Epic Tradition of Peace: The Storyteller Peter Handke

Abstract

The epic rediscovery of the world that Peter Handke’s journals and travelogues strive for is based on a poetics of conscious romanticization. By turning to the overlooked monuments of everyday life, to patterns and forms, colors, smells, sounds, and gestures, Handke’s texts practice aesthetic resistance to the omnipresent signs of political power and authority. However, it is precisely this emphatic promotion of literature’s capacity for peacemaking that makes it clear that the horror of history cannot simply be ignored. Handke’s writing is, after all, very much marked by the wars of the twentieth century, the consequences of which his narrators experience again and again as a deprivation of reality and language. Meanwhile, Handke also scrutinizes the aspirations and limitations of his own aesthetics: Is it even possible to make peace “exciting”?