Wings of Denial
illustration by Cins
When the child was a child,
It was the time of these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
[...]
Does evil actually exist,
and are there people who are really evil?
From Song of Childhood by Peter Handke as recited by the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) in Wings of Desire
That photo says it all. Peter Handke on genocide safari in Srebrenica, mere months after the unspeakable crime. The great white European poet is front and centre, blocking the view of the Cyrillic town sign he presumably can’t read. In the background, we see some people, a car, an industrial plant, houses and hills (and the watermark of the Austrian National Library).
He’s wearing all black, as if to say: here I am, the angel of death. The evil twin of Bruno Ganz’s character in Wings of Desire, who longs to immerse himself with the mortals. But unlike the angels in the film he co-wrote, Handke does not care about the people on the ground. As Dževad Karahasan observes, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia can’t be categorized as a travelogue because its author is utterly uninterested in the local culture, customs and history. Let alone the displaced and the murdered. The sole purpose of the little information he provides is to show that Peter Handke was there. Selfie culture avant la lettre. Karahasan calls this writing “just navel-gazing chatter where there is nothing but the speaking subject.” And Svetlana Slapšak concludes: “To see in the Serbian people only Milošević’s world and to notice nothing else disqualifies Handke as a writer and an intellectual. […] Handke has seriously insulted Serbia.”
In 1994, Radovan Karadžić invited his guest, ‘National Bolshevik’ Russian poet Eduard Limonov, to his headquarters in Pale. During a tour of the frontlines in Sarajevo, Limonov fired an anti-aircraft machine gun at the besieged city. In his book Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinović argues that Limonov came to Pale for “literary consistency.” One could say Handke came to Milošević's funeral for the same reason. His eulogy went like this:
“The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Slobodan Milošević. The so-called world knows the truth … I don’t know the truth. But I look. I listen. I feel. This is why I am here today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Milošević.”
Anyone subject to the colonial gaze will recognize this vain solipsism.
As per Toni Morrison, the very serious function of racism is a distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. Peter Handke gets to spend his time on artful self-expression and formal experimentation. As suggested by the Nobel committee, he gets to explore “the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” He makes use of his powerful European passport to travel the killing fields in the periphery (places the displaced and exiled can’t return to) and produce literary selfies. European intellectuals and institutions then declare his colonialist corpus as representative of European civilization. Thus, hierarchies are being maintained. We, meanwhile, are being forced to invest an enormous amount of time to protect ourselves from this violence, including those of us who were lucky enough to somehow obtain a Western passport. Handke, by contrast, easily received a Yugoslav passport from the Milošević regime in 1999 while hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians were being stripped of theirs. As Morrison says, “racism keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
To Peter Handke and his disciples, treating people from the Balkans as subhumans, denying genocide, deriding victims of war, trivializing our pain and falsifying our history, means little. For them, this is just another intellectual parlour game, “just navel-gazing chatter.” For us, however, the “flatulence of the colonizer” is an attack on our war-torn subjectivities, salt rubbed into our wounds. Retraumatization, anxiety, insomnia, depression. Weeks of (unpaid) emotional and intellectual labour. Every time a colonizer flatulates again, we have to revisit what was written about it in 2014, 2010, 2006, 2003, 1999, 1996. Once again we find ourselves dredging up ICTY records and defending well-documented facts against ‘alternative facts’. And yet, Bosnian genocide denial is getting worse. The truth seems to matter little in the face of intense Islamophobia and conspiracism.
“Every time a colonizer flatulates again, we have to revisit what was written about it in 2014, 2010, 2006, 2003, 1999, 1996. Once again we find ourselves dredging up ICTY records and defending well-documented facts against ‘alternative facts’. And yet, Bosnian genocide denial is getting worse.”
Someone like Handke may feel entitled to chatter carelessly about marginalized people’s destinies and bystanders may or may not choose to address this. But we don’t have the privilege to ignore the harm caused. After all, you need to defend your very being. Aida Šehović, founder of the nomadic monument Što Te Nema, describes the effects of this “threat of complete annihilation” in an open letter to the Nobel committee: “It has taken me days to realize that all of this, everything that I am experiencing is the trauma I carry in my body, manifesting.” Genocide encompasses more than the acts of killing, denial is one aspect of it and language is crucial. As Predrag Dojčinović points out, even “a single speech act can be evidence of genocidal intent."
