Peter Handke

Peter Handke
Handke in 2006
Peter Handke
Born	6 12, 1942
Birthplace	Griffen, Reichsgau Carinthia, German Reich (now Austria)
Nationality	Austrian
Occupation	Novelist, playwright, translator, poet, screenwriter, film director
Known for	Offending the Audience, Kaspar, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Wings of Desire (screenplay)
Education	University of Graz
Awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (2019), Georg Büchner Prize (1973)

Peter Handke (Template:IPA-de; born 6 December 1942) is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter whose work has shaped German-language literature for more than half a century. Born in the small Carinthian village of Griffen during the Second World War, Handke rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a provocative voice of the European avant-garde, challenging theatrical conventions and the assumptions embedded in everyday language. His body of work spans dozens of novels, plays, poems, essays, and screenplays, and addresses themes including the deadening effects of ordinary language, the irrationality underlying routine existence, and the nature of perception itself. In 2019, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." The award proved divisive, reigniting scrutiny of Handke's public statements regarding Serbian nationalism during and after the Yugoslav Wars, which drew condemnation from writers' organizations and survivors' groups.

Early Life

Peter Handke was born on 6 December 1942 in the village of Griffen in Carinthia, which at the time was part of the Reichsgau Carinthia within the German Reich (present-day Austria). His mother, Maria Handke, was of Slovenian descent, a background that would prove formative in his later literary and political consciousness. His biological father was a German soldier; his mother subsequently married another man, Bruno Handke, who raised Peter as his own. The family's circumstances were modest, and Handke grew up in an environment shaped by the aftermath of the Second World War and the cultural tensions between the German-speaking and Slovenian-speaking populations of Carinthia.

Handke's childhood in rural Austria left a lasting imprint on his literary imagination. The landscapes, rhythms, and social textures of small-town life recur throughout his fiction and dramatic works. His mother's life—marked by hardship, limited opportunity, and the constraints placed on women in rural Austrian society—became one of the central subjects of his writing. Her suicide in 1971 prompted him to write the novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), a spare, controlled meditation on her existence and death that remains one of his most acclaimed works.

As a young man, Handke demonstrated an early aptitude for literature and intellectual inquiry. He attended a Catholic boarding school before enrolling at the University of Graz to study law, though his interests increasingly gravitated toward literature and the literary circles forming in the city at that time.

Education

Handke studied law at the University of Graz, where he became involved with the literary scene developing in the Styrian capital during the early 1960s. He became a member of the Grazer Gruppe (Graz Group), an association of Austrian authors that served as an important incubator for experimental and avant-garde writing in the German-speaking world. Through this circle, Handke connected with other young writers who were questioning the conventions of postwar Austrian and German literature. He also became associated with the Grazer Autorenversammlung, a broader assembly of authors based in Graz.

Handke did not complete his law degree. By the mid-1960s, he had abandoned his legal studies to devote himself fully to writing, a decision that proved consequential when, in 1966, he burst onto the international literary scene with a dramatic public intervention at a meeting of the literary organization Gruppe 47 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Career

Early Plays and the Avant-Garde (1966–1970)

Handke's literary career began with a provocation. In 1966, at a meeting of Gruppe 47—the influential postwar German-language literary circle—the then-23-year-old writer delivered an excoriating critique of the assembled authors, accusing them of "descriptive impotence" and a failure to interrogate the nature of literary language itself. The intervention brought Handke immediate notoriety and positioned him as a leading figure of the German-language avant-garde.

That same year, Handke's play Offending the Audience (Publikumsbeschimpfung) premiered. The work dispensed with conventional plot, character, and setting; instead, actors directly addressed the audience, analyzing the nature of theatre itself and alternately insulting and praising the audience for its "performance." The play was a sensation and established Handke as one of the most radical theatrical voices in Europe.

In 1967, Handke followed with Kaspar, a play inspired by the historical figure of Kaspar Hauser, the mysterious young man who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828 having apparently grown up in isolation. In Handke's version, the play explores how language shapes and constrains identity. The protagonist begins with a single sentence and is gradually socialized—and, in the process, deformed—through the acquisition of language. Kaspar became one of the most performed German-language plays of the late twentieth century and cemented Handke's reputation as a dramatist of major significance.

