the inviolability of Dubrovnik resurfacing ten years later, my aging, well-smoked lungs... got the most wonderful workout when I came on that passage in the Globus Interview. Identity politics, narcissistically over-laden selves! Handke, as those who have read his allegedly most closely read and famous book might know, was as it were born to denial, of the many species and energies of it, “attacks on linking” Alfred Bion calls it, lending an interesting twist to what is going on in the psyche. During those ten years of exposure to violent primal scenes he pulled the covers over his head, but I suspect peered out from under a few times to the horrific yet hot making, pornographic sight of what transpired, what was done to his beloved, once exclusively his mother: the birth of life-long rage, which he now calls “sacred”... when he allows, or retrospectively excuses, one of his outbursts. - Handke does not report whether or not he initially screamed furiously at the inception of those scenes at age two; whether he fell asleep in despair, nor it appears, from reading his “Essay on Tiredness” - which provides a laundry list of matters that make him both angry and tired - has given any thought to reasons for his insomnia, which has real uses for someone who wants to write and seeks to be the Napoleon of language. - Whence, these experiences, we eventually - by way of being able to control the anxiety through masturbating, and then calm ourselves down with pencil in hand - exercise the mastery – as surrogate for all our anxiety - via works of literature, and fashion ourselves into a writer of lyric epics who gradually acquires mastery of the entire classical repertoire and does so in the age of film - of Stifter in particular - who used to be known to writers such as W.H. Auden and Louise Bogan - in whose writing the thunderstorm, the horror is always just off stage, as in Classical drama, the horrors are left to the imagination, not the sort of thing that will succeed in reality deprived T.V. culture [the internet is in many ways just an extension, the ultimate atomization of it] are verbally evoked, but not shown, lending the lyricism of his prose a peculiar tension, but also sufficient consensual beauty so that you might even be able to forget the horror, at times, not always focus on it exclusively. “Close your eyes, and the world will arise anew” is the beginning of “Across” [“Chinese des Schmerzens,” 1982] whose chief claim to our attention as readers is not the unhappy, guilt-ridden, murderous, tortured consciousness of its protagonist Loser, but the detailed Ruysdaelesque celebration of the landscape in the Salzburg surround; Van Ruysdael instead of the anticipated Cezanne, as I at least supposed it might be since this was Handke’s first prose work subsequent to his Cezanne book, “The Lesson of St. Victoire”. Lots of ways celebrating the surround of Salzburg, just go on line to see how the Chamber of Tourism does it. Somewhat ennobled is how a van Ruysdael comes out, painterly yet sufficiently realistic, somewhat but not entirely sublime recollection of the pastoral - a geological map is another possibility; the possibilities of representation are not quite but nearly endless. Trakl is from Salzburg too. I found its alleys to be quite expressionistic. Handke’s principle of “the Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld” has matured by the time he writes “Across”, it has been adumbrated, it is far richer. If Handke were an absinthe addict, and not a white wine aficionado, the descriptions in “Across” might have come looking like late van Gogh. Example # 2: A woman in blackface starts up a vacuum cleaner at the opening of the fairly sinister “Ride Across the Bottom Lake/ Bodensee=Lake Constance,” sweeping away all prior theatrical conventions; actors who impersonate actors proceed to play the most extraordinary, somewhat Ionesco-like, reason-nonsense language games, and the world, through that discombobulation, for a few hours, becomes something very light; unless you are looking for the coat hanger of a story to hang and forget your self on; that is a far more estranging and puzzle-inducing event than anything Brecht ever managed, especially with its dark undercurrents. So there is something to charges of denial, or certainly of not being unrelievedly Goyaesque, about the horrors of the civil war. His critics say that it would also have been possible to notice similar rural details during WW II in Germany. Certainly, I did myself as a very young child, as trains took me from smoking bombed city to another. Genet, bumming his way back to France from Poland in the late 30s, noted, subsequently, in his “Journal de Voleur,” that Germany was simply the worst because the police and the criminals were one and the same! How unthoughtful of the Nazis! Poor Genet! French criminals need their clear distinction, too, or at least used to. But why, I ask myself, must these 100 French intellectuals, whose number is probably tenfold in this country, insist on wanting to stick Handke’s nose into the dog shit, what is going on inside their righteous psyches??? Why can they not accept someone’s work who puts these matters in his own unusual way? On what background does all this righteousness with its roots in psychotic violence play out, quite automatically? I make a few guesses towards the end in Part III, or perhaps I will do more than that. In what respect are they any less fundamentalist than religious fundamentalists everywhere in the world? Question is, Handke raised it himself during the controversy’s third coming, to what extent if any a lyrical epic writer such as he can even be in a conversation with a journalistic representation of these horrendous events. The controversy was sufficiently virulent for the Deutsche Akademie to convene a symposium on that very topic, which Handke, however, then did not attend! The interesting theoretician of the public sphere Okar Negt, there

said that Milosevic must have confused Handke. No, if anyone confused Handke, he confused himself. And if he was confused he will clear up his head, though it may take him until the end of his life.

II-C-

http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com

is his most differentiated take on Yugoslavia and its disintegration, not that I have seen anyone, except myself, take the trouble to specify what the greater differentiation, by itself, or compared to Handke’s written or spoken pronouncements on the subject might be. “Canoe,” for short, is the as of still now, last attempt within the now honorable tradition of post World War II German speaking theater to pose, demonstrate, make available for contemplation and discussion, rational entertainment, issues of great national and social import, a tradition that, most immediately, has its root in Brecht’s rational-oriented theater. Important plays within that tradition that have also made an impact in the English speaking theater are the likes of Grass’s “The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising” which addresses the problematics of the engage artist [Brecht] rehearsing “Coriolanus” during the 1953 East German workers uprising, to point out possibly irreconcilable contradictions at a particular moment in history when such issues come to a head; [2] Rainer Kipphardt’s “In the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”; Peter Weiss’s Auschwitz Trial play “The Investigation” are other examples that an English speaker might have heard of. “Canoe's” proposition - to investigate, entertain the history of the disintegration of Yugoslavia - resembles “Plebeians” in that it take as its mediating matter a film script, that is of the 28^th docu-drama that is to be made about Yugoslavia. It is an ingenious, if not a genius’s idea. Two directors, stand-ins for Louis Bunuel and John Ford, that is for the long view and for the absurd-grotesque, that is for the audience’s p.o.v. have some actors act out, discuss, play out the script. Basically we have the situation of a play within a play - where the play within the play is alterable, the way matters used to be alterable, tried out as in Brecht’s honorable theatrical rehearsal tradition. Within that proposition everyone - as in the “everyone is in the right” of Handke’s “Walk about the Villages” - has their say. The stage manager who comments, the forest madman, the local “historian,” the “internationals” [newsmen as well as interventionist forces], a newsman [Greek] who seeks to come back out of the cold of not being heard - so that you have the various contending points of view articulated. At the end, the two wise directors beg off, they lack the confidence that such an amount of truth is saleable.

