If Alain Finkielkraut found his pet nation among Croats, Handke found his among Serbs.
#BALKANSKA MEDJA ENGLISH FULL#
This was not the Serbia I had seen, a country humiliated by its leaders, isolated and drive to crime, full of people who could not effort to indulge in the Western phantasies of an authentic people, but who wanted to live. He transformed the hardship into one that was both only caused by the West and that was at the same time transforming Serbia into an antithesis of the West. Instead, he visited Serbia and saw a false idyll of rural calm where people could not drive a car because gas was scarce and that was reduced the basics. But this was not just the trap into which many unreflexives leftists fell, the trap anybody who claims the anti-imperialist label is good, anybody demonised by the West must be a hero. Even modest curiosity would prove that claim to be a sham. His unreflected nostaligia toward the old Yugoslavia made him fall for Milošević’s false claim to be the true heir to the country. For him, Serbia under sanctions, isolated and inward looking became a fantasy of the anti-West, how world could be. He responded with sometimes simplistic explanaitions of the wars with his own version, no better and often much worse.
However, when I read the text in a book before the reading, I was disspointed and disturbed. My travels had made me weary of the same lazy and stereotypical reports prevalent in the media that provoked Handke to write his essay, published earlier in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The refugees and debates in Vienna were a steady reminder of the wars. I had begun to travel to Croatia and Serbia three years earlier, made friends, read, studied the Yugoslavia and sought to learn what had happened. Having read Handke and admired his writing, it was hard not be excited. Twenty-three years ago, I sat with anticipation in the Vienna Akademie Theater to hear the reading of Peter Handke’s “Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Sava, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien”.
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