Peter Handke


Peter Handke is a Nobel laureate novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter from Austria. Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019.
In the late 1960s, he was recognized for the play Publikumsbeschimpfung and the novel Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. Prompted by his mother's suicide in 1971, he reflected her life in the novel Wunschloses Unglück. Handke was a member of the Grazer Gruppe and the Grazer Autorenversammlung, and co-founded the Verlag der Autoren publishing house in Frankfurt. He collaborated with director Wim Wenders, leading to screenplays such as Der Himmel über Berlin.
Handke has received other awards, including the 1973 Georg Büchner Prize, the 1987 Vilenica International Literary Prize, and the 2018 Austrian Nestroy Theatre Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Life

Early life and family

Handke was born in Griffen, then in the German Reich's province Gau Carinthia. His father, Erich Schönemann, was a bank clerk and German soldier whom Handke did not meet until adulthood. His mother Maria, a Carinthian Slovene, married Bruno Handke, a tram conductor and Wehrmacht soldier from Berlin, before Peter was born. The family lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin from 1944 to 1948, where Maria Handke had two more children: Peter's half-sister and half-brother. Then the family moved to his mother's home town of Griffen. Peter experienced his stepfather as more and more violent due to alcoholism.
In 1954, Handke was sent to the Catholic Marianum boys' boarding school at Tanzenberg Castle in Sankt Veit an der Glan. There, he published his first writing in the school newspaper, Fackel. In 1959, he moved to Klagenfurt, where he went to high school, and commenced law studies at the University of Graz in 1961.
Handke's mother took her own life in 1971, reflected in his novel Wunschloses Unglück.
After leaving Graz, Handke lived in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Kronberg, Paris, the U.S. and Salzburg. Since 1990, he has resided in Chaville near Paris. He is the subject of the documentary film , directed by. Since 2012, Handke has been a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is a member of the Serbian Orthodox church.
As of early November 2019, there was an official investigation by the relevant authorities on whether Handke may have automatically lost his Austrian citizenship upon obtaining a Yugoslav passport and nationality in the late 1990s.

Career

While studying, Handke established himself as a writer, linking up with the Grazer Gruppe, an association of young writers. The group published a magazine on literature, , which published Handke's early works. Group members included Wolfgang Bauer and Barbara Frischmuth.
Handke abandoned his studies in 1965, after the German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag accepted his novel for publication. He gained international attention after an appearance at a meeting of avant-garde artists belonging to the Gruppe 47 in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1966. The same year, his play Publikumsbeschimpfung premiered at the in Frankfurt, directed by. Handke became one of the co-founders of the publishing house in 1969 with a new commercial concept, as it belonged to the authors. He co-founded the Grazer Autorenversammlung in 1973 and was a member until 1977.
Handke's first play, Publikumsbeschimpfung, which premiered in Frankfurt in 1966 and made him well known, was the first of several experimental plays without a conventional plot. In his second play, Kaspar, he treated the story of Kaspar Hauser as "an allegory of conformist social pressures".
Handke has written scripts for films. He directed Die linkshändige Frau, which was released in 1978. Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide's description of the film is that a woman demands that her husband leave and he complies. "Time passes... and the audience falls asleep." The film was nominated for the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978 and won the Gold Award for German Arthouse Cinema in 1980. Handke also won the 1975 German Film Award in Gold for his screenplay for Falsche Bewegung. He collaborated with director Wim Wenders in writing the screenplay for the 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin, including the poem at its opening. Since 1975, Handke has been a jury member of the European literary award Petrarca-Preis.
Handke collaborated with director Wim Wenders on a film version of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, wrote the script for Falsche Bewegung and co-wrote the screenplay for Der Himmel über Berlin and Les Beaux Jours d'Aranjuez. He also directed films, including adaptations from his novels The Left-Handed Woman after Die linkshändige Frau, and The Absence after Die Abwesenheit.