The play, which premiered, Klaus Peymann director, at the Burg Theater in 1999, was caught up in controversy, due to its author’s controversial nature, already during rehearsal during the Kosovo campaign, and most reviewers opposed it, reducing one or the other point of view to the author’s own personal view as he expressed them in his various unhappy screams of pain and outrage. Something similar happened in this country, where the only real note [aside a German Professor’s demonstration of the inability to read] taken of it was in J.S. Marcus’ N.Y.R.B. piece, which is singular in its lack of understanding of the dramatic history of convention of the piece, and tries to reduce it to Handke’s political opinions on Yugoslavia, with which he disagrees. Marcus thinks he can reduce Handke’s voice to that of the “Fellfrau” [Bearskin Woman], a symbolic representation of the “canoe” [try making love in a canoe was one of the prime challenges facing me as a teenage canoe instructor!] of the eternally wild Serbian spirit coursing down the untamed rivers in the Balkans; a Bearskin woman who then tries to unfold a “United Nations” type “people all living their happy differentness” happily forever living with each other tent, a tent that, however, collapses. Marcus pointed out, usefully for me, Handke’s quoting of Danner, he ought to have picked Roger Cohen to make his points of propagandistic one-sided journalism more successfully. There is no reducing the play to one of Handke’s view points unless you reduce it to all its points of views being Handke’s, which comes closer to the truth in the sense that an author’s characters are aspects of his self. In that sense I think that the concept for the play is of Brechtian, Shakespearean strength. However, Handke’s text [who meanwhile has become so pessimistic that he writes his big plays in such a way as though they will only be read, so few of them are rarely performed] will tax an audience’s patience in the extreme in this instance, for “Canoe” does not afford the same linguistic grandeurs and richness of the overly rich “Walk about the Villages” nor the already better tempered extended meal of “The Art of Asking,” but during some stretches becomes a history lesson that it is a pleasure to read, but not to hear; and this despite the fact that Handke’s use of the screen play as the central organizing principle, of course, also avails him of the quick cuts, of the superiority in efficiency that the screenplay allows: nonetheless... too much exposition. Thus the reception of the play was not helped I don’t think, with Peymann putting it on uncut. The play is also a “model” in the way Brecht used that term: it is adaptable to other historical circumstances. Among the various contending points of view, versions of the truth, that appear in “Canoe” is some appreciation, the only time I have seen Handke voice it, of the centrifugal forces in the Southern Balkans. “We never were meant to get along together.” “It was a forced marriage all along.” [FN-7] Behind “Canoe” as also behind “Walk about the Villages” lies the chiffre play “Quodlibet” [1970] – as you like it, the play to catch the conscience of the king, the audience being the modern king, ah what eternal optimism dwells in the heart of certain playwrights. In “Quodlibet” the great whores, the powerful of this world and the CIA and KGB folk walk around the stage mouthing one liners that are double or triple entendres: it is the only text of Handke’s that depends, like “Finnegan’s Wake” on the principle of auditory hallucination, a specie of “pathology of the everyday”. For example, I translated / adapted / alluded to the My Lay massacre by creating the line “and Mary was me last best lay”… Although one might not think so on the basis of some of Handke’s interviews and verbal explosions or extended tantrums, he remains true to the salvaging principle of ambiguity throughout his theatrical work.

III-Postscript

The Handke-Yugo affair, as I call it, and its two resurgences - quite aside the immediate historical degree of responsibility of Serbs, Croats, Kosovo Albanians, and their leaders and adjutants, foreign powers, and free wheeling independent perpetrators - presents a case study in what Naom Chomsky calls a case of a "nefarious atrocity." Like vultures or coyotes attracted by the smell of a fresh kill, righteous, ill informed, media-consuming and feeding journalists and writers of all kinds converged first on Sarajevo when it became the kind of flashpoint beloved of a media to explain the world to the simple minded, and then on the Austro-Slovenian writer Peter Handke, in a parallel kind of media war, when he published the first section of his "A Winter's Journey" in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1996, which its editors, not all that inaccurately, subtitled, "Justice for Serbia" since Handke, among other matters, disagreed with the already high strung yelping of the coyotes for the skin of everything nefariously Serbian. Without wanting to summarize, again, what I think of as a detailed, unsammarizable account of the three comings and subsidings of the affair [here are several link collections:

[timeline, see FN-8] I wanted to investigate and describe the sources, the foundations of the self-righteousness of these witch hunters, the background, conscious, and assumed, on which it plays.

A] Subsequent to the Kosovo campaign, in 1999, the German Foreign Minister Fischer congratulated himself [and the Schröder government] by stating that he felt that the NATO intervention had prevented another "Auschwitz" - and there was no hue and cry as to his so stating. However, support of the Kosovo campaign had already earned this ex-68ter, who during his days as a Revoluzzer had apparently been physically violent towards a policeman, an especially well-honed Handke sobriquet QUOTE; that is, Fischer was cursed by someone who had quickly sought to apologize, as he did recently once again [see links], for having misused the "A" word, which he correctly explained had inadvertently "slipped" out of him, to express in a kind of inarticulate scream – my interpretation - his extraordinary pain at what transpired during the systematic destruction of Serbian infrastructure. The "A" word, the "steinerne Gast", the obdurate guest with obsidian qualities, a different kind of third that is stonily present in a country that has taken the extraordinary measure of passing a law that prohibits the guest's denial, and to whose weight and unwelcome presence and exploitation the rare German writer – one exception is the famous instance of Martin Walser, during his acceptance of the peace prize of the German Book Trade - voices his objection [FN-9], tries to shake off; extraordinary in the sense that it outlaws disavowal, scotomization, an everyday, every person, every depth-psychological phenomenon, one of the building blocks, also one of the great survival mechanisms of the human psyche, albeit outlawed here in a well defined instance, yet of course setting precedent - it is as though one of Freud's discoveries had been inscribed in stone. The philosopher/ sociologist Jürgen Habermas once said that it took Auschwitz to give German a conscience, a ludicrous statement if there ever was one, entirely obliterating centuries of history, the way in which conscience is created individually, within classes, societies as a whole, and German legal history. It is a statement that confuses guilt feelings with conscience, not that one is possible without the other. The historian John Irving is presently [2006] incarcerated in Austria, the Johnny-come-lately of facers of its once enthusiastic Nazi collaboration, for transgressing the prohibition against denial: from Alexander Mitscherlich's "The Inability to Mourn" [1957] to a law that tries to enforce a reminder to mourn. An entire people, for generations to come, is reminded what their ancestors – the losers of WW I, initiators, mad believers, opportunists, the haters and ressentimenters, the fellow travelers, the entirely innocent, the entirely ignorant; that whole spectrum, a society - perpetrated or failed to keep from being perpetrated between 1933 and 1945, and which immense and also hugely self-destructive extermination, had Hitler and his party been victorious, would have been carried out on an even more horrendous scale: after all, the Slavic peoples were next in line. All of that is, certainly, one major component, one major large canvas section on which the Handke controversy played out - of whose unusual psychological and artistic formation, whose checkerboard constellation as it were, I have tried to give more than a hint – aside whatever personal animosities and provocations played into the fracas in Germany.

