Genius, Genocide Denier or Both?

Recently there have been an increasing number of articles about artists, particularly men, who as people were utterly repellent. The recent article about Gauguin in this paper comes to mind. The Nobel Prize has (or should have) a much larger context than the isolated "art" of the recipient. The ethnic cleansing that was perpetrated by men like Milošević was utterly evil. The magnitude of that crime really means that there is no way to justify giving this award to this man without also endorsing all he said. The Nobel Committee was wrong and the arrogance of Handke is a true example of an arrogance that too many fashionable intellectuals take on as a cover for their own ignorance and biases.

People are complicated. All of us, even geniuses, believe stupid things, and do immoral things. Honoring people for their best should not mean endorsing their worst, just as censuring their worst should not blind us to their best. Reducing people into devils and angels does nothing, except blind us to our own contradictions.

Contrary to what Karl Ove Knausgaard implies, it’s actually not difficult at all to identify other authors who would be worthy Nobel laureates, particularly from outside of Europe. Off the top of my head, I can name three from Africa (Ngugi wa Thiongo, Nuruddin Farah, Tahar Ben Jelloun), three from Asia (Haruki Murakami, Bei Dao, Duong Thu Huong), and three from Latin/South America (Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska, Adelia Prado). There are also the poets Adonis (Syrian born) and Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados). Not to mention the Canadian Margaret Atwood. All of the above have surely been nominated. But the Swedish Academy, after saying they would be less Euro-centric, picked a European--one who eulogized a brutal despot and publicly claimed the Muslims of the former Yugoslavia ethnically cleansed themselves. And then they wonder why everyone's disappointed.

I spent two summers in Bosnia working with teachers who may have been suffering from PTSD shortly after the war. The teachers were traumatized. We visited Srebanica and saw the graves of the 5 thousand boys and men who were simply taken out and shot for no other reason than adhering to the Muslim faith. That this author won a Nobel Prize is making me ill, for what writer with any soul could defend that?

Undoubtedly he's great author, but I have to disagree with Mr. Herwig on at least one point. Defending dictators and genocide is neither arrogance nor defiance, it's evil.

His mother was not Slovenian, but Austro-Slovenian. There are a number of indigenous linguistic minorities in Austria, Austro-Slovenians among them.

Reading this defense of Handke is rather typical for what I would call the Yugo-nostalgia paradox. Mourning the idea of multicultural Yugoslavia by denying its peoples their will and their truth. And when that truth happens to be systematic mass murder, there’s no excuse in an idea no matter how noble.

Imagine, people are upset about opinions an author expressed outside of his worthy literary works, but meanwhile they are sitting idly by as a despotic so-called President does actual damage to them, the country and the world. Imagine what might be possible if they actually read.

Oh, the charming Austrians...

One of the greatest flaws in any society is an innate inability to appreciate the complexity of a situation and impose on it a simplified notion of right and wrong. In the Balkan conflict, is it really that easy to establish a definitive moral judgement if all we know about it has been filtered through layers and layers of lobbyist, pundits, the press, etc. ?

And today in the Hague Nobel Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi defended Myanmar against genocide appealing to a similar idea--intercommunal violence, a civil war, a sort of incomprehensible cycle reminiscent of the ancient hatreds Clinton referred to in describing Bosnia and the tribal conflicts of Rwanda. Handke can write what he likes but he chose to speak at Milosevic's funeral, and he also used his authority to affirm troubling mythologies that support denial in the Balkans and beyond. The question for me is why the Nobel committee would look the other way. We know from some reporting that some of the judges, in fact, were reading propaganda themselves. Truth matters. It should not be only up to the victims of mass violence to defend it.

A Nobel Prize may not be a guarantee of personal virtue; case in point, a truth denier or, at least, contributing to confuse fact with fiction, or trying to deny human violence occurring on account of prejudices and ethnic discrimination leading to the destruction of an entire group of people...just because somebody else didn't agree with it's culture. It has been said that a human brain is the most valuable asset in this universe...while, simultaneously, capable of the worst cruelties imaginable, based on biases he or she may not even be conscious about...until somebody or something makes us aware of our folly.

“I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes,” he said. “Leave me in peace and don’t ask me such questions.” Indeed. All you need to know in terms of his writing. As for politics, that is another matter altogether but that has nothing to do with his award. Certainly there are people who feel offended by his award but so be it, neither first nor last disappointment. And in all honesty, a fair part of the world may agree with him, the world is not only the Western countries and NYT is not the shining light for anything.

Behind all these flowery words, one fact shines brightly: Mr. Handke did not care about the suffering of the Bosnians. As written in the article he was rooted in Tolstoy, Homer and Cervantes. Perhaps he thought the Bosnians had no root with the culture the named authors represent, therefore they did not deserve empathy and justice.

I don't see many folks shunning Americans or America, and we're a country based upon genocide. (The Native American Indian population still living being the exception as well as the case in point.)