It should be emphasized that this is not just about Handke’s private opinions. He has been promoting denialist, apologist and nationalist narratives about the Yugoslav Wars in his literary works for more than two decades. So much for “separating the art from the artist”. The man himself, by the way, does not agree with this idea: “What I write and what I say cannot be separated.” Anyway, to be able to create a safe space for highbrow racism, to declare art a sphere independent from such mundane matters as crimes against humanity, is a symptom of privilege. As Dženita Karić explains:
“As Bosnians, Syrians, Albanians, we don't have the privilege to think of the names of Chomsky, Handke and their ilk without knowing that what they thought and wrote robbed us of humanity. We do not have the privilege to simply disagree with them academically or on artistic grounds. We do not have the privilege to ignore, not again.”
Some commentators, particularly in Germany and Austria, seem to have forgotten every lesson of post-war Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A major European institution awarding historical denialism the highest cultural honour (the official Nobel Prize bibliography lists all of Handke’s Balkan-related works) and engaging in the very same behaviour, is a real political liability for the countries in the region. Yet another demonstration of how little Europe cares about the Balkans. Alida Bremer observes that Handke’s defenders mostly seem to rely on his claims for their knowledge of the Balkans. To some degree, this may be because the memory of what happened in the Yugoslav Wars is fading from European consciousness. The moral and intellectual decline of the German-language discourse on Handke's 'Justice for Milošević' activism from 1996 to 2019 is evident.
Be that as it may, despite his artful obfuscations, there is nothing inconsistent or ambiguous about his positions. For instance, he openly supported Tomislav Nikolić in the 2008 presidential election in Serbia. So receptive was the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party to Handke offering himself as their poet laureate, that its newspaper Velika Srbija (Greater Serbia) at that time campaigned with photos of the Nikolić-Handke meeting (on page 14). Handke’s friend, the Serb nationalist cult director Emir Kusturica, clearly understands the political message of this award. For him, the Nobel victory confirms the idea that the independence of Kosovo should never be recognized. Kusturica calls him an “apostle of truth.” A nationalist association launched an initiative to erect a bust of Peter Handke in Srebrenica. They want to honour his "immeasurable merits in the struggle for justice and truth", namely that he "disputed the Hague verdicts and denied genocide has occurred in Srebrenica." Nationalists and revisionists feel emboldened and see the tide of history turning in their favour. The Nobel committee has fueled their ambitions.
Handke fanboys in the Austro-German intelligentsia remain blind to these political realities and then have the gall to slander diasporans as “clowns” and accuse them of “privatism” and “censorship”. This aggressive apologism is based on the myopic and racist idea that propagandizing for fascism and genocide is a-okay if it happens to a small country elsewhere. Because at home he’s still one of us. You see, they are the sole movers of History, while those Balkan people with their ancient hatreds don’t even get to work through the past. However, I’m not here to help them out of this inhuman lack of self-reflection, this particular idiocy. My concern is our sanity and dignity, my concern is self-defence.
As Aleksandar Hemon reminds us, "any survivor of genocide will tell you that disbelieving or dismissing their experience is a continuation of genocide. A genocide denier is an apologist for the next genocide.” Genocide denial goes beyond the claim that literally nothing happened. More often than not it comes in the form of something happened but. Its shifting strategies draw on a diverse arsenal of erasing, omitting, obscuring, distorting, minimizing, relativizing, decontextualizing, whatabouting, gaslighting, sealioning, bullshitting, dog-whistling, concern-trolling, victim-blaming and many other techniques. It does not seek to establish facts but to destabilize them. It purports to seek the truth but aims to create the opposite: an ambience of uncertainty. The violence of genocide denial keeps the victims from mourning, healing and moving on. It is the continuation of Ratko Mladić’s motto for the siege of Sarajevo - “Let’s blow their minds, so they cannot sleep” - by other means.
Handke certainly is a masterful practitioner of this art. He poeticizes nearly every denialist technique under the sun, to distract from the well-established truths about what happened in the Yugoslav Wars. And deliberately so. What Sartre said about antisemites also holds for genocide deniers, and perhaps conspiracism in general:
“Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”
In A Journey to the Rivers, Handke suggests "the detour of recording certain trivialities" is more important for peace and reconciliation than "the evil facts." In other words, Peter Handke's poetry is more important than justice for the murdered and closure for the bereaved. “Get over it” is what the perpetrators say. It is not for nothing that denial is regarded as intrinsic to the genocidal process. First, you kill them, then you erase their memory and 'blow the minds' of the survivors.