B] Not only has denial been outlawed in Germany, there exists a law that requires personal, proactive intervention in the event that you know that a crime against humanity is being committed… an attempt to prohibit passive fellow traveling, the looking the other way, any kind of inaction being prohibited is apparently one of the consequences of "A," the kind of law that, on an individual level, forces, obligates the individual conscience to take preventive action, to go to justice if need be, if you follow the law's ultimate consequence, to commit regicide if you judge the executive to be engaged in a crime against humanity; and which permits, obligates, the individual conscience of contemporary German Bundeswehr soldiers, to stop following orders, that is to disobey [!] orders which they regard as criminal. That is yet the second component. - How would that law, if it existed in the United States, play out in the first decade of the 21st Century? How is one to regard the unconvictable U.S. war criminals of the past fifty years? Down to the most miserable PFC who goes berserk. In Germany that law against denial has been extended to cover acts committed outside its own domain, and by citizens other than those who hold German nationality. But there is some tentativeness in using it in instances such as visits say by Donald Rumsfeld. In the hands of journalist and writers this law, and the background whence it derives, provides the moral imperative… and an impetus… that has a long and often honorable history, most famously in dictatorships, in various kinds of independence movements, and under the duress of an occupation by a foreign power. Existential moments.

However, the principle of “journalists without borders”

C] One further aspect of this affair, it is an entirely German one, needs to be mentioned here [not that revisionist debates are not part and parcel of the fabric of intellectual life]: the debate known as the "Historiker Streit." I don't wish to reargue the inarguably horrendous proposition that provided the occasion for this academic discourse - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit

– the proposition of German exceptionalism or not in setting the standard for perpetration of horrors, which however indicates that that old devil vanity is casting his glow on the proceedings and infusing the individual conscience claimants; which proposition became intimately tied to the question of denial of the holocaust and is one major reason why the human facility for denial has been criminalized, in all its multifarious versions, for whatever endless reasons. Denial certainly is not a uniquely German feature, or that of any society or historical period; it is a nearly supra-historical feature - in the individual it can be painful, but it is possible, to address it on the forum of conscience, of awakening, an often painful incremental process; on the level of the lethargic "psyche" of a tribe, much less a nation, it can be nearly impossible to address, unless that nation is nicely subdued, and generationally divided: it requires internal societal conflict for the matter to be raised at all. Evidently, the victory over the South during the American War Between the States and the so-called Reconstruction Period did little to instill regret or to assuage the narcissistic humiliation, or the sense of worthlessness of the lower white classes, whose only claim to fame seemed to be that they were not black. However, in the instance of post WW II Germany, a defeated nation, a certain segment of the educated people in one part of it - certainly here the trickle down theory applies, or up from the ranks of students who were the daughters and sons of the educated middle class – then instituted their own mourning, approximately one generation later, the previous generation, what was left of it, putting up comparatively light resistance. It took two generations in Austria. Within the terms of the "Historiker Streit", it is undeniable that in applying production line methods to extermination the Germans scored a first, other exterminators, using somewhat different methods, but lacking overt genocidal intentions, were not far behind. I myself regard the attempt to impose US will on Vietnam with free fire zones and chemical destruction of its lands as a form of industrial warfare, just one step away from genocide, since the Vietnamese were merely [!] meant to submit to Washington's will. A kind of mutual assured destruction saw its first coming during World War I. What I want to comment on is language: the initial proposition that the Germans as exterminators were not unique in world history is entirely trivial but was raised, put that way, chiefly, to shove the "stony guest" at least halfway out the door; but to reply to this proposition, with the best of intentions, by insisting that the German extermination, is unique without specifying of what kind it was, is to engage the wrong proposition on the field of language in a manner where no good results can be expected; the point being that one people's insanity is quite sufficient and all attempts at historical relativization are invidious and beside the point. If the formulation [s] is [are] wrong, the language game will not be solved. However, you may feel about abortion, Roe versus Wade is bad law, leading to endless litigation. To reply to the wrong formulation in its own terms – in this instance that German crimes were not unique – by insisting that they were, means that you have engaged a mis-formulation with a misformulated reply, and that whatever laws eventuate from this mixed bag of misformulation – you shalt not deny – will, ineluctably, invade the private sphere to a heretofore unknown depths; setting a precedent with possibly unforeseeable consequences. The criminalization of denial, think about it! How about: you shall be sent on a tour of the memorialized camps and forced to look at the films and then read the books, and then you may try to convince us the jury that what you saw was not the case, and if you so convince us you shall be win a historian prize of a million dollars! The point is: the formulation is eo ipso pointless under the law that though shalt not kill. All comparisons are invidious; only self-defense is permitted. Case closed. Yes, there are certain absolutes. In convictions for murder there exist classifications for degrees of responsibility. In the case of the German nation, it was murder in the first degree. There are no extenuating circumstances of any kind. That there are psychological, historical and sociological and linguistic explanations says nothing about guilt. After all, German law was perverted, legally, so that the crimes could be permitted [just as U.S. law has been once again perverted under Bush II]; brilliant German jurists participated in these perversions, wrote these perversions of justice. The extermination of European Jewry is not an instance of accidental man slaughter; or of aiding and abetting, of which no end of European nations are culpable, more rather than less enthusiastically in this instance while claiming to be Christian [excepting the Danes and the Bulgarians]. The U.S. decimation and maltreatment of its native peoples, too, is uniquely criminal, no matter how historically comparative; as is the attempt to enforce its will on the Vietnamese people in the 1960s and 1970s; or the conquest of Iraq, all of them major crimes against humanity for which only the losers ever have to pay the piper, although the American people are already paying the price for their folly in believing the likes of Cheney, Bush Rumsfeld and the mad Neo-Cons and for far deeper follies for which only they and how they arrange their nation are responsible.

