Deniers of Serbia's War Crimes:
Peter Handke
Why we need to challenge genocide denialism in the Balkans
The denial of an individual’s or a group’s persecution is the ultimate
cruelty – on some level worse than the persecution itself . By
Ehlimana Memišević, Al Jazeera, July 16, 2021
A Literary Consecration of Genocide Denial While the
Nobel committee insists that Handke is a poetic genius whose works transcend
worldly politics, the Austrian writer’s Yugoslav texts tell a different
story. What Handke has crafted is a new cultural space for
genocide denial, blending literary ambiguity and epistemic uncertainty in an
effort to rewrite the history of the genocide in Bosnia and redeem the
Serbian nationalism of the 1990s, even using the Srebrenica mass murders to
advance anti-Muslim views in the name of peace and justice. By
Edin Hajdarpašić, New Lines, July 12,
2021
A few unflinching pairs of eyes for Handke to face up to
Graphic reports on the kinds of genocidal crimes that Handke denies happened. By
Melina Borčak on Twitter, December 10, 2019
The King of Sweden gives Peter Handke a disgraceful Nobel Prize
A Nobel
Prize that will live in infamy was officially presented today to Peter
Handke, who is a genocide denier. There was no sign of protest or discord
inside the Concert Hall of Stockholm as King Carl XVI Gustaf handed a gold
Nobel medal to Handke. Outside, protests against this award have been
unprecedented. The Balkan countries that best know what happened in the war
— Bosnia, Turkey, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Albania —
boycotted the award ceremony today. Two members of the Nobel Committee
for Literature have resigned their posts, and one member of the Swedish
Academy, which is the final arbiter of who wins the literature prize,
refused to attend the ceremony.
By Peter Maass, The Intercept, December
10, 2019
Peter Handke
and the power of denial
Denial is part and parcel of the process that sets the context for genocide
in the first place. Victims have to be seen in the same way they were
constructed and imagined before the killing: as less than human and
deserving of their fate. In
October this year, the Nobel Committee delivered the final verdict on our
place in European memory: we are unseen and unremembered, our pain and our
truth - denied. The outside world actively rationalized and negated
our experience, and what is more, it continues to do so. By Emir Suljagic,
Al Jazeera, December 9, 2019
Why Peter Handke's Evasions Can't Evade the Truth
Handke reaps benefit from his dubious alliances with Serbian fascists, which he incessantly denies,
posing instead as an ethereal aesthete tormented by other people’s fundamentally
irrelevant responses to his ill-informed political interventions, which he
claims he intended as art and never really meant. By Eric Gordy, December
9, 2019
Two members leave Nobel literature committee, criticizing Swedish Academy
Gun-Britt Sundstrom
said in a statement published in
Dagens Nyheter that the choice of Handke had been interpreted as if
literature stood above politics and she did not share that view. Handke has been
heavily criticized for his portrayal of Serbia as a victim during the Balkan
wars and for attending the funeral of former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic. Milosevic died in 2006 in The Hague, where he was standing trial for
war crimes. Reuters, December 2, 2019
Wings of Denial A detailed look at Handke's anti-Muslim and
genocide-apologist history.
He has been
promoting denialist, apologist, and nationalist narratives about the Yugoslav
Wars in his literary works for more than two decades.
The cult of
ethnic purity in Serb nationalist ideology very much appeals to fascists in the
West. 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.
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. By
Adnan Delalic, December 2, 2019
The Nobel Prize, a Rape Camp in Bosnia, and Peter Handke What’s come to
be known as ethnic cleansing is not a simple or quick act. To succeed, it must
be ongoing and everlasting. The memory of what happened must be denied and
repressed at all times, so that it does not return to destabilize the false
history you are trying to establish. If you stay at the Vilina Vlas
with the knowledge
of what happened there,
you are a participant in the process of memory erasure, to life returning to
normal in places that are not normal and never should be;
you are an active
accomplice to the moral crime of genocide denial
. By Peter Maass, The Intercept, November 28 2019
Handke's publisher is acting as an accomplice Publisher Suhrkamp
should appeal to Handke to apologize to the victims of the Srebrenica
genocide. Society for Threatened Peoples, November 27, 2019
Stockholm Syndrome: The Nobel Prize Organization Is Now Fully Engaged in the
Business of Genocide Denial The organization
itself has become an open skeptic of the mass murder of Bosnia’s Muslims.
