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HANDKE MATERIAL ON THE WEB: http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/ [the American Scholar caused controversy about Handke, reviews, detailed of Coury/ Pilipp's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE, the psycho-bio http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE# http://www.handke-trivia.blogspot.com http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

Friday, December 3, 2010

AN OUT-TAKE OF AN EXCURSUS IN THE FULL-LENGTH REVIEW OF HERWIG'S BIOGRAPHY

 
















  
   

   Excursus NY Spring 1971
An Austrian Cultural Package Arrives for a 21 events in 28 days USA marathon...

By the time the Austrian threesome - Handke, Kolleritsch, Libgart Schwarz - arrived in New York in the Spring of 1971 I had been beseeched by Siegfried Unseld, as he does the Left-Handed Woman to become the Suhrkamp agent to replace the fine ex-Berliner Joan Daves, who had her nose full of that representation. See 
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.htm
for a detailed account of what transpired during the two years I endured working for the Obergauner and his Foreign Rights Hyena, Helene Ritzerfeld, also for the relationship with Farrar, Straus + Giroux.
I had managed to put Handke’s work over at Farrar, Straus with support from Susan Sontag – barely: had it not been for Robert Giroux realizing Handke’s talent that ass-licking stiletto man Michael DeCapua - as I will memorialize him justly in the annals of literature - would have had his way again and as he would have once more in the future and shot down another of my projects. KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS had been published, to some fine reviews, of as yet officially unperformed plays. I had given up my own royalties as translator to get two plays finally done, officially, at B.A.M. A clown named Schulz, a clown in every which way in American parlance and a clown suit made for him by his American hippie girl friend Barbara Becker [a.k.a. "Slave girl"] had appeared in my office who wanted to do them, since I had not gotten anywhere in a couple of years I had no reason to say no.
http://www.schulz-keil.faithweb.com/photo.html
Since Princeton 1966 [see Footnote for Princeton] I had seen Handke once more, in 1969, in Berlin, to discuss my translation of KASPAR ["more abstract, as abstract as possible" had been the author’s wish] and my heart had sunk at the prospect of finding the German originals for the quotes from American black mask type novels that DER HAUSIERER contains, I might have asked Handke whether he could help me find them. As it was, GOALIE was substituted for HAUSIERER in the contract I had drawn prior to becoming Suhrkamp agent and thus also Handke’s U.S. agent. I had translated GOALIE, too, by then.
 I had already run around town with a wild ex-pat troupe that had re-appeared from San Miguel de Allende with my friend the actor and writer Michael Locascio and a certain JB in whose scrawny arms “the Hammer” – Neil Cassidy - had expired one cold Mexican Tequila night on some railroad tracks - to give a hint of how relatively hardcore down-low hippie precincts we are now in - and will not except for mere mention indicate what the weed they brought with them elicited in me… - and arranged for one shot performances of PUBLIC INSULT and SELF-ACCUSATION at any venue that would have us, me and my trusty Sony tape recorder, weight about 20 pounds those days. I had worked with Herbert Berghof and E.G. Marshall at his HB studio on two two week performances of these plays and of KASPAR. E.G. Marshall! A memorably intelligent actor. NY was a fairly wide open town those days, it would become far more open in the next ten years. [FN-2]
In Berlin Handke had shown me Baby Amina as we left his dank prince’s apartment in the Uhlandstrasse, Adorno had told me of the ownership of this anything but princely rat hole, and I had thought it perfectly normal - look at Handke’s A CHILD’S STORY, a pretty good account [but for its leaving out the lay-a-broad’s womanizing or any real mention of the girl’s mother!] of those years that also touch on Berlin, and am I ever glad that I like little more than liebäugeln with babies - as compared to the revolutionaries who lacked time and interest for the like in their self-important endeavors. Handke’s “showing” and invariably wanting to go quickly outdoors [we worked at a table at an outdoor at my old familiar Ku-Damm] would eventually become to seem other than “normal.” I had also translated all of the early plays but for Quodlibet, which I would do a few years later during a half year’s trip half way round the world and back on the Hellenic Splendor.
    The Austrian Threesome appeared to think that the Suhrkamp Rep’s small apartment was their home away from home. Handke at once moved them out of the Austrian assigned hotel on Lexington Avenue into his there-after forever preferred New York abode, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Algonquin. Uwe Johnson would stay in the next door, far cheaper, Iroquois. I was beginning to learn the odd ways of the once fabulous seeming writers’ – who it turned out “all scratched themselves at the same spots” as did ordinary mortals - invariable eccentricities. We trouped to the premiere of what struck me as a barely good enough performance, the reviewers, Steve Kroll in Newsweek still comes to mind, seemed to like it fine, so did Mel Gussow at the NY Times. Not so Herr Handke who felt it was just as well it had been done in Brooklyn, of course how would he know that B.A.M. and being outside Manhattan was becoming an “in” thing. He went backstage and must have had unhappy words with the director, Wieland Schulz [passport name, a.k.a. Schulz-Keil.
for during our ride back to Manhattan, to Elaine’s, my home away from home since 1965 when it had just been a hole in the wall on Second Avenue, Handke said that he thought Schulz was very dark. When I, who had no particular reason to be apprehensive, questioned that assessment, Handke qualified himself by saying “at least very German.” I of course was keenly aware that Handke was a genius, but learned to appreciate his x-ray vision for character only with time; that he, too, would prove “very dark” and “very German”, differently of course and with that admixture of salvaging Slovenian Maria Sivec, and incomparable to the ultimate masochist Schulz whom John Houston sent to Mexico City to bring some real whores on to the set in Cuernavaca of Under the Volcano, proud of being a pimp, I could not imagine such perverse character structures at the time – live and learn, never live long enough - came as a surprise only because Handke’s genius had made me forget all about my initial 1966 impressions. Translating these works – challenging, but to understand them would take half a life time, to understand what genius can accomplish.
    I had not had time to attend rehearsals, the Jezebel, the only one who could have accomplished this, for whom I had broken out of a six year marriage, had had the part of the woman in Self-Accusation; however, Pamela Bellwood [King] who had been married to Peter Bellwood of The Fringe had got a good part, in the touring company of Butterflies Are Free I think it was, and had fluttered the coop [sorry I couldn’t resist], and had mentioned that the director shouted. What German director did not shout? – well, I never saw Herbert Berghof shout. It was a first alert, like others tucked away in the  underground storage bin. Handke I imagine was unaware of most of the preceding, and he never asked, as a matter of fact during the 20 years that the relationship translator author lasted he never asked the simplest of questions, such as where were you born, when did you get to the U.S., where did you go to school, whose parents child are you – and so I have to agree with Marie Colbin’s assessment that Handke is a one-eyed mono-maniac, entirely self-involved to which numerous documents testify that Malte Herwig provides in his MEISTER DER DAEMMERUNG, especially the letter to Siegfried Unseld seceding from Suhrkamp Verlag because Siegfried is also publishing the Reichs-Kanickel, and the lengthy diary complaint about Sophie Semin’s son from an earlier affair behaving as unselfconscious possessor of Handke’s space in his house in Chaville. I was never at ease with Handke even prior to what he did with my girlfriend Judith Thurman, and I don’t think just because I was awed by his genius, the early impressions that that then proved so premonitiously accurate [Footnote 1] I expect played into that, if there had been a chessboard out during my visits to Rue Montmorency in the 70s we might have gotten something on, those days when some of us at Elaine’s and the crossstreet bar Eric’s followed every move of Bobby Fischer’s championship games was the last hey-day of my chess. According to a letter Handke wrote to Kolleritsch [see their published correspondence] I was "pleasantly boring" - I imagine he could not imagine how boorish I found someone who didn't have a glass of water for a city walker who had walked some miles to his place and unless we went out really didn't seem to want his guest around for at most ten minutes. One must read WEIGHT OF THE WORLD and MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING to appreciate Handke's state of mind during those days after his mother had committed suicide and his insulted and neglected wife had split. - I was at ease and talkative as could be with no end of people but my then uncomprehended gut feelings made me freeze in the presence of murderers and major criminals. Schulz with his act of being one of the guys and saying “shit” at the right moment  - it took me a long time to admit that Handke had been right about him and in five minutes.
At Elaine’s it seemed perfectly normal, as though we had been flirting for a long time, for Libgart and me to play footsie and hold hands under Table 3 while the Bicyle-built-for-Two Kolleritsch-Handke was entwined intellectually. As we left Elaine’s Handke wanted to take a photo of the three of us, Libgart in the center. I realized by the way she moved my hand away from her tush and placed it around her right hip that she was a woman with finesse. I wanted to “walk back” – to the Algonquin, a mere two miles, but Handke was tired. I seemed to have lacked the finesse to instruct Libgart to spend an afternoon at “a hairdressers.” Either by that evening or subsequently, at the Austrian Institute, on its long winding staircase, I saw Libgart “perform” an entrance from that marvel THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE – I noticed how proud Handke was of her as a bewitching and light as air performer. That damned peripheral vision again! Within a day or so I gave a party at my three room apartment at 55th and 6th Avenue and invited two of Handke’s earliest American backers, the critics Richard Gilman and Stanley Kaufman, maybe a dozen people, no one from Farrar, Straus best as I recall, and it was when the two critics and Handke and I were a foursome, and Gilman who had noticed Handke’s use of Wittgensteinian [Philosophical Investigations] forms of querying language in RIDE [Gilman had not experienced a performance and so we, good friends to be, would forever argue about the irrelevance of Wittgenstein to what an audience undergoes as the ordinary logic of their word world is destroyed and they are set free], it may have been Gilman asking some lit-crit question along those lines that Handke dropped out down to the left and squatted down by my record player on the lowest shelf of a book case and put on a Beatles Record [?] that I subsequently realized something had been … too much… perhaps one of those episodes that he terms “autistic” to Herbert Gamper. The “dark fellow” with the Alan Ginsberg Karl Marx visage all the time stood by the window to the apartment building shaft into which I had once tossed my wedding ring. After everyone had left, it occurred to Handke, it was the first thing he said, to say that I had was gay. This might have made for more than an awkward moment, but Libgart who might have of course pointed to herself, quickly mentioned the also departed flaxen-haired beauty, Renate Karlin, who had had to leave to look after her two splendid kids. In retrospect what strikes me as odd about myself that here I am having this passionate affair with Renate, which founders on insane jealousy on my part, and I’d have been willing, money allowing, to run off with Libgart, to wherever. Handke would have had his breakdown a year or so earlier. Renate was a recently divorced professor of art at Sarah Lawrence, who could what my even harder working beautiful painter-illustrator teacher wife had been too stubborn and socially incompetent to do, .e.g. hold her own, and not be fazed by the tough talk at the so male oriented Table 4, the “big table”, at Elaine’s – it took very little really to be admitted to the circle if you were a woman, but only two other women come to mind who could handle it, Anthea Sylbert who was married to my close friend and author Paul Sylbert, and the woman who did the acrostics for the New York Magazine, Mary Ann Madden, and tended to hang with friend Tom Buckley, a New York Times reporter who had been in 'Nam, she had a touch of that forties hard drinking reporter gal about her that seemed to admit you to the male club. Renate was entirely feminine but smart, and charming, and had fine hind legs of her own. And yet… so much for my sainthood. Perhaps Handke still had Ginsberg’s pass at him via me of 5 years earlier in mind, or noticed that I held my cigarette the way my mother had. I might have pointed out to him that he had squatted down by my record player like a woman!
At the Threesome’s return from 21 cities in 28 days jaunt through the US, that is memorialized in SHORT LETTER, they seemed to have headed straight for my apartment, Fredi Kolleritch collapsed on what had been my marriage bed, tachycardia, Libgart, too, was exhausted and got to rest on the daybed in my work space, all I did was some liebaeugeln as Handke seemingly energized by the trip experience asked whether there were any international news stands about: indeed, he had come to the right area, both Rizzoli’s and a fancy hotel, the Carlton [?] had them and were within about a block. Had there been images of him in those pages? I failed to ask at his return. Oh yes, Handke asked me whether I could guess whose signature they had wheeled during a flight to Atlanta. I threw up my arms. Muhamed Ali’s on their way to Atlanta. What kids we all were, straight out of the Ride Across Lake Constance, not to forget its sinister bass line. Libgart and I continued where we had left off with our secret little touches and feelies - all this ever evoked from the twosome, it was Kolleritch who spoke up: "Libgart du bist so anders." Was she ever! Anyhow, I made her feel desired who had not been made love to since the birth of her daughter several years before. And so her finally leaving the monster came as no surprise to me.
    We also had lunch one time at the Russian Tea Room on West 57th, they had gone to see a musical play I think with Lauren Bacall in it, Handke was disappointed in her of whom he of course had those marvelous memories as a film actress. At one point we also met with the translator Joachim Neugroeschel, another mama's boy whose mother via the Austrian Institute had arranged for the meeting. Handke nearly threw up at the physical ugliness of Neugroeschel, whose character would turn out to match his physique. The people I was willing to put up with! Joachim was a pretty good translator, I used him a lot later at Urizen, and when I read my translations of INNERWORLD at the Goethe House asked him to join me with his Celan. There would be a second time that Handke nearly puked, at Barbara Rose as the then wife of the friend Jerry Leiber when I was working on putting some songs into THEY ARE DYING OUT, this was in Paris, at the Rue Montmorency. Her character, too, would match her physique, like her daughter, Rachel Stella by whom I would allow myself to be seduced in 1979 and have a great two old shoes year with until I had to make myself impossible at a time I could not have a lead shoe dragging on me, Barbara had been cute when young, but aged badly. Thus Handke's sense of the aesthetic and the moral seem to match. No wonder he sometimes is overcome with self-disgust.
Later, back on the West Coast in the 80s, I heard of Handke’s behavior at UC Riverside’s Austrian shin-dig, he had cursed everyone as idiots and gone off with a woman not his wife. Donald Daviau who ran that operation before he took Summers off to drive the USA in his Goldwing, of French Canadian working class origins, in many ways a splendid man, did not take kindly to Handke’s Tourettism, and it cost Handke a special issue of the magazine he edited.
FOOT NOTE [1]
 Allow me to put my initial impressions of Peter Handk in summary fashion, and let me start with my initial involvement with this great writer, “The first time I saw your face, so much like a fifth Beatle, wearing those gangsta shades” I suppose it would be in an Amurrican musical – at Princeton 1966. After Handke’s famous first major – quite a few prior minor ones in Austria - public performance at Princeton, and after the party that I and Jakov Lind and Pannah Grady gave for the Gruppe at Pannah’s splendid apartment in the Dakota
a complex most famous as the scene of the murder of John Lennon in fall 1980, I knew the following matters about Peter Handke:

