The Swedish Academy and Peter Handke: Justice for whom?

Peter Handke’s controversial writing on Serbia mixes idyllic descriptions of the landscape with an attack on newspapers, individual journalists and the international community in general. Photo: Wild+Team Agentur - UNI Salzburg (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

This controversy surrounding Handke is not new and the debate already took place in the 1990s. He is a very prolific writer, but for many, his writings on the Balkans overshadowed everything else he has produced. His Nobel Prize came as a surprise, if not a shock.  

Members of the Swedish Academy defended their choice. One argued that Handke is “radically unpolitical” in his writing, while others suggested that critics “ignored Handke’s statements”. It is therefore worthwhile to analyse Handke’s essay, which is his most notable statement at the heart of this controversy and the debate that followed its publication. Was it radically unpolitical?

The journey

In November 1995 Peter Handke embarks on a journey to Serbia. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Croatia is now over and the peace talks are taking place in Dayton, Ohio in the United States. Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, Croatian President Franjo Tuđman and Bosnian-Herzegovinian President Alija Izetbegović sign the Dayton Accords in Paris on December 15th.

In January 1996, Handke publishes his first essay in Süddeutsche Zeitung, titled “A journey to the rivers: Justice for Serbia”. His intention was to look for justice and peace, but instead he causes a scandal. While Milošević is widely known as the butcher of the Balkans, Handke comes up with the title “Justice for Serbia”? It had to cause a stir.

It is interesting to explore why Handke travelled to Serbia. In 1995, it was an outcast and under an embargo. Most journalists travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina, for the theatre of war. Handke, however, has a different approach. “What does a stranger know?” he asks. Serbia should be investigated; journalists who have not been there are partisan and not credible. So Handke travels to Serbia in search of truth and justice: “It was mainly because of the wars that I wanted to go to Serbia,” he writes, “to the country of the so-called ‘aggressor’ … I felt the urge to go to this land, which with every article, every comment, every analysis was less known.”

Handke writes again and again just how good he feels in Serbia, how he feels at home there. He adores the landscape, the vineyards, the faraway horizons, the snow and the traffic-free Danube. There are no ships because of the embargo, but for Handke it is a positive thing. He hints that the inaccessibility of the western world might be good for the country.

While Handke is enthusiastic about the landscape, he mentions the “so noticeably distant sea”. It is an interesting allusion to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Before the war, the sea was a common asset of all the republics, but now, with independent Croatia, its distance is keenly felt. Handke’s tone is nostalgic and reminiscent of his earlier 1991 essay, “The dreamer’s farewell to the ninth country”, where he writes that he sees no reason for neither the state of Slovenia nor the state of Croatia. He recalls the informal and even enthusiastic “coming together” of the Yugoslav peoples in 1918 and regrets the collapse which he sees as an externally controlled “breach of contract”.

Slovenia, for Handke, is particularly important because that is where his mother came from. He claims that Slovenians never dreamed of having their own state and in 1991 they left Yugoslavia “out of sheer selfishness” and betrayed their Yugoslav brothers. Although Handke does not mention Serbia at this point, it is hard to resist the impression that he is taking Serbia’s side.

For some, taking Serbia’s side led to Handke downplaying or even questioning the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. He mentions a woman from Bajina Bašta who “was convinced that it was true that in Srebrenica, in the summer of 1995, thousands had been killed”. Handke was soon to be heavily criticised for this passage, for some felt that he insinuated that there was no massacre. A French translator asked him to distance himself from his words on Srebrenica, but Handke refused.

Alone against the world

Handke’s writing on Serbia mixes idyllic descriptions of the landscape with an attack on newspapers, individual journalists and the international community in general. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) is for him the “European central Serb-eating paper”. Le Monde, once Handke’s favourite, is now “demagogic”. El Pais is the “world champion of amplification”. They have one thing in common: the “self-confident hatred of everything Serbian”. According to Handke, journalists are not seeking the truth and only manipulate the images of war. He notes that the Serbs are never described as victims: photos always show other nations “supposedly really suffering” (wohl wirklich leidend). Handke decries that there are no compassionate close-ups of Serbs; they never look into the camera, but they are shown looking down, “as guilt-conscious” (wie Schuldbewußte). For Handke this is a manipulation, showing the war in black and white. He believes that the international community was too quick to set the roles of the aggressor and the victims. He aims to fight against it and at the end of the essay he writes: “Mind you: this is not an ‘I accuse’. I just want justice. Or maybe just consideration”.