“While the preparations for the first ICTY exhumation of the Srebrenica victims were underway, Handke was palling around and drinking with Karadžić loyalists (including war crime suspects) in the vicinity of the mass graves. ”
In post-war Germany, Theodor Adorno, more than anyone else, understood just how devastating the destruction of memory is: "The murdered are to be cheated out of the single remaining thing that our powerlessness can offer them: remembrance." He also famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Well, for Handke, even writing poetry against the memory of the Bosnian genocide is not barbaric enough. He actively participates in its erasure on site. For instance, in 1998, he stayed at the Vilina Vlas hotel in Višegrad, which during the war was the site of genocidal rape. This was already a widely reported fact when Handke previously visited the town in 1996. And yet, in his account of the journey, he casts doubt on the crimes that had occurred in Višegrad. Of the 200 girls and women detained and sexually abused at Vilina Vlas, only a handful survived. The remains of most of the victims were uncovered only in 2010. Their memory continues to be erased in Višegrad today, while monuments for the perpetrators are being built there. Handke’s travel to Srebrenica and Višegrad, where he was courted by the nationalist post-genocide authorities, goes beyond denial: it is genocide triumphalism. While the preparations for the first ICTY exhumation of the Srebrenica victims were underway, Handke was palling around and drinking with Karadžić loyalists (including war crime suspects) in the vicinity of the mass graves. Wallah, It would take a PhD thesis to thoroughly analyze all of his 'detours.'
They live in a Europe that once again dreams of banishing Muslims.
Johannes Anyuru on the Swedish Academy
He dreamed his future into being.
Omer Hadžiselimović on the poet-warrior Radovan Karadžić
The point about an apologist for the genocide of Muslims in Europe winning the Nobel Prize is not that it's shocking, contradictory or un-European. The point is that it's all too European. The way Handke gives wings to Greater Serbia motifs is little more than a highbrow version of how the Fascist International imagines the Balkans. Srebrenica survivor Emir Suljagić gets to the heart of it: “To award him the Nobel Prize in literature is to retroactively award Radovan Karadžić for being the first to imagine Europe without Muslims." The anti-Albanian racism that permeates some of Handke’s late works would have frequently translated into prosaic fear-mongering about ‘gang mentality’ and ‘Muslim hordes’ if coming from the pen of a lesser stylist. Whereas his jeering at Bosnian poets with a gibberish 'Muslim-sounding' name (“some Ali Muhmets“) and callous contempt for the Mothers of Srebrenica - both in his art (Die Tablas von Daimiel) and as an artist (“I don’t believe a word they say, I don’t buy into their grief.”) - is the kind of open racism Muslims in Europe are subject to all the time. Moreover, Handke’s resentment of Muslim women continues in his fiction. At one point in his most recent novel Die Obstdiebin (The Fruit Thief), the narrator encounters veiled women on a train. He stares at them for pages but fails to see them as fully human. They irritate him, the situation leaves him angered. His male gaze is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s study of the psychology of French colonialism in Algeria: “This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer.”
“The point about an apologist for the genocide of Muslims in Europe winning the Nobel Prize is not that it’s shocking, contradictory or un-European. The point is that it’s all too European.”
Speaking of France, it’s worth noting that Handke has a connection to the Nouvelle Droite. In 1996, he gave an interview to his safari companion Thomas Deichmann of ITN vs Living Marxism fame, where he calls the media a “Fourth Reich.” The English translation was published in, you guessed it, Living Marxism - arguably the most notorious platform for Bosnian genocide denial. After losing the libel case against ITN, Living Marxism rebranded as Spiked and has steadily become more right-wing over the years. The French translation of the interview was published in Éléments, a magazine edited by Alain de Benoist - one of the most influential fascist intellectuals of our time. Then in 1999, Handke signed an ‘anti-war’ petition started by de Benoist.
This reframing of his pro-Milošević stance as opposition to war is indicative of how the theorizing of this ideological godfather of the New Right often operates. De Benoist’s syncretic approach seeks to blur the line between the seemingly emancipatory and the outright fascist (just like Limonov’s). He proposes, for instance, 'right-wing readings' of Marx and Marxian theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Moishe Postone. De Benoist likes to hide his fascism behind ‘concern’ for the Third World, opposition to US Empire and euphemisms such as ethnopluralism. Unwittingly or not, Handke's politics essentially follow the same pattern. His apologists cite pacifism, media critique, opposition to imperialism, "justice for Serbia" and whatnot as his impetus. And yet, this only ever translates into ethnic essentialism, nationalism ("one relating to a nation that is elsewhere"), Islamophobia and denial of, and thus support for, genocide.