1] That he was an exhibitionist – a matter   I knew not only from his first performance where he so famously attacked what had been read at the Gruppe meeting for being descriptively impotent – which his first novel, the 1964 DIE HORNISSEN certainly is not - but because Handke announced to West German media from the Empire State building that he was “the new Kafka.” We recall the first announcing that he was “the first.” And later Handke would confide the full extent of his exhibitionism to me. Handke has made a spectacle of himself – since age 2 says someone who had a number of affairs with single mothers whose children were none too happy to see Mommy in bed fucking someone else! Once analytically trained I became more discreet and aware, at least in that respect.
2] That he was a potential revolutionary who lacked deference for his elders, that he would break rules.

3] That here was a killer I noticed at the look that came over Handke’s face at the sight of a Max Frisch book lying on a display table as the assembled filed out of the hall. The look of murderous envy and ambition that passed over his face! Looks like that are not easily forgotten, but they can go underground. – Herwig’s MEISTER DER DAEMMERUNG contains Handke’s own admissions along those lines, unless you fail to glean so from his texts. Potentially a compleat psychopath if literature were not his salvation. He wanted to murder Marie Colbin we find out in Moravian Nights. Herwig’s book is complicitous with Handke in the way it elides Colbin’s famous set of charges, nor does Herwig call Handke when he lies to his face that he “maybe gave her a kick in the ass, I don’t know I may have slapped her too.” Handke is the man who once said that if he is caught out he will lie at once, and I don’t think he was lying when he said that. Sing sorrow! 