The calamity of the Yugoslav federation was its ethnically and politically and religiously fractious past and the history of recourse to violence by all parties which then began to be played out in genocidal terms as the federation disintegrated, also economically, into its constituent parts. Into that fray entered a variety of chiefly European and American tourists of the civil wars [a la H.M. Enzensberger’s famous essay, “Tourists of the Revolution”] few if any of whom were acquainted, with the fabric of the region; quickly conclusionary ”

D] The fourth component of the canvas on which the three comings of the Handke controversy were played out is the ferocity with which the law forbidding denial is exercised, wielded by a particular class?? segment??? by the guild of journalists and writers... the "fourth estate"... professional, amateurish, at any event all self-appointed, as of course am I, with no official legitimacy except whatever trust exists in the organs that hire them or publish their material, or as pendants of legal action such as that of the International Tribunal; their legitimacy resting on the quality of their attempt to be as truthful as possible, on their research, the soundness argumentation, the ingenuity of their intuition, and of course on the quantitative effect of their reportage; and on the sounding board into which they feed their reports. Star reporters. Foreigners all who descended on Yugoslavia as though it were the Congo, which is still sufficiently strange and foreign to them to give them pause about their ignorance. Except for Handke, a showboat and star too, but by far the most knowledgeable among the lot, someone with historical consciousness reaching back at least some hundred and so years.

 Handke, accused of denial, was going to his own kind of writerly truth, implicitly, in a kind of apparently unacceptable manner, and accusing those who victimized him  of entirely ignoring other sets of victims, making different more complicated emphases, and as an artist who, as it were preternaturally as I have tried to describe, does not put the horror story on page one every day of the week; yet who, it appears, was personally far more upset than anyone of the neutral or atrocity screaming and exploiting reporters and freelancers, the numerous tourists of the civil wars in the sense of H. M. Enzensberger's famous essay "Tourists of the Revolution." - Each side with their favored victims. The German writer Buch sentimentalized the Kosovo Albanians. Handke in the face of the near exclusive emphasis on Bosnian Muslim victims pointed to the Serbian and Croatian victims. The concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel said that, as a former victim, he was instantly on the side of the Kosovo Albanians. Wouldn't it be loverly if life were that simple... and if victims were lambs and were not hurt and vengeful, potential wolves.

 Two states of denial as it were, where I find Handke's - especially with his psychically determined proclivity to deny, to ameliorate, of which he is to a limited extent  aware - far less objectionable since he at least allows the dreadful truths to appear at the edges, and in their complexity, only rarely and amusingly denies outright, is possibly influenced by sentimental transference in the case of the Big Bad Wolf, de-emphasized some aspects in favor of others, but in his recourse to legal niceties is far more precise in his argumentation and use of language than his opponents who in the way of editors and their audience once a story is "set" prefer not to question the underlying fundamentals of the narrative of the good against the bad guys.

   How often does a news paper or other provender actually admit, within the brief-lived historical memory of their audience that they had gotten the fundamentals of the story wrong, and thus… Most of the time you can see the truth, if they happened to have some purchase on it, slipping out of their hands. My most favored current instance is that of the origin of popular support for the Iraq insurgency in several nervous shootings of several dozen residents of Fallujah by members of the first U.S. division stationed there. You can actually see this once described event slipping out of the very hands of the same reporters who continue to report from Iraq, or the editors eliminating it. However, you can trace the disappearance act within the morgue of the NY Times, its archive.

States of denial of one and the same kind? that both assume, claim to have some purchase on a complex reality? That listen to each other? Mutual hatred, since Handke certainly is unstinting in his expression of hatred of the news media. Not a pretty picture at all. A Brescia all the way, a weird collage. And not a conclusion, a result that I anticipated arriving at when I followed this trail of tears like some early human ancestor looking for marrow bones in this attempted finding, since I'm as much a consumer of the news that flows my way, pre-digested, edited news… and, initially, still, continue to be preternaturally gullible. I suppose one way of representing what transpired in Yugoslavia might be by way of Breughel the Younger's paintings of a Dutch villagers who are all beating each other up with scythes and sticks and stones and shovels.

It would of course have helped if Handke himself were something closer, say, to what I perceive to be the media-mediated nearly saintly figure of an Archbishop Tutu or Nelson Mandela – it's just amazing what a Christian you can become if tortured to a sufficiency by so-called Christians – than just the extra-ordinarily gifted writer Peter Handke who lacks few of the reprehensible qualities of his persecutors, and then some, if he weren't so violence prone, didn't throw unattractive tantrums. If the attacks on him had not elicited his furies, if he had been entirely a patient argumenter, a kind of less slippery Habermas.

It appears that the first two sections of this background – a past red and still raw with atrocities - and the laws that are its consequences, enabled, self-justified the newspaper class to act as judge and jury and lynch mob executioners all rolled into one, beholden to whom? Certainly not even to their own educatable, revisable conscience. For I have seen not a one – there must be, there just have to be that one or two that I have missed – who, when he or she looked at matters more closely, revised and changed their minds and conclusions that the chief culprits are the Serbians with Slobodan Milosevic as wolf in chief. Nor have I seen Handke change his mind, though he appears to be willing to speak the hideous formulations in the way that it was demanded of him. [4] Engraved memories. Automatic, visceral reactions. And a questionable tribunal that then fails to bring charges - which is why it loses in legitimacy - in the instance of the war crime of the destruction of the Serbian infrastructure, fails to bring General Wesley Clark to trial, no matter how convictable he may be since he would certainly seek to justify his command actions as having been committed under orders, in which case you would have to put Ex-President Clinton, Ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Javier Solano on trial, too. If nothing else, perhaps in acquitting these horrendous worthies, such a trial would be educational, all around, and especially in the Balkans. Not going to happen though if it did I expect that it would receive better coverage from the NY Times than the Milosevic trial got at the hands of their Marlise Simons.