By Peter Maass, The
Intercept, November 20, 2019
Handke won the Nobel Prize after two jurors fell for a conspiracy theory about
the Bosnia war They relied on books that repeat discredited denials of
Serb concentration camps in wartime Bosnia. By Peter Maass, The
Intercept, November 14, 2019
Why Did Nobel Winner Peter Handke Have a Secret
Passport From Milosevic-Era Yugoslavia? The passport
says "Yugoslav" under the heading of "Nationality." The fact,
undisclosed until now, that Handke had a Yugoslav passport would appear to be
a new indicator of his actual sympathies and loyalties.
By Peter Maass, The
Intercept, November 6, 2019
Peter Handke:
Sorrow of the Nobel prize
Handke has reduced the Serbian nation to Milosevic’s world and failed to notice
anything else. This is not a question of ideas or political sympathy, but of
a serious lack of observation, knowledge, sensibility, and impulse to love
the oppressed and victims more than tyrants and abusers: in short, the
literary capacities that are important to writers today.
The fact that Handke has failed to notice anything but the brutal face of the
authorities, and that he has equated it with the people, is a serious offense
against Serbia. Being critical must be a trait of anyone who feels the need
to fall in love with a collective, especially an ethnic one. By Svetlana
Slapŝak, October 28, 2019
How the Nobel Prize Succumbed to the Literary Art of Genocide Denial
Defenses of Handke stand in defiance of what has long been noted by historians
of the Holocaust and other genocides: outright denial is just one way to deny a
genocide. Other forms of denial include claiming deaths were inadvertent or
unauthorized by political leaders, or there were not as many deaths as reported,
or that the victims were killed in retaliation for previous killings they had
carried out. Those strategies encompass much of what Handke (along with many
others cited on this page) has written about the Serb genocide in Bosnia.
By Peter Maass, The
Intercept, October 26, 2019
Handke's Nobel Prize: Cauterizing Muslims from Europe's history
When the Swedish Royal Academy
awarded Peter Handke the Nobel Prize in literature, it finished the process of
denying the Bosnian genocide started by the underlings of Ratko Mladić and
Radovan Karadžić. By Emir Suljagic, October 19, 2019
Why Reward a Genocide apologist? Milosevic was so fond of Handke that he
bestowed upon him the Order of the Serbian Knight. By Aleksandar Hemon, The
New York Times, October 15, 2019
Nobel Prize for Peter Handke An award for a stubborn genocide denier who
unconditionally sided with the Serbian war criminals. Society for Threatened
Peoples, October 15, 2019
Peter Handke Nobel Prize: Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania denounce the
coronation of a negationist The Austrian author saluted the memory
of Slobodan Milosevic in 2006 by going to the funeral of a Serb accused of
crimes against humanity and genocide. Le Figaro, October 10, 2019 (In
French - use Google Translate for English)
Deep Regret Over the Choice of Peter Handke for the 2019 Nobel Prize in
Literature "We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used
his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to
perpetrators of genocide." PEN America, October 10, 2019
Genocide apologist gets Nobel Prize Handke embodies the prime intellectual diseases of this era. By Peter Maass, The
Intercept, October 10, 2019
The Apologist A prominent defender of Slobodan Milosevic, the Austrian
writer spoke at Milosevic's funeral in Belgrade, in March 2006. Commentary by Michael McDonald,
The American Scholar, Spring 2007
Blind to the Truth
Handke's transformation from one of the
German language's most celebrated writers and an idol of the '68 generation
into a full-blown apologist for Serbian war crimes has taken a good 10 years
but is now officially complete. By
Tobias K. Vogel, Transitions Online, July 20, 2005
Peter Handke persists The controversy rages in Vienna around the new
play of the writer-friend of the Serbs. The author's words set fire to the
powder. Le Temps (Switzerland), May 25, 1999 (In French - use Google
Translate for English)
For services rendered - to the cause of folly
Handke has astonished even his work’s
most fervent admirers by a series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal
regime of Slobodan Milosevic, and, during a recent visit to Belgrade, received
the Order of The Serbian Knight for his propaganda services. By Salman Rushdie,
Toronto Globe and Mail, May 7, 1999
Open Letter to Peter Handke
His ex-companion describes him as an ideologue of modern Balkan fascism and
a legitimizer of Serbian violence in Bosnia and Kosovo, and violent toward
her.
By Marie Colbin, originally published in the Austrian magazine
Format,
May 1999
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