A winter trip to the rivers Danube, Save, Morawa and Drina or Justice for Serbia

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Book cover of the first edition by Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996.

A winter trip to the rivers Danube, Sava, Morawa and Drina or Justice for Serbia is a travel report by Peter Handke published in 1996 . In it he describes his impressions of the country, landscape and people on a trip to Serbia in the late autumn of 1995.

content

In the first third of the 136-page book, Peter Handke deals with the background of the trip and the media portrayal of the Yugoslavia conflict , with particular emphasis on the attitude of French philosophers such as Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy . He then describes his impressions of the country, landscape and people on a trip to Serbia in the late autumn of 1995. The author wrote the book within three weeks in Chaville near Paris , where he and Sophie Semin met for a second after the divorce from his first wife Libgart Schwarz Times married. The book begins with the words: " For a long time, now for almost four years, since the end of the war in Eastern Slavonia, the destruction of Vukovar, since the outbreak of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I had planned to go to Serbia ." Following its publication, a controversial discussion about the book developed.

resonance

The debate about the content of the book found reverberation when Handke waived the Heinrich Heine Prize (City of Düsseldorf) in 2006 after a public dispute over the question of whether he would comply with the condition of the statutes, which was ostensibly formulated in Heine's sense fulfill, which demands of the award winner "to promote social and political progress, to serve the international understanding or to spread the knowledge of the togetherness of all people". Among other things, Carolin had described Emcke as unworthy of this literary award with reference to the book. In 2009 the historian Kurt Gritsch published the book Peter Handke and "Justice for Serbia". A reception story in which he u. a. took the view that Handke had primarily tried to "dissolve the media-fueled enemy images against the Serbs" in his work.

Even before the book was published by Suhrkamp Verlag , the text appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1996 , which published it again against the background of the debate about the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature for Peter Handke in 2019 "For reading".

expenditure

  • Peter Handke: A wintry journey to the rivers Danube, Save, Morawa and Drina or Justice for Serbia . Suhrkamp Verlag , 1996

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Der Spiegel : Poet's Winter Journey - Peter Handke's Serbia report and the intellectuals viewed on December 9, 2010
  2. Handke debate: Attempt on the successful war crime , SPON of June 4, 2006
  3. Peter Handke's travelogue "Justice for Serbia" , Part I and Part II , Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 19, 2019.