... per protesta non hanno partecipato un membro dell’Accademia dal 2002, Peter Englund, né la scrittrice della giuria esterna Gun-Britt Sundstrom. Parimenti la regina di Svezia ha voluto il suo tavolo ben lontano da quello dell’autore austriaco... Sul piano diplomatico non sono mancate reazioni. Hanno proclamato il boicottaggio del Nobel ad Handke Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia-Erzegovina, Croazia, Turchia, Afghanistan, Macedonia del Nord, hanno protestato le madri di Srebrenica, online sono state raccolte di 58 mila firme online, nella capitale svedese si sono tenute manifestazioni di protesta. Ma anche la Turchia liberticida è intervenuta: Erdogan si è scagliato contro il premio ad Handke... il 10 ottobre scorso Salman Rushdie commentava: «Handke ha scritto ampiamente su quel conflitto jugoslavo. Non si può non tenerne conto, non si può giustificarlo»...
https://www.corriere.it/cultura/19_dicembre_07/nobel-handke-altre-dimissioni-scrittore-critiche-carta-igienica-70b39c46-18d1-11ea-9d71-bd7f739c6491.shtml
– Eine Würdigung für Peter Handke … und eine Erwiderung auf eine Kampagne (von Hannes Hofbauer)
– Un hommage à Peter Handke … et une réponse à une campagne (par Hannes Hofbauer)
– A tribute to Peter Handke... and a response to a campaign
“I would like to be in Serbia when the bombs are being dropped on Serbia. This is my place I assure you when the NATO criminals will release their bombs, I will go to Serbia.” Peter Handke said these words on 18 February 1999, when he was interviewed by Serbian television in Rambouillet in France.
At that time at Rambouillet Castle, the negotiators of the USA and the European Union, Christopher Hill and Wolfgang Petritsch, tried to force the Yugoslav side to put the province of Kosovo under international control and to make Serbia and Montenegro a NATO deployment area so that, as Article 8 read, “NATO personnel shall enjoy [...] free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] including associated airspace and territorial waters.” Such blackmailing was unacceptable, as also former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger let his his successor Madeleine Albright know via a newspaper comment:
“Yugoslavia, a sovereign state, is required to hand over control and sovereignty over a province with a number of national sanctuaries to foreign military personnel. Similarly, one could ask the Americans to let foreign troops invade Alamo to return the city to Mexico because of the shift in ethnic balance,” he wrote in Welt am Sonntag on 28 February 1999.
And after 17 days of negotiation, Yugoslav delegation leader Milan Milutinovic told Tanjug press agency:
“A scam had happened. An agreement was not even wanted. The whole theatre play had been arranged so that we should accept the unacceptable, or if we did not accept it, bombs would fall […].”
A month later, bombs fell on Serbia and Montenegro. On 24 March 1999, NATO, which had just been expanded by admitting Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic as member countries, attacked. The attack, violating international law, was carried out without a UN mandate. It was a criminal act. And Peter Handke kept his promise. He went to Serbia. His report on a winter journey to the rivers Danube, Save, Morawa and Drina had already been published by him in the midst of the anti-Serb atmosphere of Western media and politics. “Justice for Serbia” was the subtitle. And at the beginning of 1999 he finished his work on the play “The journey in the dugout canoe, or the piece about the film about the war” (Die Fahrt im Einbaum, oder das Stück zum Film vom Krieg), in which he clearly and unmistakably speaks out against the colonial desires of western military, companies and NGOs during the Bosnian civil war. Claus Peymann staged the premiere at the Viennese Burgtheater on 9 June, 1999, the very day that a contract was signed in Kumanovo, Macedonia, on the withdrawal of the Yugoslav People’s Army from Kosovo.