Although the background in Europe may be Auschwitz and the carnage of WW I and II, in the United States it is, most immediately, the unresolved criminality of the Vietnam war that led so many of the Vietnam protesters to join in the simple minded condemnation of Serbians. Handke pointed out that the "68ters," as the anti-Vietnam war contingent is called in Germany, seemed to be only too eager to intervene in Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds; pretty much the equivalent segment in the U.S. called for, and then endorsed Clinton and Albright's decision to intervene, first in the arming of the Croats and Bosnians [who also received some apparently disposable importable Mujahedeen from Iran!], and to bomb in Bosnia prior to the Dayton Peace talks, and then to bomb Serbia itself during the Kosovo campaign, also as a kind of first demonstration, a kind of preview of what US arms can do, of the even more emphatic shock and awe to come at the beginning of the Iraq War. These exercises are always a show not only of force but advertisement for the products of the military industrial complex, that ingenious complex which, with lard distributed through every single congressional district, has integrated the production of military hardware into the American economy, so that making arms is not the kind of dead drag that military hardware is on most others economies! Here it pays to fight evil! As a form of corporate welfare every district is up in arms when one of its bases threatens to be closed, one of its arms manufacturers relocates. And as a matter of fact you need to keep finding some kind of evil to fight to keep the stupid economy going. The same goes by the way for the outsourcing of prisons: that is the genius of American capitalism, very little in it lacks a continuous profit angle.            If ressentiment is a resource for election campaigns and for the class economy to keep on churning, the reservoir of psychosis can be tapped for war-like acts, in the instance of the journalistic class in the West, I call it the psychotic volcano, some of whose magna is in all of us. Most immediately, both in Germany and in France, with lesser sophistication in the United States, l'affaire Handke, played on the ground of the "never again," the memory of Auschwitz, but not it appears of the crimes committed by any other ex-colonial power. It played loudly amongst a self- appointed class of intellectuals who follow in the tradition of "engage" meanwhile of all kinds. The spectrum of their political affiliation, whether falling into the fields regarded left or right, are of no concern to me, since their yelping at the slightest sign of "atrocity" cuts across, is not significant to, whatever politics they profess... Atrocity, atrocity...  Discounting the possibility of bad faith of those who became engaged in the Serb hunt and the Handke hunt, no matter the theatrics of some of the participants, Handke was/ is by far the most knowledgeable, aside some of the diplomats who, however, no matter their privately held observations and beliefs [which will grace their memoirs once the are retired] each is some master's servant, acts in an interest. Handke at least provided a half dozen fine books, and one extra-ordinary play; what appeared in the papers and on the TV channels is fortunately already entombed. Last year, in New Haven, a newspaper writer went into full screaming mode against the performance of Handke's 1967 two character play "Self-Accusation" at the Yale Cabaret, entirely because he had defended the Serbs against whole sale calumny; quite aside the fact that the play preceded these events by 30 years and anyone reading this beautiful text would quickly get the point that it's author if nothing else suffers from a hypertrophy of conscientiousness. From Susan Sontag and the NYRB to that piece of righteous lumpen in New Haven, just a short stone's throw.

1]

2]

3]

4] Über das von Serben begangene Massaker von Srebrenica schreibt Handke: "Ich wiederhole aber, wütend, wiederhole voller Wut auf die serbischen Verbrecher, Kommandanten, Planer: Es handelt sich bei Srebrenica um das schlimmste 'Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit', das in Europa nach dem Krieg begangen wurde."

1. Ich habe nie eins der Masaker in den Jugoslawienkriegen 1991-95 geleugnet, oder abgeschwächt, oder verharmlost, oder gar gebilligt.

2. Nirgendwo bei mir kann man lesen, ich hätte Slobodan Milosevic als „ein" oder „das Opfer" bezeichnet.

3. Richtig ist: Anläßlich des okzidentalen Diktats gegen Jugoslawien von Rambouillet, im Februar 1999, habe ich mich, wie die Welt seit damals weiß, vor der Kamera des Belgrader Fernsehens verhaspelt, wobei herauskam, in meinem Französisch, die Serben seien noch größere Opfer als die Juden - was ich dann, nachdem ich, ungläubig, das Band mit dem von mir produzierten Un-Sinn angehört hatte, schleunigst schriftlich korrigierte: Text, seinerzeit von „Focus" veröffentlicht und von der F.A.Z. Wort für Wort, einmal ohne Kommentar, umgehend nachgedruckt.

Phantom-Titel: Wilder Mann

Ein P.S. noch für eine mir und vielleicht auch diesem oder jenem Leser wichtige letzte (versuchte) Berichtigung: Vor kurzem, wiederum in der F.A.Z., in einer der wie gewohnt geistvollen, hochherzigen und einfühlsamen Glossen des Theatersachverständigen der Zeitung, die meine Person oder meinen Phantom-Titel „Der wilde Mann" zum Vorwurf nahm (P.H., borniert, Kitschier, Befürworter von Kriminellen et cetera), war auch von meinem Stück „Die Fahrt im Einbaum" die Rede, worin ich angeblich das serbische Volk als eines schildere oder gar preise, welches Europa das Essen mit Messer und Gabel beigebracht habe, und überhaupt die Kultur. Richtig ist wieder, daß in dem Stück (Seite 65) eine Figur sagt: „Dabei waren wir es, die euch jahrhundertelang die asiatischen Horden ferngehalten haben. Und ohne uns würdet ihr immer noch mit den Fingern fressen. Wer war es, der in die westliche Welt Messer und Gabel eingeführt hat?" Nur: ist es nötig zu sagen, daß es sich hier um eine Parodie handelt? Nötig anzuführen jedenfalls der Rollenname jener kleinen Figur: „IRRER".

Und in diesem Sinne wünsche ich, daß all meine (6) Aufzeichnungen, Erzählungen, Berichte, Stücke der letzten fünfzehn Jahre zu Jugoslawien Wort für Wort gelesen würden, und anders sachverständig: „Abschied des Träumers vom neunten Land" (1991), „Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina" (1996), „Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise" (1996), „Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg" (1999), „Unter Tränen fragend" (1999) (alle bei Suhrkamp), und zuletzt „Die Tablas von Daimiel", Juni 2005 („Literaturen"). Mir dünkt, mich bedünkt, für diese Schriften ist der Heinrich-Heine-Preis. Es gibt noch Bücher zu lesen jenseits der Zeitungen.

„Ah, die alte Frau dort, meine Leserin, / die einzige, die mich noch grüßt? / Und wenn sie mich nicht grüßt? / Was für ein Abenteuer! / Und sie grüßte. / Und ein zweiter grüßte, ein Unbekannter. / Und ein Dritter dann" (Gedicht für H. H., am 27. Mai 2006).

Text: F.A.Z. vom 30. Mai 2006

5]

Author Martin Mosebach writes on the Peter Handke affair (more here, here and here): "Too bad the American ambassador who encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to wage war in Bosnia didn't come to his funeral in Belgrade. Someone like Handke who remained faithful to the dead Milosevic is much more worthy of admiration than all the Western politicians who made it possible for Milosevic to commit his crimes while he was alive."