In the martial mythology of contemporary fascists, revanchist nostalgia for struggles against the Ottoman Empire, slandering Muslims as “jihadists”, the portrayal of refugee movements as an “invasion” and slogans like “Stop the Great Replacement!” are all commonplace. No doubt then that Handke’s casual genocide denial in Die Tablas von Daimiel (The Tablas de Daimiel), where he calls the victims of Srebrenica “Muslim soldiers”, would excite many an alt-right crusader. In a remarkably blunt 2011 interview with the obscure red-brown magazine Ketzerbriefe, which was conducted by notorious genocide deniers, Handke speculates that only 2,000 to 4,000 people were murdered at Srebrenica. A monstrous example of the cheapest trick in the denialist book: baseless, contrarian chatter. In this interview, he also says he gave the 40,000 Deutsche Mark he made with book readings of A Journey to the Rivers to the post-genocide mayor of Srebrenica - Karadžić's man. Handke even materially supports the erasure of the Bosnian genocide.
Of somewhat greater, more ‘Nobel-worthy’ artistry is the passage in Die Kuckucke von Velika Hoča (The Cuckoos of Velika Hoča) where he indirectly references the SANU Memorandum of 1986, a milestone of Serb nationalism. He propagates its myth that Kosovo Albanians are secretly plotting to commit genocide against Serbs. Hence, violence against them is preemptive and justified self-defence. According to the memorandum, the high birth rate of the (predominantly Muslim) Kosovo Albanians is a central component of their “indirect genocide” (Anders Breivik). This demographic jihad trope was used by Ratko Mladić to justify his crimes in Bosnia. He spoke of the Islamic world’s “demographic bomb.”
Handke’s most ingenious reinvention of Greater Serbia motifs can arguably be found in Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise (A Summer Addendum to a Winter's Journey). There, he compares Karadžić's besiegers of Sarajevo to Native Americans. In his view, both are freedom fighters up on the hill, fighting foreign invaders down in the valley. Both are being demonized as the aggressors in Western media and Western movies, respectively. In other words, Handke equates the real colonization of North America with the ‘anti-imperialist’ conspiracy theory that the Yugoslav Wars were all about a US-led plot against former NYC banker, Kissinger buddy and neoliberal reformist Slobodan Milošević and his proxies. Another celebrity genocide denier and proponent of this ‘theory’ spells out the logic: "Serbia is one of those disorderly miscreants that impedes the institution of the US-dominated global system.” The culture of Bosnian genocide denial in the West (the hardcore variety, at least) is typically constituted by the syncretism of far-right and far-left ideologies in service of Islamophobia and genocide. However, these ideas don’t only end up on neo-Nazi platforms like Stormfront. The same conspiracy theory that convinced some Nobel jurors to award Handke despite his support for Greater Serbia is, for instance, propagated by the ‘leading voice of the American left’, Jacobin Magazine.
“Handke was a groomsman for Novislav Đajić’s wedding - the accordion player from the far-right Remove Kebab meme, aka Dat Face Soldier.”
Essentially the same idea as Handke’s spin on ‘Cowboys and Indians’ appears in the manifesto of the Christchurch killer. The self-styled “kebab removalist” and Karadžić fan Brenton Tarrant calls Kosovo Albanians "Islamic occupiers" and bemoans the West’s failure to resolutely support the Serb nationalist ‘freedom fighters’. This is brought full circle by the fact that Handke was a groomsman for Novislav Đajić’s wedding - the accordion player from the far-right Remove Kebab meme, aka Dat Face Soldier. A war criminal who was sentenced in 1997. Đajić is one of the protagonists in Handke’s 1999 play Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg (Voyage by Dugout or The Play of the Film of the War), where the Yugoslav Wars are portrayed as a globalist conspiracy against Serbia and Dat Face Soldier is found not guilty. Øyvind Berg analysed the play in 2014 on the occasion of Handke winning the Ibsen Award:
"The point of view in the play is easily recognizable as that of the Chetniks (Serb fascists) and the author himself shows up under the nickname “The Greek.” It’s known that Maldić’s forces took Srebrenica with the help of Greek Volunteers and before the massacre, two flags were raised over the town, a Serb one and a Greek one."
In Rund um das Große Tribunal (Around the Grand Tribunal) from 2003, Handke goes on for pages about his “friend” Đajić’s innocence and even quotes at length from an unpublished text written by Dat Face Soldier to promote the war criminal's point of view on the crime he had committed. But separate the art from the artist, right?
