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In Conversation: Peter Handke You with your
Yugoslavia
26/11/2010, 18:08 2010-11-26 18:08:10
Interview: Thomas Steinfeld
"The question of guilt divides the world": The writer Peter Handke speaks of the impossibility of returning home - and explains why in 1996 he visited war criminal Radovan Karadzic was.
late September "Still Storm" was released, Peter Handke's memories of his childhood in Carinthia, was discussed throughout the book friendly. Was superimposed on the reception of the message, however, the writer had visited the end of 1996 the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, who had been been looking for an arrest warrant (SZ, 30 October). to ask is reason enough for memory and message. The conversation took place last weekend in Peter Handke's house in Paris. Peter Handke in Salzburg
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"Still Tempest" called Peter Handke's memories of his childhood in Carinthia. The Austrian writer has recently hit the headlines, as has become public, was that he had met in December 1996 war criminals Radovan Karadzic. (© dpa)
SZ: Herr Handke, when you think of Yugoslavia, at your earliest experiences with this country, what do you think?
Peter Handke: Rather than that I thought of something to show me memories of my childhood, the Steiner Alps, as they pile up behind the border. I remember a high line to the south, strong and powerful, a solid that looked medieval, romantic, natural way. I've longed for these mountains, out of an Austrian confinement. Carinthia, and especially the south of Carinthia, is indeed marginal land, and the Germans will be displaying aggressive. There was, and is there still a Naziwut how rare anywhere, and the mountains were like a different country, and this idea was wrong and fruitful one.
SZ: You grew up there, in a Slovenian family, of which one, not only since "Still Tempest, your latest book, may have the impression that it was an island in an at least culturally differently constituted environment.
Handke: The impression is not wrong, this family was something of an island, even if the picture probably did not raise themselves. The difference is caused by language robbery by force, to speak German, a popular racism, by a very anxious that an otherness also increased. To the island but is also a man who tells of love, my mother, as she tells of her two brothers who died in the war on the German side, for nothing at all.
One of them, my uncle Greg was a convinced Yugoslav. For me he is a martyr, a witness. But at the same time it is not the case that only the family has since played a major role. There was also the religion, the Church and the Catholic Church in southern Carinthia, Slovenian. She has raised me, not politics, not the newspaper. In my hometown of the priest is still a Slovenian.
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SZ: But there were still too the years you spent as a child in Germany, there was the High German, which would not allow your grandfather, there was also a boarding school.
Handke: It has not become simpler. It took a long time until I got an idea of where my rhythm is and where my pictures are. The boarding school, for example, was guided by priests device, the boys from the country commenced, from poorer families, including many Slovenes. The Slovenian boys banded together and said to one another Slovenian, and I came from a Slovenian family, knew the language but not.
So I was still verinselter, and I then turned off by this world. This went on until about my stay in America (1978, editor's note), up to "Slow Homecoming" and the move back to Austria, to Salzburg. And then I was not so half-heartedly, as in the boarding school, but wanted to learn Slovenian and translated my first book from this language, the "pupil Tjaž" by Florijan Lipuš. By the way, it is a wonderful work, the novel "Bostjan flight," published in 2005 in German, an unsuccessful outside Slovenia book in the world literature.
SZ: They call it homecoming, but have you seen that really true, as a return to a place of origin?
Handke: Of course not. Homecoming, there is only the book but not otherwise. That's why I'm "Still Forward" also only be able to write as wide awake dream, not as Peter Weiss's "determination" wrote. The Steiner Alps, the mountains were neither Tito nor that of the king. I only saw the country as a free country, and of course not true, but it is there, and it is true. I returned home to a stranger.
But there are landscapes in which I was home for a while can feel, Alaska degenerate, for example, where the "Slow Homecoming" begins, and leave as it is sometimes. The Yukon is glorious. And in Chaville I sometimes feel at home, but less in my house than in one of the bars at the station when I hear the trains. That is a relative at home, and the right remains in the book.
SZ: Let's stick to still storm. In this play the letters of the brothers from the war a major role. They are read. And yes, these letters are addressed to a home.
Handke: Yes, letters from going home, letters ever go home often, e-mail does not go home. And as the letters went to Gregory's home, it wanted to use the hidden passages Slovenia, which escaped the censor, or he does not notice. I have had reason to dream, what would there can and what would have come.
SZ: In your book, you can Gregor, who died in 1943 in the Crimea, to return home and become a partisan, your aunt Ursula is on the partisans, and even the narrator seems to be enthusiastic about it.
Handke: The Carinthian partisans have only occurred late in the war, in late 1943 and early 1944, and they were all on his own, although they were later backed by the British and Tito's groups - although they were then the only organized resistance in the area of the German Empire. Most of them were ordinary people, wood workers, factory workers, many Slovenian descent, who had sung before the war in the church choir and most of them left, that socialists and communists.
After the Anschluss of 1938 these people were doubly isolated, politically and linguistically. The first deserters often spent months alone in the forest, they had to first learn how to fight, and it has tormented her. There exists a striking book by Karel Prusnik-Gasper, which has already appeared 1981st It's called "chamois on the avalanche," because this had to be partisan move, like mountain goats on the Avalanche. It's happened to them but no justice by the later generations of the Nazis who arrived in Austria and Carinthia in particular to power.
SZ: But for righteousness' sake, but they are not sympathetic to the guerrillas, and it will not be the vision of an independent Carinthia, which you most excited partisans, or an extended Slovenia. Why do it then?
Handke: No, I do not think of states. I'm always relieved when you can instead talk about a state of a country. What fascinates me about these partisans, and this may be a wonderful invention, which is that they join in anywhere that they are resistance, because they find it to be correct, and that they sacrifice themselves for it. These partisans, they fought because they have no choice but they could not stay in their burrows, and then she got up, have become energetic. And that brings me to the path that is a vanishing point for writing.