These early works established the thematic territory that would preoccupy Handke throughout his career: the relationship between language and reality, the ways in which habitual speech patterns and social conventions obscure authentic experience, and the possibilities of literature to disrupt routine perception.

Novels and Prose Works (1970s–1980s)

Handke's transition to prose fiction during the early 1970s produced several of his most enduring works. The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, 1970) tells the story of a former goalkeeper who commits a seemingly unmotivated murder and then drifts through the Austrian countryside in a state of dissociated awareness. The novel's flat, detached prose style—what critics have described as "ultra objective" and "deadpan"—was a deliberate literary strategy, mirroring the protagonist's estrangement from language and meaning. The book was later adapted into a film directed by Wim Wenders in 1972, marking the beginning of a productive artistic collaboration between the two.

Following his mother's suicide in 1971, Handke wrote A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück, 1972), a novella that reflects on her life and death with controlled precision. The work traces Maria Handke's biography—her upbringing in rural Carinthia, her constrained existence as a woman in Austrian provincial society, her periods of hope and resignation—while simultaneously interrogating the author's own capacity to represent her experience in language. The novella is frequently cited as one of Handke's finest achievements and as one of the outstanding examples of autobiographical prose in twentieth-century German-language literature.

The Left-Handed Woman (Die linkshändige Frau, 1976) continued Handke's exploration of alienation and inner life through minimal, observational prose. The story follows a woman who abruptly asks her husband to leave and then attempts to construct an independent existence. Handke later directed a film adaptation of the novel himself.

During this period, Handke also co-founded the Verlag der Autoren, a publishing house in Frankfurt owned and operated by its authors, which represented a significant experiment in the economics of literary publishing in the German-speaking world.

By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Handke's prose grew increasingly expansive and meditative. Works such as Slow Homecoming (Langsame Heimkehr, 1979) and The Repetition (Die Wiederholung, 1986) moved away from the spare minimalism of his earlier fiction toward a more lyrical, contemplative mode, drawing on landscape, memory, and the experience of place. The Repetition in particular explored Handke's maternal Slovenian heritage and the landscapes of the Carinthian-Slovenian borderland.

Collaboration with Wim Wenders

Handke's collaboration with the German film director Wim Wenders produced several notable works of cinema. Handke wrote the screenplay for The Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung, 1975), a loose adaptation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship set in contemporary West Germany.

Their most celebrated collaboration was Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987), for which Handke co-wrote the screenplay. The film, set in a divided Berlin, follows two angels who observe the lives of the city's inhabitants; one of them falls in love with a human trapeze artist and chooses to become mortal. Handke contributed the film's poetic narration, including the "Song of Childhood" that opens the film, a meditation on perception and innocence that begins: "When the child was a child, it walked with its arms swinging..." Wings of Desire won the Best Director award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival and became one of the defining European films of the late twentieth century.

Handke also directed several films himself, including an adaptation of The Left-Handed Woman (1978) and The Absence (Die Abwesenheit, 1992).

Later Prose and Continued Output (1990s–2020s)

Handke remained prolific through the 1990s, 2000s, and into the 2020s, producing novels, essays, journals, and dramatic works at a steady pace. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus, 2000) is a novel that explores themes of alienation, longing, and the nature of truth through the journey of a pharmacist from Salzburg who embarks on a surreal odyssey.

The Fruit Thief (Der Obstdiebin, published in English translation by Krishna Winston) continued Handke's characteristic approach to narrative—beginning, as the author often does, with a man going out for a walk—and unfolded into a meditative, expansive exploration of landscape, encounter, and observation.

In a 2025 interview with Le Monde, Handke, then in his eighties, reflected on his relationship to writing and mortality, stating: "To die in the middle of writing a book, that would be magnificent!" The remark was characteristic of Handke's temperament: blunt, elliptical, resistant to the conventions of literary self-presentation.