Handke’s disturbing appropriation of Native American struggles serves to embellish an old Greater Serbia idea. In Serb ethno-nationalist mythology, Slavic Muslims are seen as race traitors. They represent the separation of Slavdom from Western civilization and embody the Ottoman domination over the Serbs. The existence of these Christ-killers (and, by extension, also Albanian Muslims), as well as their collaborators among the Serbs (i.e. non-nationalist Serbs), is what stands in the way of the resurrection of a purified ethnos. In this view, Serbs are indigenous, while Bosnians - and in particular Bosniaks - are rootless agents of outside forces and contaminated with the Orient, i.e. not an authentic Volk. In the 1990s, Bosnians were once again rumoured to be inviting in foreign powers, above all the USA, which reinforced the notion that they are, indeed, traitors deserving of elimination. Thus, Handke conceptualizes the crimes of Višegrad, Sarajevo and Srebrenica in essence as a twofold liberation struggle: against the Islamic yoke of olden times and the globalist yoke of today. Sure, every now and then he would vaguely admit that something ‘ugly’ had happened, but he’s not able to actually condemn these horrors. He can’t conceive of Đajić, Mladić, Karadžić and Milošević as really guilty. For him, they are tragic figures caught up in forces beyond their control: history, modernity, imperialism, globalization, Islamization and so on. As Karahasan notes, Handke collectivizes moral concepts like culpability and justice. It is he who transfers the responsibility for crimes committed by concrete individuals - Đajić, Mladić, Karadžić, Milošević etc. - to 'the Serbs' as such, and then grandstands as 'their' defender. “Such Serbs exist only in Handke’s and Milošević’s head,” concludes Karahasan.
The cult of ethnic purity in Serb nationalist ideology very much appeals to fascists in the West, whose own blood and soil revival draws heavily on de Benoist's theoretical work. What they see in the Greater Serbia project of the 1990s is the realization of their own cause: a fundamental reordering of space along archaic ethnic dividing lines, against Islam, multiculturality and globalism. Götz Kubitschek, one of the key thinkers of contemporary fascism in Germany, considers Handke’s ‘Justice for Serbia’ pamphlets part of the right-wing literary canon. Kubitschek himself witnessed post-war Bosnia as a volunteer for the peacekeeping force SFOR. This experience helped to shape his ethnocentric worldview. The book he wrote about his time in Bosnia, Raki am Igman (Raki at the Igman), may not be propagandistic kitsch, but the comparison to Handke's 'travelogues' nevertheless suggests itself, at least politically.
The Nobel Laureate's fascination with the Greater Serbia ideology rhymes with his tendency to essentialize ethnic identities. In a particularly revealing passage in Unter Tränen fragend (Asking through the Tears), Handke describes watching Milošević regime propaganda on TV during the NATO bombing campaign in 1999. He affirms it as “naturgewachsen” (naturally-grown) and marvels at Serbia’s “oldest and most traditional dances” and “most beautiful folk costumes." In his quest for primordial authenticity, Handke homogenizes 'the Serbs' ("Serbenvolk"), fetishizes them as noble savages and considers himself their saviour. However, when he speaks of 'Serbia' and 'the Serbs', what he usually means is Serb nationalism.
In late 1996, Handke met with Jovan Divjak in Sarajevo. The meeting was arranged by Valentin Inzko, then the Austrian ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina. As a Bosnian Army general, Divjak had defended his city against the Serb nationalist siege, which made him a Sarajevo legend. Handke asked him why he - as an ethnic Serb - remained in a Muslim army. Divjak explained to him that it's an army of Serbs, Croats, Muslims and all other citizens. It was his professional duty to side with the citizens against the onslaught. Divjak told him about the Markale massacres and the more than one thousand children that were killed during the siege. He also told him that Handke's books too were burned in the destruction of Vijećnica. In August 1992, the Army of Republika Srpska targeted and set ablaze the neo-Moorish edifice which housed the National and University Library. Karadžić's men sought to annihilate the cultural heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this memoricide, millions of books, historical documents and unique manuscripts were destroyed. As a public intellectual in the German-speaking world, Handke surely must be aware of Adorno's description of the obliteration of memory as the devil's innermost principle. In Divjak's recollection, though, he seemed uninterested and unmoved by what he had been told. Shortly before their conversation, Handke visited Karadžić in Pale, who was already wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. The two poets drank Šljivovica and exchanged books.