Views

In 1996, Handke's travelogue Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien created controversy, as Handke portrayed Serbia as being among the victims of the Yugoslav Wars. In the same essay, Handke also criticised Western media for misrepresenting the causes and consequences of the war.
In 2013, Tomislav Nikolić, as the then President of Serbia, expressed gratitude saying that some people still remember those who suffered for Christianity, implying that Handke was a victim of scorn for his views, to which Handke replied with explanation, "I was not anyone's victim, the Serbian people is victim." This was said during the ceremony at which Handke received the Gold Medal of Merit of the Republic of Serbia.
In 2014, Handke called for the Nobel Prize in Literature to be abolished and dubbed it a "circus". In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."
In February 2020, Sima Avramović, the president of the commission for decorations of the Republic of Serbia, explained that Handke, for "special merits in representing Serbia and its citizens" as he "wholeheartedly defended the Serbian truth", is being decorated with the Order of the Star of Karadjordje. The current President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, presented recipients on the occasion of the Serbian Statehood Day.

Reception and criticism

After his play Voyage by Dugout was staged in 1999, Handke was condemned by other writers: Susan Sontag proclaimed Handke to be "finished" in New York, Salman Rushdie declared him as a candidate for "Moron of the Year" due to his "idiocies", while Alain Finkielkraut said that he was an "ideological monster", and Slavoj Žižek stated that his "glorification of the Serbs is cynicism".
When Handke was awarded the International Ibsen Award in 2014, it caused some calls for the jury to resign. Jon Fosse, former recipient of the Ibsen Award, welcomed the decision of the Swedish Academy to award Handke the Nobel Prize in literature, saying that he was a worthy recipient and deserved it.

Response to Nobel Prize award

For the writer's view on the breakup of Yugoslavia and Yugoslav wars, which have been described as pro-Serbian, such as support for the late Slobodan Milošević and Bosnian genocide denial, the decision of the Nobel Committee to award Handke a Nobel Prize in literature was denounced internationally by a variety of public and academic intellectuals, writers and journalists. The high-profile figures who decried the decision of the Swedish Academy, include individuals such as: Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust historian, who in her letter published in the New York Times wrote that the Nobel committee has awarded Handke a platform which "he does not deserve and the public does not need him to have", adding that such platform could convince some that his "false claims must have some legitimacy", Jonathan Littell who said, "he might be a fantastic artist, but as a human being he is my enemy - he’s an asshole.", Miha Mazzini who said that "some artists sold their human souls for ideologies, some for hate, some for money and power but the one that offended me the most was Handke with his naivety for the Milošević regime I found him cruel and totally self-absorbed in his naivety", Hari Kunzru who said that Handke is "a troubling choice for a Nobel committee" and that he is "a fine writer, who combines great insight with shocking ethical blindness", Salman Rushdie, who also criticized Handke's support for wartime Serbia in 1999, Slavoj Žižek,  Aleksandar Hemon, Bora Ćosić, Martin Walser, and others. It was met with negative criticism in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Croatia, and Turkey, resulting in public statements of disapproval. Expressing "deep regret", the decision was condemned by PEN International, PEN America, PEN England and Wales, PEN Norway, PEN Bosnia and Herzegovina, PEN Croatia. A group of demonstrators protested against the writer when he arrived to receive the prize.
Both the Swedish academy and Nobel Committee for Literature members defended their decision to award Handke the Nobel prize. Academy members Mats Malm and Eric M. Runesson wrote in the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter that Handke had "definitely made provocative, inappropriate and unclear statements on political issues" but that they had "found nothing in what he has written that involves attacks on civil society or respect for the equal value of all people". Nobel for literature member Henrik Petersen described Handke as "radically unpolitical" in his writings and that this support for Serbs had been misunderstood, while Rebecka Kärde said: "When we give the award to Handke, we argue that the task of literature is other than to confirm and reproduce what society’s central view believes is morally right" adding that the author "absolutely deserves a Nobel Prize".
In contrast, all of Handke’s Balkan war-related works were included in the Nobel prize bibliography selection, which is described by Gordy and Maass, among others, as "tacit endorsement of genocide denial, revisionism and ultranationalism", and the committee response as "gaslighting not just the survivors of the genocide, but also the historians, war crimes investigators, and journalists".

Awards

Handke has written novels, plays, screenplays, essays and poems, often published by Suhrkamp. Many works were translated to English. His works are held by the German National Library, including: