Session 3: Contemporary European Political Dimensions

2nd Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Monday 16th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Peter Handke: ‘The Moravian Night’; or the Request for Forgiveness
Cornelia Caseau

Department of Languages and Cultures, ESC Dijon, Burgundy School of Business, France

The famous Austrian writer Peter Handke, born in 1942 in the region of Carinthia (who lived in Salzburg from 1979 to 1987), has been particularly present in the European media in the past few years. His provocative statements about the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and his pro-Serbian position shocked even his most ardent admirers.

As a result of the Slovenian origin of his mother’s family and the location of his birthplace near the former Yugoslav border, he often went to former Yugoslavia and wrote down his impressions. His relation to this country was very personal and sentimental, so it was natural, that he could not remain silent during the bombardments of Serbia by NATO in the 90s. The publication of his book Winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina. Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (A Journey to the Rivers. Justice for Serbia.) in 1996, where he asked for justice for the Serbian people led to a political scandal, because the Serbians were generally considered the perpetrators of all the troubles in the Balkans. The most controversial moment, however, was the meeting between Handke and Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, who was prosecuted by the International Court of Justice, and the delivery of a speech during Milosevic’s funeral ceremony in 2006.The crimes of the so called ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ are considered unpardonable, and in defending him, Handke tarnished his own reputation.

However, at the beginning of 2008, Handke published a long narration, entitled Die Morawische Nacht. (This book has not yet been translated but the English title could be ‘The Moravian Night‘.) Over one entire night, Handke himself, in the person of a former writer, assembles some friends on his houseboat on the river Morawa in the last Serbian enclave of Porodin. He narrates his recent trip through Europe and at the same time remembers the most important moments of his life. The literary and poetic reflections reveal a self-questioning author who begins to recognize his human, political and artistic errors. For all his faults he seems to request forgiveness which is granted to him at least in a dream by his dead mother.

First, my paper will show, what crimes does he reproach himself for and do others accuse him of. Second, it will analyse how and to whom, in this narration and in his public speaking, he asks for forgiveness. Who grants him forgiveness and who refuses it and for what reasons? In which way can his poetic work, in opposition to his political publications, serve as a catalyst for forgiveness? In the last section the paper will make a comparison between Peter Handke and Günter Grass: two writers attacked for their contested political activities.

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During the last decade, the phenomenon of publicly confessing past wrong-doings by official representatives of their communities/ states has become an increasingly relevant element in official relationships between communities. Such forgiving ceremonies act as cultural practices through which the audience – the victims, the asking community and the global public – have to be convinced that the perpetrators’ confession of guilt and plea for forgiveness is sincere in order to restore a shattered relation. This paper investigates the shady sides of such practices by elaborating the ‘judge-penitent discourse’. Here, confessing wrong-doings is self-righteously instrumentalised in order to claim that we, the confessing in-group, learnt the lessons from history. In contrast, the judge-penitent constructs the out-group as not having learnt the lessons from the past. The paper illustrates this subtle strategy of positive self and negative other representation by outlining the development of the Israeli-German relationship since 1945 which subsequently enabled the construction of the United States of America as morally inferior to Germany.

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This cross-sectional study investigated whether quantity and quality of contact and intergroup threats would predict out-group trust and forgiveness among Croats and Serbs in Croatia and Serbia. The study aimed to replicate and extend the structural model for out-group trust found in Northern Ireland by Tausch et al. (2008). It was demonstrated that contact quality predicted intergroup anxiety and threat to the in-group, directly predicted out-group trust and forgiveness, and indirectly predicted out-group trust and forgiveness via intergroup threats as mediators. Contact quantity predicted intergroup anxiety and out-group trust, whilst total threats to in-group predicted out-group trust and forgiveness, whereas intergroup anxiety was not a predictor of out-group trust and forgiveness. We postulate that since previous research has argued that it is possible to forgive without trusting, out-group forgiveness could be easier to achieve than to restore out-group trust in post-war communities like the Former Yugoslavia. Moreover, this study showed that intergroup threats are perceived differently by the two nations in the two countries under investigation, which has a bearing upon how reconciliation should be encouraged between these different groups. These findings are discussed against the background of current intergroup relations in the Former Yugoslavia, and policy implications are noted.