Denialism is at the core of the Greater Serbia ideology. The irredentist claim made by Serb nationalists, that Bosnia is not a 'real' (ethnically-defined) country with a distinct history, culture and society but in fact a 'lost' territory of Greater Serbia, serves to legitimize its destruction. Bosnia’s disappearance is seen as necessary for the establishment of a purified ethnostate. The ahistorical denial of Bosnia is intertwined with the denial of Bosniaks as a people. This dehumanization sets them "outside the boundaries of nation, race, and people" and ultimately serves to deny (that is, to justify) genocide against them, both before and after the fact. If Bosniaks are a non-people (or just a spectre of 'the Turks' or actually Serbs-in-denial), you may be able to kill, displace, ‘cleanse’ or ‘take revenge’ on them randomly, but you can’t target them systematically on the basis of ethnicity - you can’t commit genocide against them. Handke propagates this idea in a recent, post-Nobel interview as well as in A Journey to the Rivers, written a few months after the Srebrenica genocide: “[...] if the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslim descendants of Serbs in Bosnia are in fact a people.” The original German version contains an extra layer of mockery because he chose to call Bosniaks “Muselmanen” - an archaic, jocular term for Muslims as well a slang term for irreversibly exhausted, emancipated and apathetic captives of Nazi concentration camps. Primo Levi described them as “the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.”
“With all of this in mind, the meaning of another of Handke’s favourite tropes becomes clear. He likes to justify the Srebrenica genocide by painting it as an act of revenge. ”
With all of this in mind, the meaning of another of Handke's favourite tropes becomes clear. He likes to justify the Srebrenica genocide by painting it as an act of revenge. To this end, he evokes a mysterious “Vor-Geschichte” (pre-history). In order to deny the genocidal intent of the perpetrators, Handke points to earlier atrocities by the Bosnian Army (while omitting the broader genocidal context in Eastern Bosnia since 1992). Moreover, this move doubles as a dog-whistle for another Vor-Geschichte - the Ottoman domination over the Serbs. When Handke speaks of revenge, inevitably Ratko Mladić’s words from July 11, 1995, in Srebrenica come to mind: “The time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region.”
Echoing his own words: Peter Handke is a writer, he comes from Njegoš, from D. Ćosić, from Karadžić. Leave him in peace and don’t ask him questions like that.
Nationalism is thus, in the first place, negativity; nationalism is a negative spiritual category because it thrives on denial and by denial. [...] Whence, we wonder, such cowardice, such an attitude, such an upsurge of nationalism, in this day and age?
Danilo Kiš
Handke, who actually praised the poetry of Radovan Karadžić, is in many respects the poet of our times. His antisemitic abuse of the literary critic and Holocaust survivor Marcel Reich-Ranicki, suspicion that George Soros, among others, is responsible for the “Welt-Krieg” (world-war) on Yugoslavia and chatter about “Soros democrats”; his animus against the ‘lying press’; his genocide tourism and triumphalism as a harbinger of Western Assadism; his humanizing of Adolf Hitler and sympathy for some “fascist violence”; his domestic violence, disdain for the #MeToo movement and misogynistic abuse of the anti-Milošević dissident Biljana Srbljanović; his Trumpesque vulgarity and “offending the audience” etc.
In an open letter, several associations of Bosnian wartime victims don’t beat around the bush: to award Peter Handke is to award fascism. Or as Edin Hajdarpašić remarked, “1990s Bosnia also taught the fundamental lesson of the twentieth century: No pasarán!” Seemingly oblivious to this lesson is Henrik Petersen, member of the Nobel committee, who justified the decision as follows: “In 50 years ... Peter Handke, just like Beckett, will be among the most obvious choices the Swedish Academy ever made, of that I am certain.” Well, he's got a point. Considering where “the world, the so-called world,” is heading, that's a fairly obvious prediction. Or as pointed out by Jean Baudrillard, the rare Western intellectual who understood the paradoxical role of the Bosnian genocide for the West: the Serb nationalists “are Europe's cutting edge. The 'real' Europe in the making is a white Europe, a bleached Europe that is morally, economically, and ethnically integrated and cleansed.” This vision is unlikely to displease our Nobel Laureate for he locates the true Europe in Serbia and Republika Srpska. That is, his own imagined Greater Serbia. The “purity“ he finds there, he says, is not “alive“ in France or Germany.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to “the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction.” The ideal, in this case, is the “painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe.” Handke’s is the poetry of Remove Kebab. It truly does represent this morally, spiritually indefensible civilization. Congratulations on the well-deserved award.