4] That as someone dressed like the fifth Beatle Handke might have an identity problems, “I want to be someone like someone else was once” – say Franz Kafka - that he was possibly modish, a photo model. http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#
5] That he had eye problems, as he mentioned to me the first time I, one of his hosts, talked to him, his glasses affording, seemingly, a better opening line than what was really on my mind – a set of specifics as to his charge at Princeton, and whose work did he really like, for example was William Faulkner a hero of his as he was of mine, I wanted to talk literature, after all this was a literature party and I did not know his work, but did of quite a few young Austrians at that point… What made him wear dark glasses even in well modulated lighting conditions of Pannah Grady’s multi-millionaire apartment where Pannah’s Beat writer friends would then smash some Persian vases. “Nausea of the eye balls.”  Eye problems. In The Lesson of St. Victoire Handke mentions occasional moments of total color blindness and is speculating whether anyone else in the family suffers the same, perhaps the trove of letters from Peter Handke to his biological father Schönemann that Herwig unearthed mention that. I once spent a week checking on this of the plethora of psycho-somatic symptoms from which Handke suffers or used to, did not reach a definite conclusion; hysteria is a frequent cause, but my guess is that the proverb “he saw black” might be most fitting in the case of someone who has half a dozen moments per day that he wants to run amok – what if we all did? - or a combination of hysteria and amok. Aside Handke's autistic episodes, hysteria and rage are the prime candidates for an explanation. It is one of a plethora of Handke's psychosomatic symptoms that fit the profile of someone who was exposed to traumatizing violent drunken primal scenes from age 2 until 12.  Handke’s Essay on Tiredness lists everything that used to make Handke tired and angry, or rather tired so angry. If Handke were entirely color blind he could of course not respond to Cezanne as he does, etc.

6] That he was a village sadist as my peripheral vision caught sight of the grin on his face as Alan Ginsberg asked me to translate that he wanted to fuck Handke. Ginsberg insisting to repeat this demand then elicited my rare steel blue Prussian dagger looks and Ginsberg backed off. I saw this dreadful self-advertizer only once more, at the end of my stint at the PEN central committee. Ginsberg wore tie and suit, another clown. Handke it turned out really did not have enough English at the time and thought it was I being propositioned, to put it mildly; a misunderstanding not cleared up until I paid Handke a visit on the Moenchsberg in 1980
The excess of sadism and the impulses to run amok, entitlement and feeling superior, I imagine play into these gratuitous injurious acts towards those closest to Handke. Masochism, an even more disgusting feature, although you may wish for it in this instance, I do not detect in our adventurer.

On the basis of Princeton and Pannah’s Party Handke I can’t say  was someone I was interested getting to know. Turns out he was an utterly confident fellow who on the basis of having written DIE HORNISSEN and PUBLIC INSULT had dropped out of law school and was announcing, as he would throughout his career, here I am, it’s me, I, Peter Handke-Sivec-Schönemann-Filip Kobal-Loser-Percival-Goethe-II! Of course there existed the possibility that he was more than just a show-off, that he really had something to show.

7] Reading Handke’s texts within the year, that is by 1968 I had read everything then published – a profusion of other plays and essays and the second novel, DER HAUSIERER, followed in short order - it dawned on me that there was more to this man than what I had seen and experienced at Princeton and in New York – and that he would then prove to be a true darling, not just the budding monster, came I imagine as far more of a surprise and of course so did his texts. Playing around with translating the first play texts to see who might be the right translator for him they proved so delightful, both serious and playful, that I decided to do them myself – and the world has not been the same since, my world.

8] That Handke could also be the most insulting person I have ever not kicked out of my house and life is due entirely to my always knowing that he was a genius. I am awed, up to a point. [see above]

9] That he could also be, especially at a remove, the most marvelous person I have ever met – was no doubt the biggest surprise of all, and which accounts, I expect, why his few loyal friends, all gratuitously injured over the years, bear with him and have not told him to go jump in a lake. But accounts for the fact that in the
70s in Paris he could write Kolleritsch: "Have not seen anyone the past ten days but the Portuguese cleaning lady." [It is understood that daughter Amina has to suffer her father always wanting to write and not taking her potty when she wants to go!]

10] That he would take my girlfriend and take her hard at the time and within a few weeks claim that he had not had any woman adventures – either points to his splitness, his ability to lie as Marie Colbin points out in her famous charge,
 
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,24228,00.html
or to dissociation, but it sure spooked me – on the other hand, the girlfriend the relationship with whom his act ruined, turned out to be a habitual liar, too.

11] That he threatened to abort a non-existent friendship when I fought, in a manner not to his liking, for what he said, at the time, was the best translation he had ever seen, of his greatest text, and the best collaboration I had had it was too, with him the “elbow holder,” WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, finally struck the kind of chord within me that said: “You know kid, aren’t we lucky, if Libgart and I had eloped as I would have with your so insulted and neglected and needy dazzling, rasante wife in 1971, and if you and Judith had not, aren’t we lucky – your work would not have found an equally fine translator responder.” Life with Peter Handke, two adventurers, meet and part. He has the talent, I have the sense of humor and am better at cards. Long distance shock administered from the St. Monica Mts. in 1986.

 [Footnote-2]
During the five years 1961 to 1966 before I got a job at Farrar, Straus I had not only been a scout in Germany but been a reader for a lot of U.S. publishers, for George Braziller’s Book Find Club, had been a reader for my friend the Trotskyite novelist Danny Gordon’s Columbia Pictures Reading Service, to which Publisher's Weekly supplied all publishers galleys in return for one page evaluation - Hollywood got the "story" outlines from Danny's readers. - The writer critic general darling, not a bad bone one of the few really good guys  Robert Phelps had proved to provide a whole new dimension to my appreciation of British and American literature. I was the Suhrkamp Scout in NY and so got to read a lot of wonderful things in manuscripts and got to know a lot of agents, my recollection of the aging emigre agents - Joan Daves, Max Becker, Robbie Lantz, Sanford Greenberger, Kurt Bernheim - continues to grow fonder. I had had a magazine,
 Metamorphosis whose publisher Michael Lebeck from one day to the next started to lift imaginary rocks in his head as he joined a Sufi sect, and that was that. Later I would inherit his apartment at 19th and 8th Avenue, but he had sold most of his books. When I got married in 1966 I gave the apartment to the fine translator from the French and Japanese, Lane Dunlo whom I came to know because he had left a huge window drawer full of books in the Hotel Chelsea, all checked out in his name from the New York Public Library. He had superb taste, and after reading
the trove I located him. This is the kind of incident that makes me believe one might write a novel called "Worm Holes".

I had translated quite a bit and wanted to stay out of offices of any kind. I had a contract to write a biography of the anti-Hitler conspirator Abwehr colonel Kurt Grosskurth, chiefly because both parents had been in the German resistance who had improbably survived, as had my grandfather four concentration camps, and Grosskurt seemed an interesting parallel to what might be transpiring in certain quarters of the US Army in the 60s, and though I eventually became disenchanted with Grosskurt, who did nothing more than toss a rock at the Reichs Chancellory and, sent to the Eastern Front, was captured at Stalingrad, and died a Russian P.O.W.,  as I did with the German resistance as a whole, I put in my 5 K advance’s research worth in D.C. and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich.




 

Monday, November 29, 2010

Excursus NY Spring 1971 The Austrian Cultural Package Arrives for a 21 events in 28 days marathon...