Controversy over the Yugoslav Wars

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Handke became a subject of intense public controversy for his writings and statements regarding the conflicts that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia. In 1996, he published A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien), a travelogue-essay in which he questioned Western media coverage of the wars and expressed sympathy for Serbia. The work was criticized for what many readers and commentators characterized as a minimization of Serbian atrocities, including the Srebrenica genocide.

Handke attended the funeral of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević in 2006, a gesture that drew widespread condemnation from human rights organizations, writers' groups, and political figures across Europe and beyond. His public support for Serbian nationalism during and after the Yugoslav Wars became inseparable from debates about his literary legacy.

In 1999, as a protest against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Handke returned the prize money associated with the Georg Büchner Prize to the German Academy for Language and Literature.

The controversy resurfaced with particular intensity when Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. PEN International, the global writers' organization, issued a statement through its president Jennifer Clement calling the decision "regrettable and distressing to victims." Several countries, including Albania, Kosovo, and Turkey, boycotted the Nobel ceremony. Other writers and intellectuals defended Handke's literary achievement while distancing themselves from his political positions, or argued that his Serbian writings constituted a legitimate, if deeply flawed, exercise in questioning dominant narratives.

The controversy has ensured that critical assessment of Handke's work remains entangled with questions about the moral responsibilities of writers and the relationship between literary art and political engagement.

Personal Life

Handke has lived in several European countries over the course of his life, including Austria, Germany, and France. Since the late 1980s, he has resided primarily in Chaville, a commune in the western suburbs of Paris. He is known for his reclusive habits and his resistance to the rituals of literary celebrity. In interviews, he has frequently expressed discomfort with discussing his writing in conventional terms, preferring oblique or paradoxical formulations.

His mother, Maria Handke, whose life and death profoundly influenced his literary work, committed suicide in 1971. Handke has addressed this event directly in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and has returned to it, in various oblique forms, throughout his subsequent writing.

Handke's maternal Slovenian heritage has been an important element of his identity and his literary exploration of Central European history, language, and landscape, particularly in works such as The Repetition.

Recognition

Handke has received numerous literary awards and honors over the course of his career. In 1973, he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious literary prize for German-language literature, given by the German Academy for Language and Literature. He later returned the prize money in 1999 as a protest against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

In 2019, the Swedish Academy awarded Handke the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing his "influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." The award was among the most contested in the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature. While the Swedish Academy praised the breadth and originality of his literary achievement, the decision drew strong criticism from human rights organizations, writers' groups, and the governments of several nations that had been affected by the Yugoslav Wars.

PEN International described the choice as "regrettable and distressing to victims" and called attention to Handke's record of statements regarding the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Other literary organizations and individual writers offered more nuanced assessments, acknowledging the controversy while affirming the significance of Handke's literary contributions.

Handke has also received numerous other prizes and honors throughout his career, and his works have been translated into dozens of languages. His plays, particularly Kaspar and Offending the Audience, remain staples of European and international theatre repertoires.

Legacy

Peter Handke's influence on German-language literature and European letters more broadly is substantial. His early plays helped redefine the possibilities of the dramatic form, stripping away conventional narrative elements and foregrounding the materiality of language itself. Offending the Audience and Kaspar have been performed and studied around the world and are regarded as landmarks of postwar European theatre.

In prose, Handke's contribution lies in his sustained interrogation of the relationship between language, perception, and experience. His novels and novellas—from the forensic minimalism of The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick to the expansive meditations of his later work—represent a distinctive strand of European fiction that insists on the primacy of observation and the inadequacy of habitual modes of description.

His collaboration with Wim Wenders, particularly on Wings of Desire, extended his literary sensibility into cinema and contributed to the development of European art film in the 1970s and 1980s.

At the same time, Handke's legacy is inseparable from the controversy generated by his statements and writings on the Yugoslav Wars. Critical engagement with his work now routinely addresses the tension between his literary achievement and his political interventions, and the question of how—or whether—these dimensions of his public life can be separated has become a persistent feature of scholarship on his writing.

As Ruth Franklin wrote in The New Yorker in 2022, Handke stands as "literature's most controversial Nobel laureate," a designation that speaks both to the power of his writing and to the unresolved debates it continues to provoke.