From Suttner to Handke

It has been two years since the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Austrian writer Peter Handke. The numerous public criticisms of Handken's separation of this award were also marked by literary criticism of his authorship.

There was a wide level of debate on both plains. One side argued Handken as unworthy of the price because he supported the Serbian genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo, defended the Yugoslav “Utopia” and tried to present the Serbian people as victims of all that happened in the 1990s. The other side argued for its radical, non-conventional and foreign-political writing style as a stable basis for the price.

When it became clear that the award was being given to Austrian Handke, reactions were formalized by both literary and political organizations, as well as by public intellectuals who could not conceive of his assessment at a price of “respected”, such as Nobel, precisely by being called into the tradition of this award in the report with whom it was dedicated. These criticisms, the members who shared the prize, simply replied that Handke in any of his writings had not politically defended the Serbian regime in periods of bloody wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

It is not now important what the reasons were or the conceived values of Handke's work were, since such a price has been shared and a Nobelist has been added to Austria. But what connects Austria to Nobel and our current political flows cannot go unnoticed as trends, much to the moral crisis that has swept Nobel from the dimension of this symbolic and encouraging price to a political rehabilitation concept, in contrast with the origin of which it was conceived by its own founder.

While Handke is Austria's last novelist, the first Austrian Nobelist dates back to 1905. That's Berta Suttner. On our socio-political level, Sutner is not well-known because she acted in a period when the people of Kosovo were deprived of international flows.

But besides us, Sutner is known to Western civilization as an extraordinary activist for peace and against the invading militant currents. Her literary work “Ulin down weapons”, was among the most translated works of the time and with a tremendous impact on the western audience.

Berta, would become a symbol of pacifist engagement in Western Europe under efforts to discipline the radical and militaristic currents of former European empires, separately in an effort to prevent wars and weapons that had come down. She, even a friend of Alfred Nobel, is said to have been one of the main promoters Alfred would list in his own will the peace price category.

Berten, we don't know and haven't seen her, except as a printed figure in the Euros' metal notes, but we have the causes of her engagement embedded and we know them very well. They really legitimize a price for peace because they oppose violence and dictatorial debauchery. They are against oppression and oppressive regimes. They oppose the deregulation of war and the regimes that promote it.

But 114 years later, Nobel would be given an Austrian, like Handke, who has large gaps in this pacifist tradition. Handkes' assessment in this perspective has a deeper political dimension than literary dimension. Through it, in fact, an effort has been made to modify and rehabilitate history.

Anyone who has only understood the Handken award in the form of a literary prize has failed to understand the effort to rehabilitate Serbia's past, which for its neighbours continues to be an endless, present and daily extension of a brutal hegemony period for which he has not yet asked for forgiveness. Therefore, Handke is not simply “author” but also “object” of a reality that is supposed to be placed in the European political context.

And this trend has a tradition. In 2006, the head of the oldest theater in Europe, the French player “Comedie Française” Marcel Bozonet, he had refused to put Handke's work on the scene, precisely because of hisgloricating role in Yugoslav utopia and the bloodshed around it. But it had been France's Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, who had criticised Bozoninet and invited Handken to visit his ministry.

It is now clear that the generation of Western statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic, which had been directly involved in the crisis of the former Yugoslavia, and which had made attempts to prevent bloodshed and was forced to intervene militarily to do so, is now offstage.

Not only is he not on stage as a presence, but he's also being endangered as a memory. The new presence, separately in several European countries, seems to have put aside the treatment of real history and has become a function of historical rehabilitation, having as other criteria the leading force, such as the market in the first place.

So wherever there is a need for commercial expansion, history cannot be an obstacle. Thus, today's Serbia as a potential geostrategic and commercial partner of Western Europe is not what it was 20 years ago. Her planting has begun earlier and is manifested more and more.

The problem with its establishment as a country about which stability -- the market and the circulation of goods -- marks the break of historical truth and rehabilitation for the sake of the current dynamic. The only part of the puzzle known and said, is that such a rise is supposed to pass on our backs and our fresh memory, which has not only been apologized for, but is supposed to turn against us, such as dealing with the war for liberation in international justice parameters.

I don't know him as an author, and I can't judge him by his literary size. It certainly arouses some kind of curiosity as long as it is stabbered to the degree of a Nobel winner. But Handke <x0-political” is not conceived as a winner, since his victory as such would legitimise itself on the backs of tens of thousands of victims, a large part of which have not yet been found.

No further than the day before, it was 15 years since Milosevic was declared dead at The Hague, without expecting the epilogue of justice for crimes that had prompted him. Next week, 15 years from Handke's funeral, he would say the following words: “Bota, the so-called world, knows everything about Slobodan Milosevic. The so - called world knows the truth. And that's why the so-called world is missing, and not just today, and not just here. That is why I am present today, near Yugoslavia, near Serbia, near Slobodan Milosevic”

This attitude that was to be seen in the critical plan, through the Handken Prize, in the new geopolitical movements has begun to be rewarded, simultaneously condemning Handkes' “world, which, according to him, did not understand the truth of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Milosevic.

In the contextal political dimension, our first task is to try to save the very world Handke criticizes. After all, let him hold the price but we have to keep the world, because the truth was so simple, so obvious and unfortunately left so many traces around us.