‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists’ - By Aleksandar Hemon
The choice of Mr. Handke implies a concept of literature safe from the infelicities of history and actualities of human life and death. War and genocide, Milosevic and Srebrenica, the value of the writer’s words and actions at this moment in history, might be of interest to the unsophisticated plebs once subjected to murder and displacement, but not to those who can appreciate “linguistic ingenuity [that] has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” For them, genocide comes and goes, but literature is forever.
Back in my previous
life in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I read the Austrian writer Peter
Handke’s books, was pleasantly baffled by his plays and watched the movies he
wrote. I loved the shimmering emptiness of his novel “The Goalie’s Fear of the
Penalty Kick.” I loved the beauty of the Wim Wenders’s masterpiece “The Wings
of Desire,” which Mr. Handke worked on. In the late 1980s, I
was young and invested in the pursuit of the smart and cool. Mr. Handke seemed
not only smart and cool but also a writer who was expanding the frontiers of
literature. He was the kind of writer I was angling to become.
But things changed for
Mr. Handke and me in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav People’s Army, responding to Slobodan Milosevic, president of
Serbia, engaged in a brief war in Slovenia, then in a longer and much bloodier
one in Croatia, leveling cities and committing atrocities. Unwilling to stay in
Yugoslavia, a majority of the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina decided in a
1992 referendum to declare independence. Mr. Milosevic pounced.
His nationalist
ambition to create a “Greater Serbia” demanded a genocidal operation against
Bosnian Muslims. Radovan Karadzic, one of Mr. Milosevic’s proxies in Bosnia,
conducted a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” which meant rape and murder, mass
expulsions, concentration camps and siege. Mr. Milosevic’s state provided full
financial and military support.
In July 1995, the
Serbs entered Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia, that had been declared a
safe zone and was supposed to be protected by a Dutch battalion under the
United Nations flag. Gen. Ratko Mladic, the commander of
the Bosnian Serb Army, was there to celebrate the taking of Srebrenica. He
declared that it was the most recent victory in the 500-year war against “the
Turks” — a racist term for Bosnian Muslims. A few days
later, Mr. Mladic’s soldiers murdered about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims and buried them
in unmarked mass graves.
I don’t remember how
or when I heard that Mr. Handke, whose mother was from Slovenia, had decided
that the real victims of the Yugoslav wars were the Serbs, and that the Western
governments and journalists lied about them out of hatred. It could be that my
initial reaction was mere disbelief - for how could the writer who imagined the
angels in the sky over Berlin caring about all its citizens in Mr. Wenders’
movie come to believe that the “Muslims” in the multiethnic Sarajevo were
massacring themselves to blame the Serbs, that both sides committed atrocities
in Srebrenica. Mr. Handke insisted that the number of Bosnians killed was much
exaggerated and that the Serbs were suffering like the Jews under the Nazis.
Shortly after the war
was over in 1996, he published a book titled “A Journey to the Rivers: Justice
for Serbia.” He discovered a kind of purity that was 2,000 years old in Serbia
and Republika Srpska (the ethnically cleansed Serb entity in Bosnia
established as part of the Dayton Peace Accord) and came to believe
that a true Europe still existed only there. Mr. Milosevic was so
fond of Mr. Handke, he bestowed upon him the Order of the Serbian Knight for
his commitment to the Serbian cause. Even after huge amounts of evidence of
Serbian crimes in Croatia and Bosnia (and after 1999, in Kosovo) led to Mr.
Milosevic and his proxies being arrested and indicted after the war, Mr.
Handke’s support for the butcher of the Balkans went on unabated.
Mr. Milosevic called
for him to be a witness at his trial in The Hague, which Mr. Handke politely
declined, though he visited his trial more than once. After Mr. Milosevic’s
death in 2006, Mr. Handke spoke at his funeral to an audience of 20,000
patriotic mourners. In Belgrade, Mr. Handke is deemed to be “the friend
the Serbs didn’t have to buy.” Outside the pure Serb
lands and Mr. Handke’s head, the responsibility of Mr. Milosevic and his
underlings was established beyond reasonable doubt: Mr. Karadzic and Mr. Mladic
were sentenced for life for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.
