Peter Handke

Biography

In the spring of 1966, just before his first novel came out, the twenty-three-year-old Peter Handke arrived in Princeton for a meeting of Group 47, an association of German-language writers. He wore a Beatles haircut. After several hours of readings he delivered a caustic speech accusing the assembled authors of “descriptive impotence”, and the critics too, whose work he called “as pointless as this literature”. He was breaking an unwritten rule of the group: the discussion was supposed to be about a specific text, not about literature in general. On the tape recording one can hear laughter and interjections from the hall.

He was born on 6 December 1942 in Griffen, in Carinthia, in the house of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Maria, was a Carinthian Slovene; his biological father was Erich Schönemann, a bank clerk and a soldier stationed in Carinthia. Before her son was born, Maria married Adolf Bruno Handke, a Berliner who was a tram conductor and a Wehrmacht soldier. Handke learned about his real father shortly before his school-leaving examinations.

From 1945 the family lived in the Berlin district of Pankow, in the Soviet occupation zone. Shortly before the blockade began, in June 1948, they left at dawn by train for Griffen, and crossed the Austrian border without passports, in a lorry. For a five-year-old with a Berlin accent it was hard to get close to the village children. Later he called himself “the son of a landless peasant”: his stepfather was among the poorest in the village.

In 1954, on his own initiative, he entered the Catholic boarding grammar school at Tanzenberg. There he wrote a sixteen-page composition, “My Life. Part 2”, and published his first texts in the school newspaper, Fackel (“The Torch”). A teacher, Reinhard Musar, encouraged his writing and advised him to study law: the year’s syllabus could be mastered in a few months, leaving the rest of the time for literature. In 1959 Handke was caught reading Graham Greene, whose books were forbidden, and moved to a grammar school in Klagenfurt, travelling there by bus from Griffen. A school competition brought him a prize and two publications in the newspaper Kärntner Volkszeitung. He passed his examinations in 1961 with distinction.

In Graz he studied law without enthusiasm but successfully, earning money as a Greek tutor and in the warehouse of a mail-order firm. He went to the cinema a great deal and listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. From 1963 he wrote short texts and reviews for Graz radio, on James Bond, football, cartoons and pop music; he met Alfred Kolleritsch, editor of the magazine manuskripte, and joined the circle of the Forum Stadtpark and the Graz Group. He began the novel “The Hornets” in the summer of 1964 on the island of Krk. The publisher Luchterhand turned it down, and Suhrkamp accepted the manuscript in 1965. Handke did not sit the third state examination and left the university.

In 1966 Claus Peymann directed “Offending the Audience”, and in Oberhausen Günther Büch staged two earlier pieces, “Prophecy” and “Self-Accusation”. The critics received them well, and within a few months Handke had become something like a pop star of the literary scene. In 1967 his novel “The Peddler” appeared, and in 1968 “Kaspar” premiered in Frankfurt and Oberhausen. In 1969 he was one of the founders of the Frankfurt publishing house Verlag der Autoren, which is owned by the authors themselves.

His mother’s suicide in 1971 is the subject of the narrative “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams” (1972), filmed in 1974. The same year saw “Short Letter, Long Farewell”, which draws on a journey through the United States. Wim Wenders brought “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick” (1970) to the screen, and made “The Wrong Move” (1975) from Handke’s screenplay. In 1973 Handke received the Georg Büchner Prize. From November 1973 he lived in Paris, and from 1976 in Clamart. From 1977 he kept the journal “The Weight of the World”. “The Left-Handed Woman” appeared in 1976, and the film he directed from the book in 1977. The end of 1978, after a trip to Alaska, was by his own letters a severe crisis: he wrote to Hermann Lenz of the despair with which he was working on “Slow Homecoming”.

From August 1979 to November 1987 he lived in Salzburg, where he finished the tetralogy “Slow Homecoming”, began translating little-known authors, above all Slovene ones, and translated “Prometheus Bound” from Ancient Greek for the Salzburg Festival of 1986. For Wenders’s film “Wings of Desire” (1987) he wrote part of the screenplay. He then set off on a three-year journey, the notes on which were published only in 2005. Since the summer of 1990 Handke has lived in Chaville, near Paris.

In 1996 the publication of his travel notes “A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia” provoked sharp controversy over his attitude to the wars in Yugoslavia. In 2004 he signed an appeal in defence of Slobodan Milošević, in 2005 he visited him in prison in The Hague, and on 18 March 2006 he spoke at his funeral. After that the Comédie-Française in Paris dropped one of his plays from its schedule, and Handke himself declined the Heinrich Heine Prize awarded to him; the 50,000 euros raised in his support he gave to a Serbian village in Kosovo.

On 10 October 2019 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” The award prompted protests and open letters on both sides.