Thank you for your article and for mentioning our demonstration in Stockholm last night. I'm one of the organizers together with Teufika Šabanović who buried 36% of her father's remains in Srebrenica. Our dignified protest made news throughout Europe and is travelling on with the message that we will not let the raging industry of genocide denial and history revisionism be legitimized by Nobel's legacy and stand in the way of reconciliation. There were at least 1000 people who stood for 2 hours in the cold as the laureates had their dinner. I am immensely proud to have stood there with Roy Gutman and Florence Hartmann whose reporting saved many lives and for whose sake hundreds of survivors of concentration camps came from all over Europe. Yet, even these giants of journalism were overshadowed by the poignancy of the speech by the Mothers of Srebrenica and the stunning gesture by our own Swedish Christina Doctare who returned her Nobel medal in protest against the Swedish Academy. Christina was there with us even though she is still under threat for her testimonies in the Hague which made mass rapes a war crime. So many women from Srebrenica whom she took care of that July 1995 came to see her, hug her, talk to her, and she found time in the chaos of cameras to greet them again. She deserves to have her picture in your article. In the end, a man said to me, "You made it easier to be Swedish tonight." I hope we made it easier to be human again, to look for love again.

Is Handke the writer who would often repeat phrases or words one right after the other as a stylistic device in his fiction? Years ago I started one of these writings (in German) but gave up after a couple pages because of this annoying technique.

Kind of tough to be pointing fingers at someone like Handke or even the Swedish Academy when we elected Trump, who has done and is doing far, far worse things than Handke and getting rewarded for them and will continue to be rewarded for them for the rest of his life. In other words, you don't need to be a good person to be president, as someone recently pointed out, and you don't need to be a good person to win a Nobel prize, either. I think Handke should address his past with honesty and stop villifying the press. But he probably won't. Also, he is a European with a long and personal sense of European history, which already places him in a category unfamiliar to many Americans, whose sense of history is different, if it exists at all.

Well, Celine and Pound are still taught in English Literature courses.

It's a travesty that such an excellent writer abused his literary talent in the end to romanticize the sites and perpetrators of mass tortures, rapes, and massacres in order to process his childhood traumas. Handke's misdirected frustrations and ethical blindness inevitably compromised the value of his later works. And by perverting the function of great literature and art, he ruined his literary legacy.

If his crime is defending war criminals, and it seems that he is, then he is in good company with all who defend U.S. politicians and military personnel guilty of war crimes. Applying rules to some and not to others renders those rules worthless and void of moral content.

Well, he's definitely not merely a bigot; he's a moral monster. I have not read his literature but people who are qualified to make such judgments say he's a world class writer. If that's so, he would be far from the first such combination the world has known. If you despise his villainy but enjoy his writings, I will not condemn you. I may wait until he has shuffled off his mortal coil to read from his works, but I do not presume to claim that my choice is necessarily the best one. And after all, I do study many bigots of low literary merit who are politically important. I can defer Handke because politically he is unimportant.

Until now, I knew nothing of Handke's background, but I loved his book, "The Left Handed Woman".

What’s lost amidst most of this pseudo-criticism of Peter Handke is, it is rarely, if ever, about his works themselves. It is exclusively directed at opinions he has expressed or supposed stances he has taken outside of the actual literature for which he is being awarded the Nobel Prize. It is akin to people opining about the Mueller Report without actually having read it. Moreover, were one to actually judge Handke’s work as morally compromised, he or she would have Oscar Wilde to contend with, who said there was no such thing as a moral or immoral book. “Books are well written or poorly written. That is all.”

No. Just No. A writer, no matter how gifted, who uses their craft to seduce the reader into overlooking rank evil deserves no honor whatsoever. That should be non-negotiable. Big fat thumbs down to the Swedish Academy for their moral blindness.

well, the Nobel Peace prize has actually gone to real war criminals. just saying. at least Handle's a good writer

Speaking at Milosevic's funeral was an unforced error of the highest magnitude. But it is the Nobel Prize in LITERATURE, not the Nobel Peace Prize, which Handke won't be winning anytime soon. As a result, the work should stand on its own from the man.

There is one thing to remember about the Nobel Committees that make the awards. They proposed giving the Peace Prize to Hitler twice and never considered awarding it to Gandhi.

There's no excuse for a man who grew up in Austria and Germany during and immediately after World War II to end up praising a genocide and eulogizing a dictator.

Yeah: "Peter Handke, the Austrian author who was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, has been accused of falsifying history and praising war criminals..." Ya gotta HATE that.

I remember Handke's disgusting writings during and after the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. I am amazed that the Nobel Committee could not come up with some other deserving writer. There is always a choice. Handtke chose to stand with the murderers. Personally, I will not read his works again. This is a disgrace.

When you evaluate art by moral values you censor it.