By the time the Austrian threesome arrived in New York in the Spring of 1971 I had been beseeched by Siegfried Unseld, as he does the Left-Handed woman – Herwig who quotes from LHW misses Handke’s succinct x-ray portrait of the great suitor - to become  the Suhrkamp agent to replace the fine ex-Berliner Joan Daves, who had her nose full of that representation. See 
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
\
for a detailed account of what transpired during the two years I endured, also for the relationship with Farrar, Straus + Giroux.
I had managed to put Handke’s work over at Farrar, Straus with support from Susan Sontag – barely: had it not been for  Robert Giroux realizing Handke’s talent that ass-licking stiletto man Michael DeCapua as I will memorialize him justly in the annals of literature would have had his way again and shot down another of my projects. KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS had been published, to some fine reviews, of as yet officially unperformed plays. I had given up my own royalties as translator to get two plays finally done, officially, at B.A.M. A clown had appeared in my office who wanted to do them and since I had not gotten anywhere in a couple of years I had no reason to say no.
Since Princeton 1966 I had seen Handke once more, in 1969, in Berlin, to discuss my translation of KASPAR ["more abstract, as abstract as possible" had been the author’s wish] and my heart had sunk at the prospect of finding the German originals for the quotes from American black mask type novels that DER HAUSIERER contains, I might have asked Handke whether he could help me find them. As it was, GOALIE was substituted for HAUSIERER in the contract I had drawn prior to becoming Suhrkamp agent  and thus also Handke’s US agent. I had translated that, too, by then.
 I had already run around town with a wild ex-pat troupe that had re-appeared from San Miguel de Allende with my friend Michael Locascio and a certain JB in whose scrawny arms “the Hammer” – Neil Cassidy - had expired one cold Mexican Tequila night  on some railroad tracks - to give a hint of how relatively hardcore down-low hippie we are now - and will not except for mere mention indicate what the weed they brought with them elicited in me - and arranged for  one shot performances of PUBLIC INSULT and SELF-ACCUSATION at any venue that would have us, me and my trusty Sony tape recorder, weight about 20 pounds those days. I had worked with Herbert Berghof and E.G. Marshall at his HB studio on two two week performances of these plays and of KASPAR. E.G. Marshall! A memorably intelligent actor.
 During the five years 1961 and 1966 that I got a job at Farrar, Straus I had not only been a scout in Germany but been a reader for a lot of US publishers, for George Braziller’s Book Find Club, had been a reader for my friend the Trotskyite novelist Danny Gordon’s Columbia Pictures Reading Service, Robert Phelps had proved to provide a whole new dimension to my appreciation of British and American literature. I was the Suhrkamp Scout and so got to read a lot of wonderful things in manuscript. I had had magazine, Metamorphosis whose publisher from one day to the next started to lift imaginary rocks in his head as he joined a Sufi sect, and that was that. I had translated quite a bit and wanted to stay out of offices of any kind.
In Berlin Handke had shown me Baby Amina as we left his dank prince’s apartment in the Uhlandstrasse, Adorno had told me of the  ownership of this anything but princely seeming rat hole,  and I had thought it perfectly normal -  look at Handke’s A CHILD’S STORY,  a pretty good account [but for its leaving out the lay-a-broad’s womanizing or any real mention of the girl’s mother!]  of those years that also touch on Berlin, and am I ever glad that I like little more than liebäugeln with babies -  as compared to the revolutionaries who lacked time and interest for the like in their self-important endeavors. Handke’s “showing” and invariably wanting to go quickly outdoors [we worked at a table at an outdoor at my old familiar Ku-Damm] would eventually become to seem other than “normal.” I had translated GOALIE by then, and all of the early plays all but Quodlibet, which I would do a few years later during a half year’s trip half way round the world and back on the Hellenic Splendor.
    The Austrian Threesome appeared to think that the Suhrkamp Rep’s small apartment was their home away from home. Handke at once moved them out of the Austrian assigned hotel on Lexington Avenue into his there-after forever preferred New York abode, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Algonquin. Uwe Johnson would stay in the next door, far cheaper, Iroquois. I was beginning to learn the odd ways of the once               fabulous writers’ invariable eccentricities. We trouped to the premiere of what struck me as a barely good enough performance, the reviewers, Steve Kroll in Newsweek still comes to mind, seemed to like it fine, so did Mel Gussow at the NY Times. Not so Herr Handke who felt it was just as well it had been done in Brooklyn, of course how would he know that B.A.M. and being outside Manhattan was becoming an “in” thing. He went backstage and must have had unhappy words with the director, Wieland Schulz [passport name, a.k.a. Schulz-Keil.
for during our ride back to Manhattan, to Elaine’s, my home away from home since 1965 when it had just been a hole in the wall on Second Avenue, Handke said that he thought                                   Schulz was very dark. When I who had no particular reason to be apprehensive questioned that assessment, Handke qualified himself by saying “at least very German.” I of course was keenly aware that Handke was a genius, but learned to appreciate his x-ray vision for character only with time; that he, too, would prove “very dark” and “very German”, differently of course and with that admixture of salvaging Slovenian Maria Sivic, and incomparable to the ultimate masochist Schulz-Keil whom John Houston sent to Mexico City to bring some real whores on to the set of Under the Volcano, proud of being a pimp, I could not imagine such perverse character structures at the time – live and learn, never live long enough - came as a surprise only because Handke’s genius had made me forget all about my initial 1966 impressions. Translating these works – challenging, but to understand them  would take half a life time, to understand what genius can accomplish.
    I had not had time to attend rehearsals, the Jezebel, the only one who could have accomplished this, for whom I had broken out of a six year marriage had had the part of the woman in Self-Accusation; however, Pamela Bellwood [King] who had been married to Peter Bellwood ofThe Fringe had got a good part, in the touring company of Butterflies Are Free I think it was, and had flown the coop, and had mentioned that the director shouted. What German director did not shout? – well, I never saw Herbert Berghof shout. It was a first alert, like others tucked away in the                                   underground storage bin. Handke I imagine was unaware of most of the preceding, and he never asked, as a matter of fact during the 20 years that the relationship translator author lasted he never asked the                                   simplest of questions, such as where were you born, when did you get to the U.S., where did you go to school, whose parents child are you – and so I have to agree with Marie Colbin’s assessment that Handke is a one-eyed mono-maniac, entirely self-involved which numerous documents that Herwig cites prove, especially the letter to Siegfried Unseld seceding from Suhrkamp Verlag because Siegfried is also publishing the Reichs-Kanickel, and the lengthy diary complaint about Sophie Semin’s son from an earlier affair behaving as unselfconscious                                   possessor of Handke’s space in his house in Chaville. I was never at ease with Handke even prior to what he did with my girlfriend Judith Thurman, and I don’t think just because I was awed by his genius, the early impressions that that then proved so premonitiously accurate I expect played into that, if there had been a chessboard out during my visits to Rue Montmorency in the 70s we might have gotten something on, those days when some of us at Elaine’s and the crossstreet bar Eric’s followed every move of Bobby Fischer’s championship games was the last hey-day of my chess. I was at ease and talkative as could be with no end of people but my then uncomprehended gut feelings made me freeze in the presence of murderers and major criminals. Schulz with his act of being one of the guys and saying “shit”
at the right moment  - it took me a long time to admit that Handke had been right about him in five minutes.
  At Elaine’s it seemed perfectly normal, as though we had been flirting for a long time, for Libgart and me to play footsie and hold hands under Table 3 while the Bicyle-built-for-Two Kolleritsch-Handke was entwined intellectually. As we left Elaine’s Handke wanted to take a photo of the three of us, Libgart in the center, and I realized by the way she moved my hand away from her tush and placed it around her right hip that she was a woman with finesse. I wanted to “walk back” – to the Algonquin, a mere two miles, but Handke was tired. I seemed to have lacked the finesse to instruct Libgart to spend an afternoon at “a hairdressers.” Either by that evening                                   or subsequently, at the Austrian Institute, I saw Libgart “perform” an entrance from that marvel TE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE on its long winding staircase – I noticed how proud Handke was of her as a bewitching and light as air performer. Within a day or so I gave a party at my three room apartment at 55th and 6th Avenue and invited                                   two of Handke’s earliest American backers, the critics Richard Gilman and Stanley Kaufman, maybe a dozen people, no one from Farrar, Straus best as I recall, and it was when the two critics and Handke and I were a foursome, and Gilman who had noticed Handke’s use of Wittgensteinian [Philosophical Investigations] forms of querying language in RIDE [Gilman had not experienced a performance and so we, good friends to be, would forever argue about the irrelevance of Wittgenstein to that], it may have been Gilman asking some lit-crit question along those lines that Handke                                   dropped out and squatted down by my record player on the lowest shelf of a book case and put on a Beatles Record [?] that I subsequently realized something had been … too much… perhaps one of those episodes that he tersm “autistic” to Herbert Gamper. The “dark fellow” with the Alan Ginsberg Karl Marx visage all the time stood by the window to the apartment building shaft. After everyone had left, it occurred to Handke to say that I had was gay. Libgart might have of course pointed to herself, but mentioned the also departed flaxen-haired beauty, Renate Karlin, who had had to leave to look after her two splendid kids. In retrospect what strikes me as odd                                   about myself that here I am having this passionate affair with Renate, which founders on insane jealousy on my part, and I’d have been willing, money allowing, to run off with Libgart, to wherever. Renate was a recently divorced professor of art at                                   Sarah Lawrence, who could what my wife had been too stubborn and socially incompetent to do, hold her own, and not be fazed by the tough talk at the so male oriented Table 4, the “big table”, at Elaine’s – it took very little really to be admitted to the circle if you were a woman, but only two other women come to mind who could handle it, Anthea Sylbert who was married to my close friend and author Paul Sylbert, and the woman who did the acrostics for the New York Magazine and tended to hang out with friend Tom Buckley, a New York Times reporter who had been in 'Nam, she had a touch of that forties hard drinking reporter gal about her that seemed to admit you to the male club. Renate was entirely feminine but smart, and charming. And yet… so much for my sainthood. Perhaps Handke still had Ginsberg’s pass at him via me of 5 years earlier in mind, or noticed that I held my cigarette they way my mother had. I                                   might have pointed out to him that he had squatted down by my record player like a woman!
  At the Threesome’s return from their jaunt through the US they seemed to have headed straight for my apartment, Fredi Kolleritch collapsed on what had been my marriage bed, Libgart, too, was exhausted and got to rest on the daybed in my work space studio, all I did was some liebaeugeln  as Handke seemingly energized by the experience asked whether there were                                   any international news stands about: indeed, he had come to the right area, both Rizzoli’s and a fancy hotel had them and were within about a block. Would there be images of him in those pages? I failed to ask at his return. Oh yes, Handke asked me whether I could guess whose signature they had managed to get during a flight. I threw up my arms. Muhamed Ali’s on their way to Atlanta. What kids we all were, straight out of the Ride Across Lake Constance, not to forget is sinister bass line.
    We also has lunch one time at the Russian Tea Room on West 57th, they had gone to see a play with Lauren Bacall in it, Handke was disappointed in her of whom he of course had those marvelous memories as a film actress. At one point we also met with the translator Joachim Neugroeschel, another mama's boy whose mother via the Austrian Institute had arranged for the meeting. Handke nearly threw up at the physical ugliness of Neugroeschel, whose character would turn out to match his physique. The people I was willing to put up with, Joachim was a pretty good translator, I used him a lot later at Urizen, and when I read my translations of                                   INNERWORLD at the Goethe House asked him to join me with his Celan. There would be a second time that Handke nearly puked, at Barbara Rose as the then wife of friend Jerry Leiber when I was working on putting some songs into THEY ARE DYING OUT, this was in Paris, at the Rue Montmorency. Her character, too, would match her physique. Thus Handke's sense of the aesthetic
and the moral seem to match. No wonder he sometimes is overcome with self-disgust.
  Later, back on the West Coast in the 80s, I heard of Handke’s behavior at UC Riverside’s Austrian shin-dig, he had cursed everyone as idiots and gone off with a woman not his wife. Donald Daviau who ran that operation before he took Summer’s off to drive the USA in his Goldwing, of French Canadian working class origins, and in many ways a splendid man, did not take kindly to                                 Handke’s Tourettism, and it cost Handke a special issue of the magazine he edited.


