Posted on 06/26/2006 11:04:21 AM PDT by Bokababe
Peter Handke has once again shocked the German public but this time in such a way that not even the most extreme do not dare criticize him for it. He has given up the alternative Heinrich Heine award that the actors and intellectuals of Berlin wished to bestow upon him in favor of the Serbs of Kosovo, who live "surrounded by barbed wire and tanks".
www.novosti.co.yu Vecernje Novosti daily, Belgrade
June 24, 2006 By D. Sekulic, June 23, 2006
Peter Handke has once again shocked the German public but this time in such a way that not even the most extreme do not dare criticize him for it. He has given up the alternative Heinrich Heine award that the actors and intellectuals of Berlin wished to bestow upon him in favor of the Serbs of Kosovo, who live "surrounded by barbed wire and tanks".
The Berlin Ensemble, headed by the also frequently controversial Klaus Peymann, the famous former head of the Vienna Burgtheater, recently organized donations with the help of numerous actors to award Handke an alternative Heinrich Heine award in the amount of 50,000 euros. The highly prestigious German language award was awarded to Peter Handke by an expert jury in Dusseldorf but the city council refused to accept its decision, stating quite literally that the award could not go to a writer who is of pro-Serb orientation!
The case provoked spirited discussion and many concluded that it represented an instance of brutal political censure of literature. Local politicians are judging one of the greatest living writers in the German language, warned eminent intellectuals, among them some, like Nobel laureate Gunther Grass who at one time advocated the bombing of Serbia.
At the same time Handke informed Peymann and his friends that he is renouncing the alternative award as well because, as he had previously stated, he did not wish his work to be the subject of meddling by local politicians. The money that they collect should be sent to the Serb enclaves in Kosovo and Metohija to people who are living under impossible conditions thanks to the supporters of "freedom" imposed upon them by NATO bombs.
Grass dismisses jury
In Dusseldorf it has now been openly admitted that the decision really was of a political nature and that the Heinrich Heine award allegedly has a clearly political character. In response to this, Grass, who is highly influential, has sent a request that in the future the city council be stripped of the right to approve or reject the decision of the expert jury.
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Related article:
Disputed Author Handke Awarded German Literary Prize
DEUTSCE WELLE 25.05.2006
Großansict des Bildes mit der Bildunterscrift: Austrian writer Peter Handke is controversial because of his stance on Serbia
Controversial Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke was awarded the city of Düseldorf's Heine Prize for literature.
The Heine Prize, endowed for 50,000 euros ($64,000), is one of the three highest-paying literature prizes in Germany. The jury said Handke -- like Heinric Heine, the German poet after whom the prize is named -- obstinately follows the way to an "open truth." He puts forth his own poetic world view, in contrast to broader public opinion, they said. The prize will be awared on Dec. 13.
Handke wrote the groundbreaking experimental play "Offending the Audience" and the novel "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick", but may be best know for writing the novel "Wings of Desire", whic was turned into a film by Wim Wenders.
Pro-Serbian stance
He is controversial because of his pro-Serbian stance during the Balkan wars, and his support for the Serbian regime.
Recently, Frenc national theatre Comédie-Française removed the play "Voyage to the Sonorous Land or the Art of Asking" from its 2007 season lineup, after Handke spoke at the burial of former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in Marc.
Handke, who lives in France, said in an esay in the Frenc newspaper Libération: "Let's stop laying the masacre . on the backs of the Serbian military and paramilitary. And listen -- at last -- to the survivors of the Muslim masacres in numerous Serbian villages around Srebrenica."
'Glad' aceptance
Last year, Handke's publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, said the author would categorically refuse any more literature prizes; in Paris, however, Handke said he would "gladly" acept the Heine Prize.
Up to now, winners of the Heine Prize have included Walter Jens, Günter Kunert, Max Frisc, Wolf Biermann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Elfriede Jelinek und Robert Gernhardt.
May God Bless Peter Handke!
Do you ever get the feeling we fought on the wrong side in that "illegal" war?
We shouldn't have fought on any side.
He supported Serbia because he saw Serbia as the last remaining outpost of the Communism he favors, not because of any humanitarian concerns.
Good for Peter Handke! One of the few European intellectuals who dares to speak out against the trend.
As for Günther Grasse, I've always thought that his work was highly overrated. I've never been able to get through it. Nothing but self-worshipping, superficial, juvenile leftism, lacking imagination.
You don't have to like an author's politics to admire his writing, but Grasse is a second-rater.
You should be able to see right through Handke, Cicero. I mean, come on.
Screw him. He was a supporter of the Milosevic regime and spoke up in defense of that scumbag.
Well said!