In an exclusively online answer to writer Botho Strauß' general amnesty for geniuses in the Peter Handke affair (text in German here), Jörg Lau puts the two Peter Handkes back together: "Why do we get so upset at Handke's kitsch rendering of Serbia and things Serbian, why does his coquettishly playful relativization of the facts annoy us so much, why do our hackles rise when he appears at the funeral of mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic? It's because he's a major poet, whose novels and diaries continually provide us with 'moments of true experience.' When we attack Peter Handke the politician, we defend Peter Handke the poet."

c.buch

wittstock

nzz guenter

re loeffler

FN-1

Subsequent to the end of Handke’s surcease there had followed a series of pronouncements on the occasion of the withdrawal of his "wild man" play "Untertagsblues" [Subday Blues] from the prize competition at the Mühlheim theater festival, culminating in the explanation that he had had a sufficiency of prizes, a convincing explanation on the face of the contemplation of his accumulation of them since he received the most important German literary recognition, the Büchner Prize in 1968, a prize which he gave back during the Kosovo War, to the bafflement of the prize committee, which had had no truck with the NATO destruction of the Serbian infrastructure. However, I think, it seems more likely that he disavowed even the possibility of receiving the Mühlheim Prize because what with all the truly great plays of his that had not been awarded the Mühlheim Theater Prize it would be awful not so much to lose yet again in that competition, but to win with one's most – actually his only – pedestrian - oh what an ordinär – piece it is boot on the part of someone whose greatest achievement, for me, had been to create works for the theater that worked independent of naturalistic conventions. A work more likely than not written just in order to "stay in the picture," though it hits the road rage note of the contemporary worldwide mood, although this wild man's enumeration of all the things he hates [that irritate him] does not derive from a well-known strain in Handke, his nausea – there was a time when Handke complained of suffering from “nausea in the eyeballs”. Handke’s misanthropism, however, is given for more interesting and truly delightful expression, say, in his novel "Nomansbay" in the personae of a restaurateur who keeps going bankrupt as he serves the world's most delicious food but is as particular about his guests as he is about the gustatory ingredients; a split-off part of Handke's self my Kleinian friend's might say, but very true also, judging by the recent Croatian weekly Globus' interview with Handke [SEE LINK COLLECTION BELOW] at his forest abode, of someone who, once the worst of hosts, has become a splendid cook and host - as one might also guess from a truly delightful play of his entitled “La Cuisine”; who, however, judging by yet another long fairly recent interview, no longer even takes his friends, since he cannot abide having men in a room with him for long, on his extensive mushroom rambles in the forest in which he lives. A very special misanthrope indeed. "Could I have another serving of wild boar with your hand-picked mushrooms, Herr Handke?" Following the French interview, [with someone who has given hundreds over the years, the most interesting being the book length "Ich Lebe doch nur von den Zwischenräumen" – I live exclusively from the thresholds between rooms - with Herbert Ganscher, that is counted among Handke’s 100 or so works , there followed a rich, long interview with Herbert Greiner, the chief literary editor of Die Zeit, also conducted in Handke's Chaville Forêt abode, where, so it struck me [as it did also, and more forcefully, in the more recent Globus one], that Handke seemed to be toying in a passive aggressive manner with his guest {QUOTE}, alternately threatening to evict the guest every few minutes, insisting on his rights as lord of the castle, and grumped, justifiably so I felt, at being favorably received for his novels and diaries in Die Zeit but given the shortest and nastiest and stupidest of shrifts for his half dozen Yugoslav books. Amongst the interview slew is also one with the NZZ [Neue Zuricher Zeitung, SEE LINKs] which I find most notable for Handke's detailed acquaintance with the ins and out of current Belgrade politics. [I may yet be missing one or the other interview on the occasions of the publication of that truly extraordinary, mercifully formally succinct late performance, "Don Juan – as told by Himself," and of the fourth of his published diary tomes "Gestern Unterwegs," [Yesterday, Underway] both in 2005, which, now that Handke knows that he has enemies, are edited somewhat less revealingly than used to be the case.

[Fn-2] 3. September 2006
Der österreichische Schriftsteller Peter Handke nennt seinen Kollegen Günter Grass nach dessen spätem Eingeständnis, der Waffen-SS angehört zu haben, „eine Schande für das Schriftstellertum". Der österreichischen Info-Illustrierten „News" (Donnerstag) sagte Handke: „Ich finde vor allem die Sprache, mit der er das betreibt, völlig verfehlt. Bei ihm kommt nichts von innen." Handke, der selbst wegen seines Engagements für Serbien und seine Rede zum Begräbnis des ehemaligen Diktators Slobodan Milosevic heftig von Kollegen und den Medien angegriffen worden war, kritisiert weiter: „Sogar sein Outing, wie man das heute nennt, ist so selbstgerecht wie er seit 50 Jahren: böser, selbstgerechter Formalismus." Der 63jährige in Paris lebende Autor zweifelt zudem Grass' angebliche Unkenntnis an: „Die Ausrede, daß man mit 17 nichts weiß, ist eine der schlimmsten. (...) Das Nazitum, ob es in Danzig war oder nicht, hat ein Volk zum Feind des Erdenlebens erklärt, und das waren die Juden. Sogar ein Zwölfjähriger muß spüren: Wenn ein anderes Volk als schlecht hingestellt wird, ist diese Ideologie grundböse." Grass habe das „gewußt und nicht demgemäß gehandelt. Das ist ein ewiger Makel eines empörenden Menschen."

Text: FAZ.NET mit Material von dpa
Bildmaterial: ddp

The man who delivered himself of these words, at the age of 40 beat up his girl friend, at the age of 28 nearly killed his three year old daughter in a fit of irritation while he was confronted with a flood in his basement at his house in Kronberg while he was writing the biography of his mother, Maria Sivec-Schönherr-Handke, who during her 20s had certainly embraced with wonderful enthusiasm a number of Nazi soldiers stationed near Griffen, Austria. Give me break! And the Germans who entered Austria during the Anschluss were certainly welcomed also for their anti-semitism. It is the most unpleasant side of Handke that reveals itself there, also the most competitive, since he’s trying to give that extra shove to give the final kick to get the wounded sage from Gdansk off his pedestal! There I prefer the Handke who said that there’s enough guilt to go around for everyone.