 

 




-- 
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Saturday, November 27, 2010

HANDKE STEINFELD INTERVIEW JUGOSLAVIEN

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/im-gespraech-peter-handke-du-mit-deinem-jugoslawien-1.1028957

Im Gespräch: Peter Handke Du mit deinem Jugoslawien

26.11.2010, 18:08 2010-11-26 18:08:10


Interview: Thomas Steinfeld

"Die Frage nach der Schuld teilt die Welt": Der Schriftsteller Peter Handke spricht über die Unmöglichkeit von Heimkehr - und erklärt, warum er 1996 zu Besuch bei Kriegsverbrecher Radovan Karadzic war.

Als Ende September "Immer noch Sturm" erschien, Peter Handkes Erinnerungen an seine Kindheit in Kärnten, wurde das Buch überall freundlich besprochen. Überlagert wurde die Rezeption indessen von der Nachricht, der Schriftsteller habe Ende 1996 den Führer der bosnischen Serben, Radovan Karadzic, besucht, als dieser schon per Haftbefehl gesucht wurde (SZ vom 30. Oktober). Grund genug, nach Erinnerung und Nachricht zu fragen. Das Gespräch fand am vergangenen Wochenende in Peter Handkes Haus bei Paris statt.
Peter Handke in Salzburg Bild vergrößern

"Immer noch Sturm" heißen Peter Handkes Erinnerungen an seine Kindheit in Kärnten. Der österreichische Schriftsteller war zuletzt in die Schlagzeilen geraten, als publik geworden war, dass er im Dezember 1996 Kriegsverbrecher Radovan Karadzic getroffen hatte. (© dpa)

SZ: Herr Handke, wenn Sie an Jugoslawien denken, an Ihre frühesten Erfahrungen mit diesem Land, woran denken Sie dann?

Peter Handke: Eher, als dass ich an etwas dächte, zeigen sich mir Erinnerungen: an meine Kindheit, an die Steiner Alpen, wie sie sich hinter der Grenze auftürmen. Ich erinnere mich an eine hohe Linie im Süden, stark und mächtig, an ein Massiv, das mittelalterlich wirkte, auf natürliche Weise romantisch. Ich habe mich nach diesen Bergen gesehnt, aus einer österreichischen Eingeschlossenheit heraus. Kärnten, und vor allem der Süden Kärntens, ist ja Grenzland, und das Deutschtum tritt dort aggressiv auf. Dort gab es, und gibt es noch, eine Naziwut wie selten irgendwo, und die Berge waren wie ein anderes Land, und diese Vorstellung war falsch und fruchtbar zugleich.


SZ: Sie sind dort aufgewachsen, in einer slowenischen Familie, von der man, nicht erst seit "Immer noch Sturm", Ihrem jüngsten Buch, den Eindruck haben kann, sie sei eine Insel gewesen in einer zumindest kulturell anders verfassten Umgebung.

Handke: Der Eindruck ist nicht falsch, diese Familie hatte etwas von einer Insel, auch wenn sie das Bild vielleicht selbst nicht erhob. Der Unterschied entsteht durch Sprachraub, durch den Zwang, Deutsch zu sprechen, durch einen landläufigen Rassismus, durch ein Bedrücken, das ein Anderssein auch verstärkt. Zur Insel gehört aber auch ein Mensch, der davon liebend erzählt, meine Mutter, wie sie von ihren beiden Brüdern berichtet, die im Krieg gefallen sind, auf deutscher Seite, für nichts und wieder nichts.

Einer der beiden, mein Onkel Gregor, war ein überzeugter Jugoslawe. Für mich ist er ein Märtyrer, ein Zeuge. Aber gleichzeitig ist es nicht so, dass da nur die Familie eine große Rolle gespielt hat. Da gab es auch die Religion, die Kirche, und die katholische Kirche ist im Süden Kärntens slowenisch. Sie hat mich gehoben, nicht die Politik, nicht die Zeitung. In meinem Heimatort ist der Pfarrer heute noch ein Slowene.

SZ: Aber da waren doch auch die Jahre, die Sie als Kind in Deutschland verbrachten, da war das Hochdeutsche, das Ihr Großvater nicht dulden wollte, da war auch das Internat.

Handke: Es wurde dadurch nicht einfacher. Es hat lange gebraucht, bis ich eine Ahnung davon erhielt, wo mein Rhythmus ist und wo meine Bilder sind. Das Internat zum Beispiel war eine von Priestern geführte Einrichtung, die Knaben vom Land aufnahm, aus ärmeren Familien, darunter viele Slowenen. Die slowenischen Jungen schlossen sich zusammen und sprachen untereinander slowenisch, und ich kam auch aus einer slowenischen Familie, beherrschte die Sprache aber nicht.

Ich war also noch verinselter, und ich wandte mich dann auch von dieser Welt ab. Das ging lange, bis zu meinem Aufenthalt in Amerika (1978, Anm. der Red.), bis zur "Langsamen Heimkehr" und dem Umzug zurück nach Österreich, nach Salzburg. Und dann war ich nicht mehr so halbherzig wie im Internat, sondern wollte Slowenisch lernen und übersetzte mein erstes Buch aus dieser Sprache, den "Zögling Tjaž" von Florijan Lipuš. Von ihm stammt übrigens ein herrliches Werk, der Roman "Boštjans Flug", 2005 auf Deutsch erschienen, ein außerhalb Sloweniens übergangenes Buch der Weltliteratur.

SZ: Sie nennen das Heimkehr, aber haben Sie das tatsächlich so empfunden, als Rückkehr an einen Ursprungsort?