SZ: How about Tito's Yugoslavia? As far as submit your sympathies?
Handke: Once again, even for me once Yugoslavia is the country. Then the country has a history. For this story, for example, include the killing of thousands of civilians, including hundreds of students in the Serbian town of Kragujevac, by the Army in October 1941, in retaliation for a Partisan attack. This also executed that after the German surrender in Slovenia tens of thousands of soldiers, members of the Home Guard and civilians who had not stood with Tito.
I know, I always knew and always I have seen Yugoslavia as a country of pain, as a country of great suffering. Austria I am not as sure as there is no such pain. Then of course you can say, as many do today, that this whole business of Yugoslavia was doomed to failure, the Third Way, Tito's socialism by the working collective, with its many warring nations together with the large Differences in wealth and poverty. This one has not known a priori, and this was a great utopia, was a great utopia as Nehru's India. And I was busy, and it concerns me now, to an extent that the sister in "Still storm" the narrator says: "You with your Yugoslavia."
SZ: But had in the sixties and seventies Yugoslavia but, judging by your works, for you have not had this meaning.
Handke: No, that came later, with the novel "The repetition", ie the mid-Eighties. Since it started, because I am not moved much, politically, but through the country on the other hand, for two months, from Slovenia, Dalmatia. And under no circumstances would I open up "Central Europe", in this idea was so much revenge. Instead, I took a real trip, and then when Yugoslavia also perished, and you could see, really see, there was nevertheless retain a surprising number of young people who wanted to Yugoslavia. This is left to me.
A threat I have felt most in Podgorica, Montenegro. And I was with the young people, with their melancholy, almost desperate enthusiasm totally agree, because what is already a "Republic of Montenegro? If start all regions, only to act for himself, then turns everything is politics, then only a state, then no more land, then it's all hate, the whole landscape. And anyway, that many people live together with Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, which requires a great country, that does not work in a small coercive state.
SZ: Your sympathy for the Serbs, more precisely, your desire for "Justice for Serbia," but then seemed like a justification for war criminals and tyrants.
Handke: Oh, nonsense, you just have to read Ivo Andric, the "Bridge on the Drina," and you learn what you know about Yugoslavia, its peoples and its internal contradictions have, and also which could mean a great state for those regions. And you learn not only from the fact that there may be a home only in the book, but how wrong the question of guilt is often, especially when it comes to such complicated things as the coexistence of peoples.
SZ: What is wrong with the question of guilt?
DISPLAY
Handke: The question of the guilt shares the world, it leaves no room for questions on the reasons for the country for the people, it solves everything in a stimulus and a reaction and knows nothing in between, she knows nothing of wrong and right from wrong in law. This is so difficult, where you can only by the Fiction are allowed, it is not history or journalism. I have written in such beautiful things, the "Moravian Night", and then comes some political event, and the book is gone. Instead, Sun appears an absurd story up again like the other day of my visit with Radovan Karadzic in December 1996, and everything gets a false appearance.
SZ: Well you said you were with him in order to make himself an image to the talk of the media to counter their own inspection. And why is not your editor came along, because you wanted to show him that reality is sometimes different than what you think so? But if you go to Milosevic or Karadzic, then one encounters but politicians, so statesmen and warriors, and not country people.
Handke: Of course, the politicians, and they make war, but not even they are simple rules. Because when I met her, her power was already waning, or it was not there anymore. I am drawn to that which has something of Shakespeare, the sight of power at the moment of their release or their no-longer-having. Then you find yourself up there in Pale, in this high landscape, between the decaying bodies of the Olympic Games of 1984, and in a ramshackle hut, under a Serbian eagle, is Radovan Karadzic. He was the eminence grise of the Bosnian Serbs, but there was already the warrant of the International Court of Justice. I have taken
him following mediation by Valentin Inzko, then Austrian ambassador in Sarajevo, and today the European Union Special Representative for Bosnia. With him I have also lived during those days, he helped me with passes. And not only I met with Karadzic, but also the Serbian General Jovan Divjak, who fought on the side of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Which I thought when he heard that I had previously been in Pale, the angry fist to the nose.
SZ: So you were not only for Karadzic, but made a round trip, from one belligerent side others?
Handke: Yes. I was supposed to meet even the Grand Mufti of Sarajevo, but then had no time because he had to Brussels. The Grand Mufti sent me but a Koran. You know, if you are really interested in a country, then you want to know everything. Therefore intended that the inspection because it is hoped to meet with a heart. And there is something else: the desire for a higher degree of veracity, of the blame also, and that includes the politicians. With all the "experts" who talk about the disintegration of Yugoslavia, I can not find this truth - even the word "Balkan expert" I smell the tendency and ideology. The word is one of my swear words litany.
SZ: And?
Handke: Well, it was then not so. For if a politician agrees to meet a writer, then he does not so much to talk with him, but because he wants to organize his image for posterity. That was when Bruno Kreisky, another politician I've met, he had no power, no different than with Radovan Karadzic - or Slobodan Milosevic, when I visited him in prison in The Hague. I wanted to talk to Milosevic about his family, but that did not interest him, he wanted to explain just who he really is. So they are, they want a chronicle and I should be the chronicler. I was not perceived as the person I am, I do not I could be. But I must say one thing about this: The perception of these people is sometimes very strange.
There was, for example, once a Bosnia Serb philosopher, an expert on German idealism, which was then a sharp patriots and politicians in the war. And what he asks me when we meet - if I could not help him to get the Vienna Herder Award, which is indeed awarded for the ceremony of the European cultural heritage. And I think to myself: I want nothing at all to explain this history of Yugoslavia is an infinite chain, and no one can quite to tell. Unless he plays down. http://handke-magazin.
