Don't back away from the Handke Nobelist: To me Yugoslavia Has Meaning

Austrian writer Peter Handke, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature from the Swedish Academy for 2019, defended Serbia's commitment to defence during the war in the former Yugoslavia and added that he has never bowed to Milosevic. Maybe he didn't bend, but he still has.

I have not bowed to Miloevic at any moment, neither in myself to the public” the Austrian said in his interview with the newspaper Die Zeit, the first after being awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in October of this year and talking about his contractive engagement.

“I saw him once, was imprisoned at The Hague” said Handke in this long-standing interview in Paris, where he now lives for years.

I wanted to hear it. The former president's lawyer asked me if I wanted to talk to him. I heard what Handke has to say.

Asked about his participation in the 2006 Milosevic funeral, which caused the scandal, Handke said “abnormally that I was there”

Handke without a problem expresses his sympathy for him yet, and his reasoning is, at least it might be surprising. Handke completely forgets the Serbian fascism of Milosevic's power and links it to Yugoslavia, not Serbia.

“In one of his last appearances, he had declared that he did not want Yugoslavia to be dissolved. His tomb is also Yugoslavia's grave. Did we forget that this country was formed to oppose Hitler's Reich?

Handke in 1996 had published the “License for Serbia” after the war in Bosnia and Croatia that had triggered major controversy. He had also condemned the 1999 shelling of Serbia by NATO.

He still insists that his writings are not to be condemned.

No word I wrote about Yugoslavia is doomed. This is the literature” he said.

Handke, whose mother is Slovenian from the province of Korushka in Austria, also explained this strange insistence, saying it is APUoslav from his mother, not Slovenian.

I was still the only one. I am Yugoslav by his mother and my uncle who studied in Maribor... for me Yugoslavia has meaning”, Handke said.

While speaking of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, he said it was “Brotherial War” added that “there is nothing worse than the killing brother”. But it's clear who your brother considers killer.

“As Serbs lived in Croatia, Krajina. And all of a sudden they had to be the inferior people in their country. ”

The Nobel Prize awards ceremony will be held on December 10th, on the day of Alfred Nobel's death.

The Swedish Academy had responded to Kosovo Academy of Sciences Chairman Mehmet Kraja, rationalising their decision and standing behind that decision.