Handke: Natürlich nicht so. Heimkehr gibt es nur im Buch, sonst nicht. Deswegen habe ich "Immer noch Sturm" ja auch nur so schreiben können, als Hellwachtraum, nicht wie Peter Weiss seine "Ermittlung" schrieb. Die Steiner Alpen, das waren weder die Berge Titos noch die des Königs. Ich sah nur das Land, als freies Land, und natürlich stimmt das nicht, aber es steht da, und so ist es wahrhaftig. Ich kehrte heim in eine Fremde.

Aber es gibt Landschaften, in denen ich mich für eine Weile heimisch fühlen kann, Alaska zum Beispiel, wo die "Langsame Heimkehr" beginnt, so verkommen und verlassen, wie es da manchmal ist. Der Yukon ist herrlich. Und auch in Chaville fühle ich mich manchmal zu Hause, aber weniger in meinem Haus als in einer der Bars am Bahnhof, wenn ich die Züge höre. Das ist dann ein relatives Zuhause, und das richtige bleibt im Buch.

SZ: Bleiben wir bei Immer noch Sturm. Darin spielen die Briefe der Brüder aus dem Krieg eine große Rolle. Sie werden vorgelesen. Und diese Briefe sind ja an ein Zuhause adressiert.

Handke: Ja, Feldpostbriefe gehen nach Hause, Briefe gehen überhaupt oft nach Hause, E-Mails gehen nicht nach Hause. Und wie die Briefe Gregors nach Hause gingen, mit den darin versteckten slowenischen Passagen, die dem Zensor entgingen oder die er nicht bemerken wollte. Ich hatte Grund zu träumen, was da hätte sein können und was da gekommen wäre.

SZ: In Ihrem Buch lassen Sie Gregor, der 1943 auf der Krim fiel, nach Hause zurückkehren und zu einem Partisanen werden, Ihre Tante Ursula ist bei den Partisanen, und auch der Erzähler scheint sich für sie begeistern zu können.

Handke: Die Kärntner Partisanen sind erst spät im Krieg aufgetreten, Ende 1943, Anfang 1944, und sie waren ganz auf sich gestellt, obwohl sie später von den Briten und von Titos Gruppen unterstützt wurden - trotzdem waren sie dann der einzige organisierte Widerstand auf dem Gebiet des deutschen Reiches. Die meisten von ihnen waren einfache Leute, Holzarbeiter, Fabrikarbeiter, oft slowenischer Abstammung, die vor dem Krieg im Kirchenchor gesungen hatten und meisten links waren, also Sozialisten und Kommunisten.

Nach dem Anschluss Österreichs von 1938 waren diese Menschen doppelt isoliert, politisch und sprachlich. Die ersten Deserteure verbrachten oft Monate allein im Wald, das Kämpfen mussten sie erst lernen, und es hat sie gepeinigt. Es gibt dazu ein eindrucksvolles Buch von Karel Prusnik-Gasper, das schon 1981 erschienen ist. Es heißt "Gemsen auf der Lawine", denn so mussten sich die Partisanen bewegen, wie Gemsen auf der Lawine. Es ist ihnen aber keine Gerechtigkeit widerfahren, von den Nachgeborenen der Nazis, die dann in Österreich und in Kärnten im Besonderen an die Macht kamen.

SZ: Allein um der Gerechtigkeit willen werden Sie aber nicht mit den Partisanen sympathisieren, und es wird auch nicht die Vision eines unabhängigen Kärnten sein, die Sie am Partisanen begeistert, oder ein erweitertes Slowenien. Warum tun Sie es dann?


Handke: Nein, ich will nicht an Staaten denken. Ich bin immer erlöst, wenn man anstatt von einem Staat von einem Land sprechen kann. Was mich an diesen Partisanen fasziniert, und das mag eine traumhafte Erfindung sein, das ist, dass sie nirgendwo mitmachen, dass sie Widerstand sind, weil sie das für sich für richtig halten, und dass sie sich dafür opfern. Diese Partisanen, sie haben gekämpft, weil ihnen nichts anderes übrigblieb, sie konnten nicht in ihren Erdlöchern bleiben, und dann sind sie aufgestanden, sind energisch geworden. Und das bringt mich auf den Weg, das ist ein Fluchtpunkt fürs Schreiben.

SZ: Wie ist es mit Titos Jugoslawien? Wie weit reichen da Ihre Sympathien?

Handke: Noch einmal, auch Jugoslawien ist für mich erst einmal das Land. Dann hat das Land eine Geschichte. Zu dieser Geschichte gehört zum Beispiel die Tötung von Tausenden von Zivilisten, darunter von mehreren hundert Schülern im serbischen Kragujevac, durch die Wehrmacht, im Oktober 1941, als Vergeltung für einen Partisanenangriff. Dazu gehört auch, dass nach der deutschen Kapitulation in Slowenien Zehntausende von Soldaten, Angehörigen der Heimwehr und Zivilisten hingerichtet wurden, die nicht auf Seiten Titos gestanden hatten.

Das weiß ich, das wusste ich immer schon, und immer habe ich Jugoslawien als ein Land des Schmerzes wahrgenommen, als ein Land des großen Leides. Österreich nehme ich nicht so wahr, da gibt es keinen solchen Schmerz. Dann kann man natürlich sagen, wie es viele heute tun, dass dieses ganze Unternehmen Jugoslawien von vornherein zum Scheitern verurteilt war, der Dritte Weg, Titos Sozialismus mit den Arbeiterkollektiven, mit seinen vielen miteinander verfeindeten Völkern, mit den großen Unterschieden in Reichtum und Armut. Das hat man aber von vornherein nicht gewusst, und dies war eine große Utopie, so wie Nehrus Indien eine große Utopie war. Und das hat mich beschäftigt, und es beschäftigt mich jetzt noch, in einem Maße, dass die Schwester in "Immer noch Sturm" zum Erzähler sagt: "Du mit deinem Jugoslawien."

SZ: Aber in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren hatte Jugoslawien doch, Ihren Werken nach zu urteilen, für Sie noch nicht diese Bedeutung besessen.

Handke: Nein, das kam später, mit dem Roman "Die Wiederholung", also Mitte der achtziger Jahre. Da ging es los, da bin ich viel gewandert, nicht politisch, sondern durch das Land auf der anderen Seite, zwei Monate lang, von Slowenien nach Dalmatien. Und auf gar keinen Fall wollte ich "Mitteleuropa" erschließen, in dieser Idee lag so viel Revanchismus. Stattdessen unternahm ich eine richtige Reise, und wenn Jugoslawien damals auch zugrunde ging, und das konnte man sehen, richtig sehen, so gab es doch erstaunlich viele junge Leute, die Jugoslawien behalten wollten. Das ist mir geblieben.

Eine Bedrohung habe ich am deutlichsten gespürt in Podgorica, in Montenegro. Und ich war mit den jungen Leuten, mit ihrem melancholischen, fast hoffnungslosen Enthusiasmus völlig einverstanden, denn was ist das schon, eine "Republik Montenegro"? Wenn alle Regionen anfangen, nur noch für sich zu handeln, dann verwandelt sich alles in Politik, dann ist nur noch Staat, dann ist kein Land mehr, dann ist alles Hass, die ganze Landschaft. Und überhaupt, dass viele Menschen miteinander zusammenleben, Serben mit Kroaten, Albaner mit Bosniern, das setzt ein großes Land voraus, das geht nicht in einem kleinen Zwangsstaat.

SZ: Ihre Sympathie für die Serben, genauer: Ihr Verlangen nach "Gerechtigkeit für Serbien" wirkte dann aber wie eine Rechtfertigung für Tyrannen und Kriegsverbrecher.

Handke: Ach, Unsinn, man muss nur Ivo Andric lesen, die "Brücke über die Drina", und man erfährt, was man über Jugoslawien, seine Völkerschaften und seine inneren Gegensätze wissen muss, und auch, was ein großer Staat für diese Regionen bedeuten konnte. Und man lernt nicht nur daraus, dass es eine Heimat nur im Buch geben kann, sondern auch, wie falsch die Frage nach der Schuld oft ist, vor allem, wenn es um so komplizierte Dinge geht wie um das Zusammenleben von Völkern.

SZ: Was ist falsch an der Frage nach der Schuld?

