The title of [Peter Handke’s] first collection of poems, Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt (The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, 1969), implies the oscillation between subjective lyricism and objective empiricism that would become characteristic of Handke’s oeuvre.
Meister der Dämmerung, Malte Herwig’s engaging new biography, suggests that it is possible to see this early work as the key to Handke’s controversial political views. Since the mid 1990s, Handke has been notorious for his engagement with Serbian politics: from 1996, when he published a controversial report on his trip to Serbia the previous year … through his decision in 1999 to hand back his Büchner Prize in protest against the bombing of Kosovo, to 2006, when he gave a short speech at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral and was subsequently refused the money he had been awarded for the Heine Prize, Handke has been an outspoken critic of “Western” views on Serbia. Yet Herwig argues that Handke’s politics are a logical extension of his poetics: what drives him is not his pro-Serbian conviction per se, but rather his insistence on “another kind of language” to the party line propagated by the media. He is loyal not to Milosevic, argues Herwig, but to a language that is “not the journalistic orthodoxy”. Handke’s claim at Milosevic’s funeral that “this is not a day for strong words, but for weak words”, is of a piece with the disgust he expressed in his 1973 Büchner Prize speech at “the rationalizing violence of power”: he wants to change the world, but through literature, as he declared in his 1967 manifesto Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms (I am an Inhabitant of the Ivory Tower). His fingers burned by early skirmishes with the media, Handke has remained obdurately consistent in his view that the poet’s role is to offer a counterweight to what he sees as the flattening homogeneity of much journalism.
These “weak words”, a phrase which Handke repeats in his private diary, offer a key both to his poetics and to his politics.
Reminiscent of Stifter’s “gentle law” (sanftes Gesetz), the term suggests Handke’s slow, carefully modulated (and typically Austrian) prose style, as well as his sympathy with marginal, outsider figures, born of his difficult childhood in post-war Austria.
from Ben Hutchinson’s review in the Times Literary Supplement, 5 August 2011
