In Belgrade too, Nobel winner is humiliated: A naive man who has supported Milosevic

“Bota, the so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia and Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Slobodan Milosevic. The so-called world knows everything about truth... I don't know the truth. But I see. Listen. I feel. I remember. So I am here today, near Yugoslavia, near Serbia, near Slobodan Milosevic”, he said, among other things.

This closeness had come long since he believed that the world was unfair toward Serbs, especially Western press. Nobel's split prompted reactions after it was considered unfair to award the highest prize to an author who supported Serbia's leader, whose works the wounds have not yet healed.

There's a group of writers, artists and journalists who remember Hanken every day for years. Philip David, one of Belgrade's most famous writers, finds it difficult to say anything about his Austrian colleague. As a writer, he does not like it, but he does understand those who love it. David is deeply disappointed when the Austrian name is mentioned.

The “Against the people we have been opposing Milosevic's policy, he has supported this policy. This has been a dire and harmful policy for Serbia, a nationalist policy. He was at Milosevic's funeral and once wrote a pamphlet explaining how retired pensioners who had a brand of pensions were happy and how they developed empathy from vendors and bottled fuel buyers. He praised something that meant total poverty to us”.

This news has shared friends. The thin line is between work and character outside the covers. Judgment seems harder if you try to separate the work from the author.

Novica Milic has been a world literature professor at the university for years. He remembers one of his meetings in downtown Pristina a few years before the war, as Handke was published by Kosovo Serb publishing houses. Milic calls him the best writer in the world to deserve the award, however:

I told him when I had his case. Handke turns out to be naive, not very informed, and there have been mistaken assessments of both Milosevic and Yugoslavia's collapse. It is just another instance of a wonderful writer who is a total political failure. There's been cases before, and it doesn't surprise me about Handken”

The price sharing some have met with joy and some sads in the region, after being hated after loving Milosevic, it did not seem acceptable. For a part of the Serbs, that has been happiness. The Austrian author had undoubtedly chosen sides, and his suffering for Yugoslavia also appears in his authorship, which is called -- “the dreamer's division from lost land”.