ANZEIGE

Handke: Die Frage nach der Schuld teilt die Welt, sie lässt keinen Platz mehr für das Fragen nach Gründen, für das Land, für die Leute, sie löst alles auf in einen Reiz und eine Reaktion und kennt nichts dazwischen, sie weiß nichts vom Recht im Unrecht und vom Unrecht im Recht. Das ist so schwierig, dem kann man nur durch die Fiktion gerecht werden, es geht nicht historisch oder journalistisch. Ich habe so schöne Sachen geschrieben, die "Morawische Nacht", und dann kommt irgendein politisches Ereignis, und das Buch ist weg. Stattdessen taucht so eine absurde Geschichte wieder auf wie die neulich, von meinem Besuch bei Radovan Karadzic im Dezember 1996, und alles bekommt einen falschen Schein.

SZ: Nun haben Sie gesagt, Sie seien bei ihm gewesen, um sich selber ein Bild zu machen, um dem Gerede der Medien den eigenen Augenschein entgegenzusetzen. Und ist deswegen nicht auch Ihr Lektor mitgekommen, weil Sie ihm zeigen wollten, dass die Wirklichkeit manchmal anders ist als das, was man sich so denkt? Aber wenn man Milosevic oder Karadzic besucht, dann begegnet man doch Politikern, also Staatsmännern und Kriegsherren, und nicht Landsleuten.

Handke: Selbstverständlich sind das Politiker, und sie führen Krieg, doch nicht einmal für sie gelten einfache Bestimmungen. Denn als ich sie traf, war ihre Macht ja schon im Schwinden, oder sie war gar nicht mehr da. Mich zieht das an, das hat etwas von Shakespeare, der Anblick von Macht im Augenblick ihrer Auflösung oder ihres Nicht-Mehr-Vorhandenseins. Dann befindet man sich da oben in Pale, in dieser hohen Landschaft, zwischen den verfallenden Einrichtungen der Olympischen Spiele von 1984, und in einer windschiefen Baracke, unter einem serbischen Adler, steht Radovan Karadzic. Er war ja die graue Eminenz der bosnischen Serben, aber es gab schon den Haftbefehl des Internationalen Gerichtshofes.

Getroffen habe ich ihn nach einer Vermittlung von Valentin Inzko, damals österreichischer Botschafter in Sarajewo und heute Sonderbeauftragter der Europäischen Union für Bosnien. Bei ihm habe ich während dieser Tage auch gewohnt, er half mir mit Passierscheinen. Und nicht nur Karadzic traf ich, sondern auch den serbischen General Jovan Divjak, der auf der Seite der Muslime, von Bosnien-Herzegowina, kämpfte. Der hielt mir, als er hörte, ich sei vorher in Pale gewesen, wütend die Faust vor die Nase.

SZ: Sie waren also nicht nur bei Karadzic, sondern haben eine Rundreise gemacht, von einer kriegführenden Seite zur anderen?

Handke: Ja. Eigentlich sollte ich auch noch den Großmufti von Sarajewo treffen, aber der hatte dann keine Zeit, weil er nach Brüssel musste. Der Großmufti schickte mir aber einen Koran. Wissen Sie, wenn Sie wirklich interessiert sind an einem Land, dann wollen Sie alles wissen. Deswegen will man den Augenschein, weil man hofft, auf ein Herz zu stoßen. Und es kommt noch etwas hinzu: der Wunsch nach einem höheren Maß an Wahrhaftigkeit, über die Schuldzuweisungen hinaus, und das schließt den Politiker ein. Bei all den "Experten", die über das zerfallene Jugoslawien reden, kann ich diese Wahrhaftigkeit nicht finden - schon im Wort "Balkanexperte" rieche ich die Tendenz und Ideologie. Das Wort gehört zu meiner Schimpfwörterlitanei.

SZ: Und?

Handke: Na ja, es wurde dann nicht so. Denn wenn ein Politiker sich bereit erklärt, einen Schriftsteller zu treffen, dann tut er das ja weniger, um mit ihm zu reden, sondern weil er sein Bild für die Nachwelt organisieren will. Das war bei Bruno Kreisky, einem anderen Politiker, den ich getroffen habe, als er keine Macht mehr hatte, nicht anders als bei Radovan Karadzic - oder bei Slobodan Milosevic, als ich ihn im Gefängnis in Den Haag besuchte. Ich wollte mit Milosevic über seine Familie sprechen, aber das hat ihn nicht interessiert, er wollte nur erklären, wer er selber eigentlich ist. So sind sie, sie wollen eine Chronik, und ich sollte der Chronist sein. Ich wurde nicht als der wahrgenommen, der ich bin, ich durfte nicht ich sein. Aber ich muss noch eines dazu sagen: Die Wahrnehmung dieser Leute ist manchmal schon sehr merkwürdig.

Da gab es zum Beispiel einmal einen bosnienserbischen Philosophen, einen Fachmann für den deutschen Idealismus, der dann zu einem scharfen Patrioten und Politiker wurde, im Krieg. Und wonach fragt er mich, als wir uns begegnen - ob ich ihm nicht helfen könne, den Wiener Herder-Preis zu erhalten, der ja für die Ehrung des europäischen Kulturerbes verliehen wird. Und dann denke ich mir: Ich will ja gar nichts erklären, dieses Jugoslawien ist eine unendliche Kettengeschichte, und keiner vermag sie ganz zu erzählen. Es sei denn, er verharmlost.http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

COLBIN UEBER HERWIG'S MEISTER DER DAEMMEUNG

http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/kultur/art16,510132


Marie Colbin: Gedanken zu Peter Handke

  Handke Colbin
Peter Handke und Marie Colbin im Jahre 1986  Bild: aus dem Buch »Meister der Dämmerung«; DVA

Die in Gmunden geborene Schauspielerin Marie Colbin, einst Lebensgefährtin von Peter Handke, hat für die OÖNachrichten die soeben erschienene Biographie über den österreichischen Autor gelesen. Ihre Eindrücke, vor allem jene über die Kapitel, in denen sie selbst vorkommt, hat sie exklusiv niedergeschrieben.

Lesen Sie mehr darüber am Dienstag im Kulturteil der OÖNachrichten

 

Stimme mit Colbin's Überlegungen überein. Herwig lässt Handke lügen trotzdem er doch selbst die Morawische Nacht gelesen. Stimme auch mit Colbins Wutausbruch aus dem Jahr  1999 ueberein
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,24228,00.html
in JEDEM einzelnen Punkt, tue das als Handke Expert
 http://www.van.at/lesen/set01/roloff01.htm
als erster Amerikanischer Uebersetzer all der frühen Stücke, bis Dörfer, Verleger, und der auch Regie führte bei den ersten Stücken. Handke ist ein großer Dichter der mir mehr Freude bereitet hat, mit seinen Schriften und
Stuecken, besonders in den letzten 25 Jahren, ansonsten steckt ein Teufel namens Bruno Handke in ihm, ein Psychopath. Herwigs Buch erfordert 10 Jahre Arbeit, nicht zwei, und als Kumpan des Protagonisten hat er wohl zufiel dessen Pilzsuppe gesoffen. Die Liebe die in Handke steckt fliesst von der schoenen Mutter Maria Sivic durch ihn, auch seine Depression.
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2010/11/variety-type-review-of-malte-herwigs.html

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Thursday, October 28, 2010

CALL FOR A HANDKE SYMPOSIUM



- Liebe Drs.Stocker & Raubacher & Mikl & Aichinger, et al,

Ich möchte mich bei Ihnen erkundigen ob die Möglichkeit besteht ein Handke's Symposium in der USA zu unterstützen,und zwar so dass es wahrlich des Dichters und seinem jetzt hinkenden Empfang in der Englischsprachigen Welt entsprechend groß aufgezogen wird, also nicht nur in den kleinkariertenBereichen der Germanistik verbleibt [vide Fußnote].

Ich kenne den Burschen seit seinem Auftritt in Princeton in 1066, das Werk ist groß, wie bei uns allen hinkt es manchmal
an der Person an dem mehr als allzu Affenhaften!
Nachdem ich für Handke seinen Amerikanischen Verlag gefunden und ihn übersetze kam es so, dass er michdann wirklich zu interessieren anfing als ich mich psychoanalytisch in Los Angeles schulte... und sein groesstes
Werk UEBER DIE DOERFER unter ganz besonders stuermischen Umstaenden uebersetz hatte... und jetzt habe ich Verbindung mit vielen Handke
Wissenschaftlern. 

