To smell history

Muharem Bazdulj writes for Kosovo Online:

It’s book fair season, and people from all over have flocked to Belgrade. An acquaintance from Paris brought along a stack of French newspapers and magazines. Several of them carry ads and announcements for the "Rambouillet Fair," a kind of tourist event held from October 19 to November 3, focusing on the last night of October, known as "Halloween," and the first day of November, known as "All Saints' Day."

I think to myself, the bigger "Rambouillet fair" happened exactly a quarter-century ago, in 1999. This spring, the public recalled the beginning of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, but not so much the so-called "Rambouillet negotiations," in which the Western side presented Serbia with an offer reminiscent of the notorious ultimatum issued by Austria-Hungary in the summer of 1914.

I remember that, back then, German media criticized Peter Handke for going to Rambouillet during the negotiations, so I search through books to find how he responded. I find an interview with Wily Winkler in Süddeutsche Zeitung; the journalist is very direct and asks, "Why did you go to Rambouillet?" Handke doesn’t hedge: "Why not? Rambouillet is close to me; I just had to board a train. And I wanted to see what couldn’t be seen on television: diplomats, journalists, secret service agents. I wanted to smell them, just as I had regularly visited Yugoslavia in recent years. I felt a duty." When asked to whom he felt this duty, Handke explains, "To that problem, to the pain, to solving the problem."

As I read this, I think, although the interview is two and a half decades old, this is what has changed from World War II to today—writers today almost have to apologize for being writers. Kundera once said that a novelist is "an explorer of existence." In a certain sense, that applies to all writers. And how else could one explore existence but by considering all human possibilities? Literature and history owe Curzio Malaparte for his lack of squeamishness in sitting with people like Ante Pavelić and Hans Frank, among the most morally repulsive human beings recorded in history. That Malaparte would likely be "canceled" today.

Handke was not far from being canceled himself, but he was saved initially by his immense prior reputation, and ultimately by the Nobel Committee’s exceptionally courageous decision. Returning to the previously cited interview with Wily Winkler, the journalist, who is not unsympathetic to Handke, at one point doesn’t even bring up Handke’s literary vocation but rather the fact that he studied law, and from that angle asks him about the legitimacy of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. Handke replies, "For me, morality in this war has become another word for arbitrariness. I insist that the law should remain law, that rights must remain rights. Rights are the opposite of arbitrariness. Law regulates the minimum relations between people so that injustice does not happen to one person."

After twenty-five years, these words feel sobering, as they were spoken practically from within the storm. Everything that has happened since, from interventions in the Middle East to North Africa, confirms Handke’s thesis that morality has been used as an excuse for arbitrariness. He then returns to the specific case and says that the problem with Rambouillet was that no agreement was offered to the Serbs, not even an unfavorable one, but rather a brutal diktat. He also notes that the Austrian intermediary Wolfgang Petritsch personally told him, "It will be incredibly hard for the Serbs." Handke elaborates, "I thought, but the Serbs had already accepted a proposal for greater and broader autonomy for Kosovo, an autonomy that, under that proposal, was equivalent to statehood for Kosovo. It was only later that an additional clause to that agreement came to light. It was a terrible trick. I felt deceived, as I thought this was about peace, not about a diktat."

When controversies arose around Handke's views on the Yugoslav wars, some of his defenders used the argument of his supposed political naivety. They portrayed him as a kind of romantic incarnation of a poet, a burning bush through which divine inspiration speaks. In doing so, they denied him, I mean to say, the ability for analytical thinking. Revisiting this oft-cited interview from Süddeutsche Zeitung after more than two and a half decades, we see that this too was, in Handke’s words, a "terrible trick." Handke is simply a writer who wanted to smell history, and following that scent, he managed to reconstruct its directions and flows. If the Nobel Prize ended attempts to nullify the literary value of his work, it is not impossible that time, as a "master sieve," may also revise his political reputation.