One might be tempted
to think that those crimes have now become undeniable history, but Bosnians
learned the hard way that “Never again!” usually means “Never again, until the
next time!” We often run into people who don’t know, don’t care to know, think
it is too complicated or outright deny what happened in Bosnia and whose
responsibility it was.
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. As for Mr. Handke, The Irish Times reported, “When critics pointed
out that the victims’ corpses provided evidence of Serb atrocities, the writer replied: ‘You can stick your corpses up
your ass!’” Mr. Handke’s immoral
delusions could perhaps be related to his literary aesthetics, to his suspicion
of language and its ability to represent truth, which ultimately leads to a
position that everything is equally true, or untrue. His moral collapse could
also be seen in the context of everlasting European Islamophobia, or its
cocktail whataboutism which found all parts of former Yugoslavia equally responsible
for its demise, all of which went very nicely with knee-jerk dislike of Western
imperialism that in the bloody 1990s befogged the lofty minds of many a
European salon.
But even if one could
explain Mr. Handke’s moral derailment with his intellectual skepticism, or with
his uncritical sentimentalization of the Balkans, rooted in his family history,
it is hard to grasp what could cause him to worship a monster like Mr.
Milosevic. A dull apparatchik
whose ambition exactly matched his bloodthirst, Mr. Milosevic was reliant on
the oppressive machinery of his police, secret service and the paramilitaries.
He was prone to dissolving his opponents in acid baths. He turned Serbia into a
war-addicted kleptocracy, ruined its economy, lost every war he fought and was
deposed by his own people in 2000. To Mr. Handke, he was “a rather tragic man”
who did what anyone would do in his position.
I haven’t been able to
read Mr. Handke’s work since he devoted himself to the lost cause of Mr.
Milosevic and Serbia. By virtue of being Bosnian, I am not as European as the
wise Swedes on the Nobel Committee, who awarded Mr. Handke the Nobel Prize in Literature on
Thursday. I am therefore repeatedly failing at not seeking the connection
between his writing about, say, a goalie who suffers from penalty-kick anxiety
and his belief that the defenders of Sarajevo dropped a shell onto the packed
city market only to blame the Serbs for it.
Mr. Handke’s politics
irreversibly invalidated his aesthetics, his worship of Mr. Milosevic
invalidated his ethics. At Mr. Milosevic’s funeral, he said, “The world, the
so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the
so-called world, knows every-thing about Slobodan Milosevic. 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 Milosevic.” The writer who could speak those words can’t have
anything of value to say.
Evidently, not knowing
the truth about Mr. Milosevic and genocide was not a problem for the Nobel
Committee, mandated by Alfred Nobel to reward “the person who shall have
produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal
direction.” Maybe the engaged literature of the great Olga Tokarczuk is to it
but one among many aesthetic, ethical options of value equal to Mr. Handke’s.
Perhaps the
esteemed Nobel Committee is so invested in the preservation of
Western civilization that to it a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim
lives. Or it could be that in the rarefied chambers in Stockholm, Mr. Handke’s
anxious goalie is far more real than a woman from Srebrenica whose family was
eradicated in the massacre.
The choice of Mr.
Handke implies a concept of literature safe from the infelicities of history
and actualities of human life and death. War and genocide, Milosevic and
Srebrenica, the value of the writer’s words and actions at this moment in
history, might be of interest to the unsophisticated plebs once subjected to
murder and displacement, but not to those who can appreciate “linguistic
ingenuity [that] has explored the periphery and the specificity of
human experience.” For them, genocide comes and goes, but literature is
forever.
In the midst of a
global epidemic of Islamophobia and white nationalism, Mr. Handke’s Nobel Prize
has validated an aesthetic untroubled by decency, a literary project whose
value should dissolve like a body in acid before the magnitude of crimes its
author repeatedly denied and thus endorsed. Mr. Handke is the Bob Dylan of
genocide apologists. The Nobel Committee has shown us that it knows little
about literature and its true place in this so-called world.