Justice is undoubtedly a worthwhile goal, and it is important to point out that the world is never black and white. But the problem is that Handke, indeed, does accuse a lot of people, even the whole world, and looks for justice as he reverses the roles, going so far as to offend the victims. When he writes: “supposed really suffering”, he puts in question not just the work of journalists, but also suggests that there was no real suffering at all.

Handke goes a step further to relativise the guilt: “So who was the aggressor? Was the one who provoked the war the same as the one who started it? And what does it mean to ‘start’? Could such a provocation also be a start?” He does not clearly state it, but implies that Croatia was the real aggressor. He is immediately criticised for such insinuations.

Journalists fight back

The world of media does not hide its outrage. Marcel Ophuls, writing in the German daily Die Tageszeitung, calls Handke’s report scandalous. Ophuls defends the work of journalists, 40 of whom lost their lives in the Balkans. He argues that Handke, on the other hand, travelled to Serbia without any risk and has the nerve to despise those journalists. Similarly, Gustav Seibt, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, calls Handke’s reporting “scandalous”, “absurd” and “outrageous”. Peter Schneider, in Der Spiegel, does not mince his words either. He notes that any alleged bias of the press was not there from the beginning, it has its reasons. He also tackles Handke’s question about the aggressor: “If I’m not mistaken, the aggressor is the one who first takes up arms to solve a fictitious or actual conflict.” Schneider also notes that nearly all aggressors had responded to an alleged provocation, not least Adolf Hitler. It is interesting that Schneider compared Serbia with Nazi Germany, while Handke tries to present them as opposites.

For Schneider, Handke’s insinuations that the victims posed for photos were simply wicked. Handke may hate the media, but at least he should respect the victims. Schneider understands that Handke’s goal was to change the image of war, but argues that it cannot be done by intuition alone; evidence and facts are also required. Instead, Handke overloads us with opinions, insinuations and outbursts of rage. That is why, he argues, Handke’s project must fail. Finally, Schneider also wrote about the “historical stupidity of Handke’s intervention”. He contends that if Handke really wanted to defend the Serbs, he should not generalise but make a clear distinction between ordinary Serbs and their leaders.

Handke did not expect such a strong reaction. He wanted to write a peace text and an invitation for journalists to reconsider their methods. In response, he retaliated by claiming that the reporters were either partisan exiled Yugoslavs or young and inexperienced, but in any case, unreliable. Responses from the media only convinced him even more that he was right. It was not cowardice, not a mistake, but a jackpot. He was content with the scandal and said he “would like to be much more scandalous”.

Accordingly, he went on a second trip to Serbia, as well as Bosnia; he also wrote the book A Summer Addendum to a Winter’s Journey (published in 1996). For him, such an addition was necessary. The German media disagreed – even if he travelled to Bosnia this time around. On the whole, his views changed very little. For Hannes Hintermeier, writing in FAZ, the new essay was “just embarrassing”. With these essays, Handke’s provocations were not over. The next big controversy came when he attended Milošević’s funeral in March 2006. The press was once again outraged, and reports claimed that Handke placed a red rose on the grave of Milošević.

Handke denied these rumours, but his participation in the funeral was flagrant enough. He was named the “bard of the dictator”. Soon after, in May 2006, Handke was awarded the Heinrich Heine Prize. Politicians protested, arguing that his name would discredit Heine. In the light of the bitter debate, Handke turned down the prize.

Thirteen years later, Peter Handke did not turn down the Nobel Prize. A renewed debate shook the Western Balkans, Sweden and the literary world. The integrity of the Swedish Academy was put into question. Given what Handke had written, it is impossible to make a distinction between his political position and his writings – in the case of the essays analysed above, they merged into one.

Handke himself claims he has no opinion, which is somewhat baffling. He has opinions and has every right to hold them. But the world has the right to disagree. In the era of relativism, half-truths and alternative facts, it is a shame that the Swedish Academy decided to reward such a controversial author.

The quotes in English were translated by the author of this essay from their German originals and may differ from other published translations.

Joanna Hosa is the programme manager of the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Balkans, literature, Nobel prize, Peter Handke, Serbia