They cannot forgive Peter Handke that in the 1990s he not only regretted the breakup of Yugoslavia, but was also close to Slobodan Milosevic, the comparatively most sensible force at the time. At the grave of the person who had been deported to The Hague and died there without the medical treatment he had asked for, Handke indirectly expressed his view of the Yugoslavia crisis. This 18 March 2006 is still scandalised today. At the time, Handke spoke the following words (in Serbo-Croatian) at Milosevic’s funeral in his hometown of Pocarevac:
“The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Slobodan Milosevic. The so-called world knows the truth. That is why the so-called world is absent today, and not just today, and not just here. The so-called world is not the world. […] I don’t know the truth. But I am looking. I am listening. I remember. I am asking. That’s why I am here today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Milosevic.”
Now Germany and Austria in particular began to support Yugoslavia’s national centrifugal forces. Especially the two foreign ministers Hans-Dietrich Genscher (FDP) and Alois Mock (ÖVP) stood out. Who were their partners on the ground? It was mainly Croatian and Bosnian Muslim secessionists who they relied on; whereby the historical parallel to the forties was present in Serbia and hushed up in Germany.
In Croatia, German and Austrian foreign policy supported Franjo Tudjman. He had been elected President of the Autonomous Republic of Croatia in May 1990 and was now regarded as the hero of democracy and the free market economy; he fought fiercely for the latter. During Titoism, the trained historian was imprisoned twice for nationalist and “counterrevolutionary activities”.
Shortly before the Croatian referendum on independence in May 1991, Tudjman showed what he understood by Croatian nationalism. On 2 March 1991, Tudjman sent Croatian national guardsmen (there was no army yet) to the Slavonian town of Pakrac, which was mainly inhabited by Serbs. They forced the local Serbian policemen to hoist the new flag of the “Republic of Croatia”, not yet recognised by anyone, on their police station: the chessboard known from the fascist Ustasha period.
Western Cooperation with antisemites
The Bosnian-Muslim ally of the West, Alija Izetbegovic, was in his own way even a more radical right-wing radical than Tudjman. In the Second World War he joined the Mladi Muslimani, an organisation close to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that used the German advance and the Ustasha government in Croatia to form for its part a Muslim force against Tito’s partisans. In 1970 Izetbegovic’s main work, the “Islamic Declaration”, was published. In it he describes the desired future social order under Muslim auspices as follows:
“The first and most important (realisation) is certainly the one of the incompatibility of Islam with non-Islamic systems. There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and the non-Islamic societies and political institutions”.
Izetbegovic spent several years in Titoist prisons both for membership of the “Young Muslims” and for the publication of the Islamic Declaration. Whereas the West, especially the French media and intellectuals like the philosophers Bernard-Henry Levy and André Glucksmann, saw Izetbegovic as the saviour of democracy in the Balkans, even more so: Their battle song during the Bosnian civil war was: “We can win, so we must win! Yes or no to European civilisation! Their local patron was Alija Izetbegovic.
Handke: Solidarity with a low voice
(Translation Current Concerns)
Europe had a common cultural base: Christian ethics and social doctrine as well as the Enlightenment. Both pillars require compassion and respect for the dignity of man. Is that only for the winners? Is a defeated people erased from collective memory, because only Anglo-American “tittytainment” has room in it? There are many more wounds in defeated Serbia: those who suffer from multiple cancers and those who die from it. Cancers that have never existed before 1999. About five years after such bombardments the cancer rate starts rising and death reaper draws his late harvest. Shared culture? Compassion? Dignity of man?
The director of the RTS, Dragoljub Milanovic, wasn’t among the dead. After a busy day he had left the house half an hour earlier, to go to sleep. He would not have thought that the station in the middle of Belgrade could be a target; naive or not, but that was it.
The later Serbian government looked at it under changed political objectives and sentenced Milanovic, on the basis that he should have evacuated all staff in time, to a ten-year imprisonment he has since been serving in Pozarevac. Peter Handke tells this story from the perspective of an observer fighting the fact that manifest injustice leaves him speechless. Thus he tells what has been and what is now, for information and with sympathy, polyphonic and straightforward all at once.