FN-4
April 2006 / III

»Auf den Tod von Slobodan Milosevic habe ich, anders als die sogenannte Allgemeinheit, an deren Allgemeinheit ich nicht recht glaube, nicht »mit Genugtuung reagiert«, zumal das Tribunal den seit 5 Jahren in einem angeblichen »5-Sterne-Gefängnis« (»Libération«) Verwahrten erwiesenermaßen hat sterben lassen. Unterlassene Hilfeleistung: ist das nicht ein Verbrechen? Ich »gestehe«, etwas wie Kummer empfunden zu haben, der am Abend nach der Todesnachricht beim Gehen in den Seitenstraßen zu der Vorstellung führte, irgendwo für den Toten eine Kerze anzuzünden. Und dabei sollte es bleiben. Ich hatte nicht vor, zum Begräbnis, pogreb, sahrana, nach Pozarevac zu reisen. Ein paar Tage später erreichte mich die Einladung, nicht etwa von der Partei, sondern von der Familie (die übrigens an der Beerdigungsstunde dann, anders als verlautet, zum Großteil anwesend war). Freilich bewog mich weniger das zu der Reise. Mehr waren es die Reaktionen der durchweg feindlichen, nach dem Tod noch verstärkt feindlichen Westmedien, und darüber hinaus der Sprecher des Tribunals und auch des einen oder anderen »Historikers«. Es war deren aller Sprache, die mich auf den Weg brachte. Nein, Sl. M. war kein »Diktator«. Nein, SI. M. hat nicht »vier Kriege auf dem Balkan angezettelt«. Nein, Sl. M. hat nicht als »Schlächter von Belgrad« bezeichnet zu werden. Nein, Sl. M. war kein »Apparatschik«, kein »Opportunist«. Nein, Sl. M. war nicht »zweifellos« schuldig. Nein, Sl. M. war kein »Autist« (Wann übrigens werden die schmerzhaftest kranken Autisten sich wehren, daß ihr Kranksein als Schmähwort gebraucht wird?). Nein, Sl. M. hat mit seinem Sterben in der Zelle von Scheveningen »uns« (dem Tribunal) keinen »bösen Streich gespielt« (Carla del P.). Nein, Sl. M. hat »uns« mit seinem Tod nicht »den Teppich unter den Füßen weggezogen, uns das Licht ausgeschaltet« (dieselbe). Nein, Sl. M. hat sich nicht vor dem Schuldspruch, ohne Zweifel LEBENSLÄNGLICH, weggestohlen«. Sl. M. wird »dafür aber dem Urteil der Historiker nicht entkommen« (ein »Historiker«): abermals nicht bloß unwahre, sondern schamlose Sprache. Solche Sprache war es, die mich veranlasste zu meiner Mini-Rede in Pozarevac - in erster und letzter Linie solche Sprache. Es hat mich gedrängt, eine, nein, die andere Sprache vernehmen zu lassen, nicht etwa aus Loyalität zu Slobodan Milosevic, sondern aus Loyalität eben zu jener anderen, der nicht journalistischen, der nicht herrschenden Sprache. Beim Anhören des einen oder anderen der Vorredner in Pozarevac dann allerdings der Impuls: nein, nicht sprechen nach dem schneidigen General da, dem nach Rache schreienden Parteipolitiker da, die beide die Menge anheizen wollten, welche sich freilich, bis auf ein paar vereinzelte Mitschreier, keinmal zu einer Haß- oder Zornantwort kollektiv hinreißen ließ: denn es war eine Menge aus Trauernden, still und tief Bekümmerten, so mein nachhaltigster Eindruck. Und für diese Bekümmerten, gegen die markigen, starken Sprüche, machte ich dann doch den Mund auf wie bekannt -- als ein Teil der Kummergemeinde. Reaktion darauf: P. H., der »Claqueur« (FAZ) - gibt es eine verwahrlostere Sprache als diese? Ein »Claqueur«, was ist das: Einer, der für Geld Beifall klatscht. Und wo ist der Beifall? (Nie habe ich auch geäußert, wieder laut FAZ, »glücklich« zu sein nahe dem Toten.) Und wo ist das Geld? (Flug und Hotel selbst bezahlt.) Mein Hauptbedürfnis jedenfalls für die Grabreise: Zeuge sein. Zeuge weder im Sinn der Anklage noch im Sinn der Verteidigung. Heißt denn inzwischen, Zeuge nicht im Sinn der Anklage sein zu wollen, für den Angeklagten zu sein? »Zweifellos«, gemäß einem der Hauptschlagworte der herrschenden Sprache?« (Quelle: / Suhrkamp Verlag]

FN-6 Regrettably the deserved occasion of the Nobel Prize has probably passed: it is not to be expected that the Nobel Prize committee will be so generous as to look past Handke’s problematics and the hue and cry such an award would unloosen, his miserable humanness, and make the award for what it is designed, and in which respect I cannot think of anyone more deserving.

FN-7] Handke, who by the mid-seventies had decided that he, who was nothing but a writer, would put his big self into play! An extremely well known extensive self, few of the warts left out, on display in his whelming work. There is little that we cannot find out about Handke, from his birth – no trauma according to the midwife’s published report; interest in the genetic origin of his occasional color blindness which may or may not be connected with his autism, Handke is as an artist an idiot savant, who suffers from the social disabilities that mark that extensive syndrome. Some embarrassing matters, are concealed, there is the language regulation that claims that Handke’s first wife, Libgart Schwartz, left him to resume her career as an actress, which she had never done in the first place, and not for the good and multiple causes that she did leave; though if you read his work closely, his wanting to maintain a friendship allows you to conclude on your own that this claim is absurd; as is the claim that Handke spent some time in a hospital in Paris during a critical period in the mid-70s because he has a congenetically defective heart valve – which is contradicted by the evidence of the huge upset that this event, the death of his mother, and his finding himself needing to take care of a baby girl produced, and of the fugue states he describes in the “Nonsense and Happiness” poems and in “A Moment of True Feeling” and because in “The Lesson of St. Victoire” [1980] he boasts that he had been accepted by the Austrian army, the only thing his hated stepfather had ever approved of, even with his lousy eyes it appears, although it seems that  Handke never went through basic training, and that he must have been deferred [his vision]. The taking of valium in the hospital eased the anxiety states and, with some therapy [see: “Weight of the Word”] apparently at together with a religiously oriented therapist, led to his access to a richer emotionality which began to mark his far warmer work, starting with the mythically orienting “The Left Handed Woman”. Chiefly, he worked wrote his way out of the Paris crisis and, after briefly considering moving to N.Y. with his young child, proceeded to write “A Slow Homecoming” [#]- set in Alaska, San Francisco, Colorado, New York - in the Hotel Adams in N.Y., which then became the “Slow Homecoming” quartet [+] while settling in Salzburg until his daughter graduated from High School; whereupon, after a year or so spent traveling around the world, he returned to the outskirts of Paris to a place that he had planned to settle in already in the mid-70s. Judging by the evidence of the mystification of woman troubles that mark the less interesting part of “Across” [1982] [Chinese des Schmerzens], the first novel Handke wrote to celebrate Salzburg, his newest place of Residence, the underlying problematics - women troubles, rages galore - that had come to a head in the Paris crisis of the 70s had not been solved, no matter that Handke in spite of them had by then become, for me, a far better writer now that a painterly element had entered of his repertoire.

