Byzantine Blog

Belgrade Evening News reports a renowned Austrian author and playwright Peter Handke has once again refused to accept the Heine award, this time the alternative one, asking his friends and eminent German intellectuals to send his award money to “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”:

Peter Handke has once again shocked the German public but this time in such a way that 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”.

When NATO started its cynically named “Merciful Angel” brutal bombing campaign against Serbia in March 1999, Peter Handke promptly announced he is quitting the 'current' Roman Catholic church in protest at the Vatican's views on the Balkan conflict. He also returned the 10,000 marks he received in 1973 as the winner of the Buchner prize, Germany's top literary award. During the relentless pounding of Serbia from 15,000 feet by the most powerful nations in the world, Handke declared:

Mars is attacking, and Serbia, Montenegro, the Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia) and Yugoslavia are the fatherland of all those who have not become Martians or green butchers.

Handke turned the tables on the official justifications for the bombings, saying NATO had not prevented a new Auschwitz, but had rather created one:

In those days, it was gas chambers and shooting squads, today it is computerised killers from 15,000 feet.

Just two days after the first bombs had fallen, Handke issued his first open letter, which spoke of “Green slaughterers”, referring to the German party in power. He demanded that the “German Minister of Death” (Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping), who just months before had sent him birthday wishes, “should return my books to me.”

In the interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Handke said:

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. To be called pro-Serb today is an honour.

After the jury comprised of writers decided to award the prestigious Heinrich Heine Prize for literature to Peter Handke whose literary genius remains undisputed, the army of pen-pushers and German marginalia, the multitude doomed to eternal mediocrity and pettiness swarmed in to criticize the jury decision. A week before the council of the city of Dusseldorf bureaucrats was scheduled to confer in order to officially renege awarding of the Heine Prize, Peter Handke wrote to the city mayor suggesting the council members should take a stroll in the park, or go to the banks of Raine, instead of wasting time on debate over his work. He informed the public he is renouncing the award in order to spare everyone further humiliation and to protect his work from the bureaucratic vulgarity.

Serbian nation has very few and far-between friends. We have never had many friends anyway, it was all an illusion, wishful thinking, a mirage conjured up in-between wars by our foolishness, ignorance and naivety. But those few good men and women that are honoring Serbs with their friendship today are more valiant and valuable then entire armadas of present day empires.

If going through the pure misery and pain of having to put up with all the insults, abuse and sheer malice during the past fifteen years was the price that had to be paid to get to know Peter Handke, James Bissett, Julia Gorin, Scott Taylor, Jared Israel, Harold Pinter, David Binder, Peter Brock, James and Stella Jatras, Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti and others like them -- it was well worth it, for there is no doubt we are in the company of the best.