***
“Here a true story is to be told. But I don’t know to whom. It seems to me there is no addressee for this story, at least not in the plural and not even in the singular. I also think, it is too late to tell it: I missed the moment. And nevertheless it’s an urgent, compulsive story. Master Eckart once talked about his need to preach, being so strong, that he would even address it to an ‘offering box’ if he wouldn’t find a counterpart for his sermon – if I remember correctly. This is not a matter of a sermon, but, as I said, a story. But if necessary it would also be told to a pile of wood or an empty snail shell or – by the way not for the first time – even to myself here all alone.”
(Translation Current Concerns)
In 1966, Handke’s first novel “The Hornets” was published. He became famous in the same year for the staging of his now legendary theatre play “Offending the Audience and Self-accusation”.
Since then he has written more than 30 stories and prose works. His most famous works include “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick” (1970), “The Chinese Man of Pain” (1983) and “My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay” (1994).
His work has won numerous national and international awards. Since his first prize in 1967 (Gerhard Hauptmann Prize), Peter Handke has been awarded at least one prize every year since 1972, including the Büchner Prize in 1973, the Kafka Prize in 1979, the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1987, the Siegfried Unseld Prize 2004 and the International Ibsen Prize 2014.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the NATO alliance’s attack on Serbia, Peter Handke attended the Belgrade conference “Never to forget – peace and progress instead of wars and poverty” (22-23 March 2019). The president of the Belgrade Forum, Živadin Jovanović, awarded him the “Charter of Courage”: in recognition of his intellectual courage in defending the truth and justice in times when greed for power and lies about Serbia dominated.
The Current Concerns/Zeit-Fragen editorial team congratulates Peter Handke on the well-deserved Nobel Prize.
L’esordio di Peter Handke sulla scena letteraria fu segnato da una provocazione indirizzata all’establishment intellettuale della Repubblica federale tedesca: invitato nel 1966 a Princeton da Ingeborg Bachmann in occasione dell’incontro annuale del Gruppo 47, l’allora ventiquattrenne scrittore austriaco attaccò quella che considerava una generalizzata incapacità di stare al passo con i tempi, ovvero il conformismo linguistico e sintattico della narrativa espressa dal gruppo letterario che era protagonista di quella giornata.
Due anni più tardi, gli obiettivi polemici di Handke sarebbero stati il teatro dialettico di Bertolt Brecht e quello documentario di Peter Weiss, incapaci di agire nel tempo e nella società a cui si rivolgevano, sebbene il loro scopo fosse stimolarne il cambiamento. Al teatro dialettico e documentario, Handke contrapponeva Sprechstücke (pezzi teatrali parlati), ispirati dalla lingua della strada e dell’immediatezza, il cui fine non era conseguire effetti scenici, ma rappresentare la spontaneità. In quello stesso anno, mise in scena Kaspar il cui protagonista è una macchina retorica, un automa senz’anima che ha perso qualsiasi possibilità di autodeterminarsi ed è diventato un tipo riproducibile a piacimento.
MENTRE IN GERMANIA si faceva strada la drammaturgia della «nuova soggettività», la produzione teatrale e narrativa di Peter Handke piegò lo spazio letterario a luogo di analisi del rapporto fra individuo e potere. Ma alla cosiddetta Nuova oggettività sono comunque riconducibili quei suoi romanzi molto noti, che affrontano il rapporto fra genitori e figli: più famoso degli altri Infelicità senza desideri (del 1972), un delicato ritratto del rapporto fra un figlio e sua madre, mediato dall’esperienza biografica dello scrittore austriaco, e allo stesso tempo la descrizione della vita di una donna sino al suo suicidio, scandita da una quotidianità prosaica, nella quale non è possibile coltivare speranze per il futuro, neppure attraverso la letteratura. Quanto all’interesse di Handke per una poetica centrata sul rapporto fra individuo, società e mondo, Prima del calcio di rigore (del 1970) è forse il suo titolo più noto, anche grazie a Wim Wenders, che ne trasse l’omonimo film; gli stessi temi avrebbero poi trovato la loro espressione più matura in L’ora del vero sentire (del 1975), il cui protagonista, Gregor Keusching, arriva via via a una percezione profonda di sé e del contesto sociale nel quale vive. È una prospettiva, questa, che torna nei romanzi degli anni settanta, dove Handke recupera i moduli espressivi della tradizione.