FN-7] Also, for me, the translator of Handke’s “They Are Dying Out” it came, briefly, as a big surprise to run into the rhythms of an old familiar condemnation aria with different words! Handke’s all purpose condemnation aria, it appear; briefly because I had realized in he late 80s, deconstructing the components for the screenplay of “Wings of Desire” what a carpenter collage artist Handke is, who doesn’t throw anything in his shop away..

BIN

nearly as good as immediately starting to write your mother’s life in “Sorrow Beyond Dreams” upon her suicide.

This self display is unacceptable within the civilizational norms of western society when Handke needs to displays himself physically, a volume displacer who inveighs against bodies that displace his, {XX} also in the nude.

["Herr Handke, I'd been wondering who you are?" "Read, W.A.T.V., I'd be delighted to know how you can fit all those parts into one rabbit."].

=======================\

bin

Regrettably the deserved occasion of the Nobel Prize has probably passed: it is not to be expected that the Nobel Prize committee will be so generous as to look past Handke’s problematics and the hue and cry such an award would unloosen, his miserable humanness, and make the award for what it is designed, and in which respect I cannot think of anyone more fundamentally deserving.    No harm of course if all this controversiality led to the reading of his works, to the improvement of the central Europe! Which it has not in the past nearly 50 years since the first appearance of Count Sivec-Schönherr-Handke from Griffen on the world scene! However, no matter how exhibitionistic Handke may be, to whatever extent he, too, is a domineering, power hungry, space displacing autocrat, has any bearing on his literary exhibitions nor on whatever truth value his very different poetic, non-journalistic responses, records have, and – I think this is one of the chief rubs – his by and large non-Goyaesque descriptions of what he beheld during his several trips, whereas most everyone wanted him to scream "oh the horror of it" so they even missed the amazing moment when he actually did: QUOTE FROM “SOMMERLICHE…”

==========================

What he actually said in P. QUOTE has since been misquoted and degenerated in their misquotation as they were passed from news organ to newsroom into the magical mystery tour of the blogosphere [LINKS]. Assuredly there would be consequences, though not necessarily such a compounding as the cancelling of a great play, and a city counsel, running scared after the decision of its jury has become controversial, withholding prize money for a prize which not long ago we said we were no longer interested in [but which it was then claimed would have been useful for a translator symposium, of translators of one’s own works into the 30 some languages in which it exists!] or whatever reason we pick out of the air as is needed to get ourselves of the hook of yet another contradiction, so that we can then say something as wonderful as QUOTE; and whose appropriateness – is Heine a Handke? – was underscored by the Prize Committee’s language TRANSLATE/ LINK

==========================

Handke, who by the mid-seventies had decided that he, who was nothing but a writer, would put his big self into play! An extremely well known extensive self, few of the warts left out it h  , on display in his whelming work. There is little that we cannot find out about Handke, from his birth – no trauma according to the  midwife’s  published report; interest in the genetic origin of his occasional color blindness which may or may not be connected with his autism, Handke is as an artist an idiot savant, who suffers from the social disabilities that mark that extensive syndrome. Some embarrassing matters, are concealed, there is the language regulation that claims that Handke’s first wife, Libgart Schwartz, left him to resume her career as an actress, which she had never done in the first place, and not for the good and multiple causes that she did leave; though if you read his work closely, his wanting to maintain a friendship allows you to conclude on your own that this claim is absurd; as is the claim that Handke spent some time in a hospital in Paris during a critical period in the mid-70s because he has a congenetically defective heart valve – which is contradicted by the evidence of the huge upset that this event, the death of his mother, and his finding himself needing to take care of a baby girl produced, and of the fugue states he describes in the “Nonsense and Happiness” poems and in “A Moment of True Feeling” and because in “The Lesson of St. Victoire” [1980] he boasts that he had been accepted by the Austrian army, the only thing his hated stepfather had ever approved of, even with his lousy eyes it appears, although it seems that  Handke never went through basic training, and that he must have been deferred [his vision]. The taking of valium in the hospital eased the anxiety states and, with some therapy [see: “Weight of the Word”] apparently at together with a religiously oriented therapist, led to his access to a richer emotionality which began to mark his far warmer work, starting with the mythically orienting “The Left Handed Woman”. Chiefly, he  worked wrote his way out of the Paris crisis and, after briefly considering moving to N.Y. with his young child, proceeded to write “A  Slow Homecoming” [#]-  set in Alaska, San Francisco, Colorado, New York - in the Hotel Adams in N.Y., which then became the “Slow Homecoming” quartet [+] while settling in Salzburg until his daughter graduated from High School; whereupon, after a year or so spent traveling around the world, he returned to the outskirts of Paris to a place that he had planned to settle in already in the mid-70s. Judging by the evidence of the mystification of  woman troubles that mark the less interesting part of “Across” [1982] [Chinese des Schmerzens], the first novel Handke wrote to celebrate Salzburg, his newest place of Residence, the underlying problematics - women troubles, rages galore - that had come to a head in the Paris crisis of the 70s had not been solved, no matter that Handke in spite of them had by then become, for me, a far better writer now that a painterly element had entered

of his repertoire.

nearly as good as immediately starting to write your mother’s life in “Sorrow Beyond Dreams” upon her suicide.

This self display is unacceptable within the civilizational norms of western society when Handke needs to displays himself physically, a volume displacer who inveighs against bodies that displace his, {XX} also in the nude.

["Herr Handke, I'd been wondering who you are?" "Read, W.A.T.V., I'd be delighted to know how you can fit all those parts into one rabbit."].

The appearance at P. [PHOTO], an act of public theater, I would think  was also a calculated media event. The media need him as much as he needs them; if not one star then another…  A classic in your own life time,  which means that you are not much read, famous for being famous – he has that kind of power, that kind of access since he, who had dreamt during his youth of appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel, and of addressing the world, was first discovered by the hungry mirror in 1966, two hungers lying in wait for each other. If anyone knows how to appear on the world stage it is the fashion conscious, multiply photographed and posing Peter Handke, who also knows that you need, occasionally, to withdraw behind the curtain! Coy as only a star, occasionally sulking. “Play the game.” [W.A.T.V.]… and Handke would appear for the third time… on the cover of Novo, but now that Günter Grass had seriously damaged himself with the admission that he had allowed himself to be drafted into the Waffen SS for 45 days and for reasons of peculiar guilt feelings had become that extra righteous conscience, Handke, and his quickly resurrected righteousness, cannot be far off from finally appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel itself???