What makes Handke's work important for me and raises it out of the above-mentioned confines is thatit renovates the great tradition of prose writing,Goethe, Stifer, Eichendorf in the German realm, Flaubert, Robbe-Grillet, in English Hardy, Virginia Woolfe, the Joyce of Dubliners, and introduces the filmic element as only a progressive genius could who needed to make contact in that fashion, writing in dream syntax, the grammar of the primary system to put it in Freudian/ Lacanian terms...
and to do so as a virtuous ... as though he was Franz Lizt... I sure didn't think my fifth Beatle was that much of a genius. Handke interest the once Brechtian me because he has completed Brecht's work of creating an anti-Aristotelian catharsis, subliminally, sleight of hand man that he is, in works such as THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE and THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT EACH OTHER... thus such a symposium might have one of his great
as yet unpremiered in English plays - THE ART OF ASKING,[whose translation needs serious revision], or Scott Abbott's first rate translation of VOYAGE BY DUGOUT:
THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR as a central focus, or, since to organize such an event takes a few years, perhaps his it appears marvelous STILL STORM will have found the proper translator by then.

Zeljko Djukic did a first rate performance of HOUR at his Tutato Theater in Chicago - he is aware of the expense of hiring actors adequate for THE ART OF ASKING. Steve Pearson
did a first rate HOUR at the University of Washington's  School of Drama in the mid 90s; he is now in charge of the theater program at the University of South Carolina.

Seattle and its University would not be a good venue for such a symposium I am afraid. As a visiting scholar for ten years I was unable to drum up interest, even from someone who claimed
to be a Stifter specialist; Herbert Blau who was associated with Jules Irving when RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE premiered at Lincoln Center in 1971 had not interest in discussing with
me my rakes progress. When I tried to organize a Handke theater festival toward the late 90s with some left over Handke theater people from the now defunct EMPTY SPACE THEATER, and the
Austrians promised to support this venture to a very considerable hilt, the still chair of the theater department, Sarah Nash Gates,
behind our backs, killed the project - provincialism and philistinism and all its
pettinesses prevail among the local banana slugs. Kurt Beattie now head of A CONTEMPORARY THEATER here, Seattle's own Kaspar, at EMPTY SPACE, made a lot of promises and overtures - these  have come to nothing; so did Richard White's promise at Cornish to seriously consider VOYAGE BY DUGOUT - HE was too busy giving away arts funds for matters that are never heard or seen outside these precincts.

Thus Chicago might be an interesting venue. Yale did Handke'sTHEY ARE DYING OUT in 1979 but have not worked their way into doing far greater work since.

A symposium such as this will also produce an interesting volume of essays that someone might want to publish.
Lots of marvelous Handke's things have not been done by his mediocre US publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux -
which actually is now owned by Holzbrinck!

Wenn Sie mein Resümee betrachten erscheine ich Ihnen vielleicht als Wahloestreicher -  weil ich einige Jahre in  einem alten Kloster in Vornbach am Inn in wahrlich Stifterischen Witikow Zuständen versteckt überlebte
- 1942-1944 - während die Eltern als Wiederstaendler
mit der Gestapo zu tun hatten]

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

Hoping for serious consideration and the start of a conversation
I remain very truly yours, 

 


--  

>
> MICHAEL ROLOFF
>
> http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
>
> Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

>
> This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
>
>  The Hubs, the Navel to Todos Handke!
>
http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

Monday, October 25, 2010

A SUMMARY LETTER TO JONATHAN GALASSI OF FARRAR, STRAUS RE HANDKE PUBLICATION HISTORY I N THIS COUNTRY.


Dear Jonathan Galassi,

To summarize my findings on the publication
history of Handke in this country,
as I am winding down my 25 year + Handke project.

The idea of a Handke Reader, to make up for the mediocre way he has been published, has found all around approval.
Suggested introducers have been made.

If you seriously entertain such a project
I suggest you also consult first rate Handke scholars whom I cc herewith:
Fabjan Haffner, also in charge of Musil Institute in Klagenfurt, and author of a wonderful book on Handke's, how shall I put it, "Dalmatian" side; Karl Wagner in Zurich whose collection of writings on Handke have just been published; Hans Hoeller [whose marvelous piece on Handke's THE CUCKOOS OF VELICE HOCA I will send you]; Georg Pichler whose piece on Goethe and Handke  I have on the scholar site. That way you will be in very sound hands. David Coury, Frank Pillip who edited a volume of essays on Handke's work
for Ariadne Press are not complete idiots.

I reiterate my extreme unhappiness with your decision to pass on Handke' KALI [The Saltworks] on the basis of Krishna Winston's
ignorant and megalomaniac advice. Krishna came in on the death of Ralph Mannheim with the translation of the third of the THREE
ASSAYINGS [as I call them], she did not know of Handke as of Adam until then, and has not troubled to read what came before; even
if she had, her opinion that in KALI Handke is repeating himself, is utterly off the wall. First of all, Handke NEVER repeats himself,
it is one of his pride of prides! And KALI is one of his MOST DIFFERENT prose works - if only in that it has TWO CHARACTERS, that is, it is not a book in which he devises a personae  for his consciousness, or if he does in a very different fashion; artistically it is a kind of filmed opera,and in its exploration of the salt mine it is fascinating on that level; and is also a great act of narration.
 Thus, to take recourse to a translator albeit a professor of German for an evaluation of a text such as this, far more perfect formally than MORAWIAN NIGHT, smacks of the same old
amateur time that prevailed when I set out at FSG in 1966, very green behind the ears, no more now. And Krishna wants some time off from translating... and meanwhile thinks she
is the only one. Alas.

Something else that occurs is that a Paris Review interview with Handke on his prose would certainly bring the so severely dropped ball a bit back up in an area where Handke needs to be
discussed. I suggest James Woods for this, in tandem with perhaps the Handke friend and translator Scott Abbot, who is a professor
at Utah, and adventurously inclined to have re-walked Handke's  tour in THE REPETITION, and along on one of those famous Yugoslav
jaunts of Handke's and close friend with his Serbian translator.
Two interviewers as in two detectives etc. are better, and I noticed that Klaus Kastberger & Elisabeth Schwaegerle did a better job
than usual in their interview for the Klastberger edited volume of essay and primary material FREIHEIT DES SCHREIBENS, devoted to Handke, that Zsolnay put out this year. Another possibility is also the fine novelist James Krusoe, who knows Handke's work and has a drift on how and why it works.

Such an interview, focusing on Handke's achievements and innovations in prose is worth doing, if only since prose writers on the order
of Goethe, Stifter, Flaubert do not come around all that often.

Let us all recall Roger Straus' early letter to Siegfried Unseld where he says he has a problem called Handke. That was after Handke had been
collected into Two and Three by Handke and done by Avon and Collier Books, after the New Yorker had run THE LEFT HANDED WOMAN in its entirety, and a huge edited excerpt from THE REPETITION....but FSG waited about 10 years before publishing the successor novel A SLOW HOME COMING, and in tandem with two autobiographical text, confusing the'
reception and readers, say like that heavy headed mind, Kunkel.

And passed on the centrally important WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES and all the other great plays, far greater and more or at least equally important than what had come before, KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS, [Steve Wasserman, who then was in charge of Hill & Wang/ Noonday Books shares some of the blame, or is it the quarterly return to whose ravages...] went through a couple of dozen editions; RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE + OTHER PLAYS sold out, not reprinted. Despite the success of WEIGHT OF THE WORLD, FSG passed on its successor volume THE HISTORY OF THE PENCIL that might have alerted Handke's audience and the occasional half awake reviewer how Handke worked and planned as an artist. Meanwhile Scott Abbott's first rate translation of VOYAGE BY DUGOUT: THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR still has not a publisher in this country; nor have I been able to find a university press to do a fairly
complete edition of Handke's "Dalmatian" texts - so that that long episode can be taken out of the rumor mill of this forever dark age. Seagull/U. of Chicago is doing Handke's  UNTIL THE DAY US PART, his parallel text to Beckett's KRAPP'S LAST TAPE, meanwhile all the money mongering and all the uglinessess that prevail among humans are still with us.
Anyhow, I have had my say and that is all I can do.Hoping that you had a successful Frankfurt Book Fair.
Truly yours

 


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MICHAEL ROLOFF http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name exMember Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben] contact via my website http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html