Con Lento ritorno a casa, in particolare, lo scrittore austriaco tornava ai suoi tradizionali intenti provocatori: la legge del «mondo buono celato» che il protagonista cerca di esperire, oltre a ricordare la «mite legge» che secondo Adalbert Stifter reggeva gli equilibri della natura, rivela l’impossibilità di sfuggire alla reificazione cui è ormai condannato l’individuo, nel secondo Novecento. Sorger, il protagonista, vive dunque fra due mondi inconciliabili: realtà e fantasia, colpa e innocenza, trovando nella «ripetizione» la sola possibilità di scorgere una via d’uscita dall’impasse in cui si trova. Ripetizione(del 1986) si intitola, del resto, un romanzo emblematico del desiderio che Handke coltivava circa la possibilità di incastonare la propria prosa nella tradizione dell’epica classica, fornendo in più alla sua scrittura una valenza salvifica.
LA FIDUCIA nel «potere curativo del linguaggio», inteso anche come antidoto alla degenerazione della storia e del mondo, ha indotto Handke a raccontare nel Cinese del dolore (datato 1983) il «mondo celato» dietro a quello reale, seguendo le vicende dell’insegnante Andreas Loser, che si muove tra Salisburgo Mantova e la Sardegna come un vero e proprio «cercatore di soglie», luoghi fisici e metafisici in cui il tempo e lo spazio sono sospesi.
SUL FINIRE degli anni ottanta, Handke collaborò con Wim Wenders alla sceneggiatura del Cielo sopra Berlino mentre degli anni novanta verranno ricordati i tre provocatori reportage relativi ai viaggi effettuati nel teatro della guerra civile, che scuoteva allora la ex-Jugoslavia: le sue prese di posizione in favore della Serbia suscitarono scandalo, soprattutto nei paesi di lingua tedesca. Non contento, Handke tenne nel 2006 una commemorazione dell’ex dittatore [sic] jugoslavo Slobodan Milosevic in occasione del suo funerale. Allo stesso anno risale anche il dramma Tracce degli smarriti con il quale Handke porta in scena la parola come ultima realtà rappresentabile in un teatro che, ancora come quello del Kaspar, interroga l’esistenza umana, ponendole domande dinnanzi alle quali la lingua stessa segna il passo.
GLI SCRITTI di non fiction degli anni 2000 sembrano insistere sul viaggio e sulla ricerca identitaria e linguistica (Saggio sul luogo tranquillo e Saggio sul raccoglitore di funghi 2013), accompagnando il lettore in paesaggi europei ed orientali, poi facendolo sostare in luoghi in limine, nei quali potersi rifugiarsi per diventare, grazie al linguaggio, un «misuratore di spazi» e uno «sperimentatore di passaggi».
Handke, del resto, ha sempre avuto bisogno di luoghi intermedi, di soglie dalle quali guardare la società austriaca ed europea, fra silenzio e linguaggio. Tutta la sua produzione va letta nel contesto largo della ricerca linguistica austriaca, che dalla Lettera di Lord Chandos di Hofmannsthal attraversa la scrittura della Vienna di fine Secolo e, tramite la filosofia di Wittgenstein, innerva la sperimentazione del Gruppo di Graz, del quale l’autore fu esponente di primo piano sin dal novembre 1960, quando le riunioni vennero avviate con l’intento di maturare una critica argomentata e decisa all’establishment culturale di Vienna, ancora assai conservatore. Di questa antica militanza nella causa della letteratura sembra essersi ricordato il comitato del Nobel, nell’assegnargli il premio.