A dead chicken in my chest

‘Suddenly, in the midst of all the people who crowded around me or spoke to me, I felt as if there were a dead chicken in my chest.’ This is Peter Handke - avant-garde writer and film-maker born 80 years ago today - writing in a diary he kept in 1976 during the early years of his literary fame in Austria. In recent years, he has courted much controversy by defending Slobodan Milošević, nevertheless, very recently, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Peter was born on 6 December 1942 in Griffen, then in the German Reich province Gau Carinthia, now in Austria. His Slovenian mother married Bruno Handke, a tram conductor (not Peter’s father), with whom she lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin in 1944, and where she had two more children. In 1948, they moved back to Griffen. Peter was sent to a Catholic boarding school at Tanzenberg Castle. After high school in Klagenfurt, he began to study law at the University of Graz in 1961. There he teamed up with the Grazer Gruppe, an association of young writers, which published their own works in an avant-garde literary magazine -  manuskripte. He abandoned his studies in 1965 after the German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag accepted his novel Die Hornissen (The Hornets).

Handke came to public notice as an anti-conventional playwright with Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) in 1966; several more plays - lacking conventional plot, dialogue, and characters - followed. In 1970, he published what would become his best known novel, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick). After leaving Graz, Handke lived in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Kronberg, Paris, the US (1978 to 1979) and Salzburg (1979 to 1988). Since 1990, he has lived in Chaville near Paris.

Handke collaborated with director Wim Wenders on several films, including writing the script for Wings of Desire, and he has also directed films, including adaptations from his novels. In 1978, The Left-Handed Woman was nominated for the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival and it won the Gold Award for German Arthouse Cinema in 1980. From around 2006, Handke’s literary renown has been overshadowed by his public support for Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Yugoslavia accused of war crimes who died that year in a prison cell. 

The controversy surrounding Handke was rekindled in 2019 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literatur - even though four years earlier he had called for the prize to be abolished. The Swedish Academy chose it for being ‘an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience’. Further information on Handke can be found at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The New Yorker, or in the Nobel Prize’s biobibliography.

In 1984, Secker & Warburg published Handke’s The Weight of the World (as translated by Ralph Manheim). This is described as: ‘A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records - both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations - the details of Handke’s daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977.’ The book offers ‘a complete offering of Handke’s moods and insights, ranging from the outrageous, sarcastic, and bitter to the humorous and gentle’. But, it continues, ‘it is not, in the end, a retreat into himself, but a gesture of friendliness towards the world’.

Here is more from the publisher’s blurb: ‘Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke's passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death. Aspiring to a condition of “strained attentiveness”, Handke cultivates privacy and solitude, and deplores the all-too-frequent intrusion of the media (“Down with the news!”). His goal is to have a kind of creative “worksheet”, a vehicle through which he can preserve and explore sources of aesthetic inspiration, and also to have a place where he can “practice reacting with language to everything that happens”, a means of discovering a “universal moment of language”.

The Weight of the World can freely borrowed to read online at Internet Archive. Here are several extracts.

1 March 1976
‘Suddenly, in the midst of all the people who crowded around me or spoke to me, I felt as if there were a dead chicken in my chest

This evening I got back from Austria and Germany. Suddenly, at the dark Porte de la Muette on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, it seemed to me that my life - a kind of second, secret biography - was simultaneously continuing back home in southern Carinthia, continuing very concretely before the eyes of the villagers, and that my body at that moment was painfully, yet almost consolingly stretched over the length and breadth of Europe, that I became a standard of measurement and lost myself’

12 March 1976
‘Waking from sheltered sleep: like being tripped up while taking a quiet stroll

Waking with the thought that I’ve strangled the child; not daring to reach out and touch her; at last a sigh beside me

Ruins of memory: I try to remember the details of places, houses, faces, and all I see is ruins

Powdered sugar on my shoes from eating doughnuts (Austria)

The sensation of moving about like a sleeper who wants to look at the clock and in his dreams does indeed keep looking at the clock (because he has to get up soon), but never actually does look at the clock

If I could only look calmly at someone who hates me

A beggar holds out his hand in front of me and I shake my head angrily because he has put me into such a situation (other people just turn away in indifference)

People who have what’s needed for every emergency: umbrella, aspirin, etc.

A girl who for once does not ooze tears in that well-behaved way but lets the corners of her mouth droop and bawls out loud

The salesgirl in an empty shop that stays open at lunch hour is dreamily munching a sandwich (I wrote this outside the open shop door, which someone closed at that very moment)

The teacher who had just taken the children to the farm show (bus ride, street crossings) told me she was always in a bad humor on days when she was going to have to take the children out; at the beginning of the school year, she said, she refused to take them anywhere until she knew all about each one of them, their way of walking, etc.

The sheep at the farm show breathed mechanically, like pumps: it’s their sense of doom that turns them into machines 

“What would you like to accomplish by writing?” - “To make people laugh and cry” (I imagine being able to say such things in all seriousness)

Years ago, someone said the nice thing about me was that I had no habits. And now?

People are always claiming to be a mixture of “good and bad”; as for me, I am either all good or all bad

Nice, seeing my child with other children, as if she belonged with them

That day a pale, solemn, unknown child came in out of the rain with other children, and I didn’t recognize her as my own: horror, and at the same time marvel’

14 October 1976
‘Fantasy: an express train thundering through the suburban station; someone running ahead of it but refusing to scream

On the street today, the feeling that many people knew “who I am” but passed by without a thought of betraying me; some even tried to reassure me with a quick glance

The leaves racing over the ground; impression of a cavalcade, especially when I climb steps to reach the park where the leaves are blowing; there’s one place where the leaves disperse in all directions, leaving a clean empty circle in the middle of the park

How much more domesticated I am, after all, when I’m talking to someone than when I’m roaming around alone! (Fantasy: unaware that I’m watching them, some people, including my calm friends, made almost unrecognizable by their adventurous loneliness, race through the cities of the world with wild, glaring eyes)

Toward midnight, objects, seen out of the corners of my eyes, are starting to crawl again’