Martin, I notice that the subject of Handke and Yugoslavia cropped up in you blog once again.

Let me try to reduce the matter to its simplest {!} equation. *For Handke the Yugoslav federation represented a "dreamland" and an alternative.

The travel parts of his three travel books provide superb accounts of his subjective experience. There is no arguing with that. As to the denial of committed atrocities: as I tried to show, Handke, since his earliest days, has only wanted, generally, been able to indicate them obliquely, say, the way that thunderstorms in Stifter indicate some much greater hideousness just off screen. What his non-reading opponents object to is that, unlike them, he does not scream "holy murder" as much as they do.

They want to rub his nose in the hideousness - for example most hideously a certain once talented alcoholic, whose name I think is Franz Kraehenbugger. These "rub your nose" in the sight, the factuality of monstrosity, "rubbers" manage to feel very good and righteous about themselves. Handke, of course, did not help himself with his public outcries, as compared to his differentiated writing, differentiated except for his general roundhouse condemnation of all major media. Of all the showoffs - in what became a media circus - who showed up in Yugoslavia, he happened to know the country and had a profound relationship to it.

As to his relationship to the big bad wolf Milosevic, Handke may very well be right that M. was a tragic character caught in an impossible situation. What, however, continues to give me pause is Handke's failure to comment on M.'s posthumous Belgrade conviction for the murder of his predecessor. Handke, on the other hand, I don't think is necessarily helped by those who idolize him because of some of his works of genius, something he himself makes very clear [very clear!!!] in NIEMANDSBUCHT... not that anything like it has ever stopped the worshippers of golden calves. So what you get is the kind of mess that the Yugoslavs have been making of things for quite a while now.

I gather from some Serbian friends that even in instances where a village demonstratively all showed that they could get along with each other's differences all it took was one shot from one of these marauding bands to get them to all pick up a gun and start killing each other. That points to some very dire deep-seated general psychosis which is probably not confined to that part of the world alone. All the righteous murderous angels! But one of the few beautiful things to come out of it are the fallible Handke's text and his courageous impure position. The cc to Scott Abbott is to the American translator of Winterliche Reise, who was also along on one of the later Yugoslav jaunts that the "Handke troup" undertook and who has written very interestingly on the subject.

As ever, ...

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