The really evil villians in the story are the demokkkrat us senators who went to the wall to keep slick in the whitehouse for 8 years rather than packing his sorry ass off to St. Elizabeth's hospital for the criminally insane where he belongs.
And your source for this is...?
Do you know anything of his books? His biography?
Asking me for a "source" that Handke is a hardcore leftist is like asking someone for a source that Benedict CVI is a Catholic.
You are aware that Handke spoke at Milosevic's funeral, right?
Correction: XVI
Keep telling yourself that.
Milosevic was an unreconstructed Communist.
When people defend filth like Milosevic while attacking Clinton in the same breath, it only makes rational people view Clinton favorably.
Probably the only semi-decent thing Clinton did in his whole miserable life was attack this Communist dictator - though he only did it for politics, not out of principle.
Near as I can tell from everything believable I've been able to come up with, we bombed a totally innocent Christian nation into the stone age for 80 days and nights including Easter sunday, for the benefit of a bunch of narco-terrorists, white trash, and barbarians, and to take the Juanita Broaddrick story off newspapers. In the entire 8 year reign of terror of the KKKlinton regime, I only saw two groups of people stand up to the beast and try to face it down, that being the Mormons in Utah and the Serbs. That gives those people hero status in my estimation.
Ypu know, problem with your theory is that people actuali lived in Serbia during Milosevic administration. he started democratic reforms, dissmissing communist rule, givving new, democratic constiturtion still on power, dissmissing Islamic/communist raign on Kosovo and actualy telling people that there is more out there than communism.
Can you belive, that he actualy held elections. First democratic elections in Eastern Europe, held in 1990, when Poland, Hungary and others hade still communist regimes.
In economy he started freemarket economy, privatisation of factories and other western values.
Great story, thanks!
Enjoy.
Everything I have found said that he "joined Die Grazer Gruppe", not that he was "a founding member". Besides which, who of any of us weren't more liberal in college than we are today? For God's sake, Ronald Reagan briefly flirted with communism in his youth! (And my source for that was direct conversation with the people who talked him out of it!)
"Screw him. He was a supporter of the Milosevic regime and spoke up in defense of that scumbag."
In the interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung , 31 March 1999, he (Handke) said clearly, "I am with the Serbian people, not Milosevic. Anyone who is not a pronounced anti-Serb is despised as being 'pro-Serb'. Whoever mentions Milosevic's name without immediately adding 'slaughterer', 'Balkan Hitler', 'God protect us', is accused of taking sides with Milosovic.” He added, polemically, that "to be called pro-Serb today is an honour."
"You are aware that Handke spoke at Milosevic's funeral, right?"
Yes, and the press twisted his words so much that they had to write a retraction. Here is what Handke said in response:
"I have not laid a red rose on the hearse of Slobodan Milosevic. I did not touch the hearse. I did not wave the Serbian flag. And I have never approved "the Srebrenica massacre and other crimes done in the name of ethnic cleansing." I've never considered the Serbs as "the real victims of the war." And in Pozarevac, I did not come as a "truth seeker." I am not the author of Justice for Serbia, but of Winter Journey to the rivers Danube, Sava, Morava and Drina (Gallimard). And nowhere in my little speech in Pozarevac have I said "I am happy to be close to Slobodan Milosevic, who has defended his people." What is true: I gave my speech in "Serb" (or serbo-croat)! And for all the readers, I am translating it here in French: "The world, the so-called world, knows everything on Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything on Slobodan Milosevic. The so-called world knows the truth. For that, the so-called world today is absent, and not only today, and not only here. I know that I do not know. I do not know the truth. But I look. I feel. I remember. For that, I am present today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Milosevic. -- P.H. Actually, the last sentence should be translated as "[F]or that, I am present today, with Yugoslavia, with Serbia, with Slobodan Milosevic," which, although not literal, may better express Handke's sentiments.
Handke was a "Yugoslavist", not "a communist". He believed that if the different peoples of Yugoslavia could get a along, then the world had a chance of peace. You can call that naive, but naivete is not communism. Handke knew enough about the history of the place and the players involved (including Germany's role) in the destruction of Yugoslavia, to know that the blanket "blame it all on the Serbs" attitude was total nonsense -- and racist, to a people who Germany had twice tried to anihilate.
You can fault Handke for many things, but in this case, his behavior is a matter of conscience -- and he has paid dearly for it. Peter Handke is a brave man, and the actions of his detractors has been abominable.
Is that why he went to Kosovo to celebrate Easter and endured being stoned by Muslim Albanians? 
http://www.kosovo.net/news/archive/2006/April_28/2.html
At least he spoke in support of the Christian Serbs and against the Muhammedan terrorists.
Which is more than certain alleged Christians are willing to do.
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