Justice for Peter Handke?

This chapter re-examines the controversy surrounding the travelogue written by the Austrian writer Peter Handke about his journey through Serbia, published initially in Süddeutsche Zeitung in January 1996. It argues that the text has been consistently misread by critics who judged Handke to be defending the massacre of Bosnian Muslims. This reading argues that it is important to recontextualise Handke’s text as a contribution to a very specific debate taking place in Germany in the mid-1990s.