No Heine Prize for Handke

It was with relief that the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) registered the decision of the SPD, FDP and Greens in the Düsseldorf City Council to prevent the donation of the Heinrich Heine Prize to Peter Handke. "The mind boggles at the notion of rewarding the intellectual support of genocide", criticised the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch (at present in Erbil/Kurdistan) on Wednesday the vote of the independent Juy for the Austrian writer. "The scandal is made even greater by the intentional misuse of the name of one of the most important German poets, the Jew, Heinrich Heine." Precisely in Germany one ought to have more sensitivity for seeing that Handke´s "poetry" turns victims into riminals and criminals into victims. This was the charge brought against the jury, consisting of literature experts, members of the City Council and a representative of the province, which wanted to bestow on Handke the Heine Prize worth 50,000 euros. Handke has in the opinion of the GfbV turned himself into the "literary second of extreme chauvinism, so-called ethnic cleansing and genocide , also because he denied the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague the right to pass judgment on the Serb dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. In 1996 the GfbV charged the writer of ignoring all evidence for the genocide in Bosnia with 200,000 dead, some 20,000 raped women, with over 100 concentration and internment camps, as well as 324 mass graves which had by then been discovered. The human rights organisation published at the time under the title "The poet´s fear of reality" 16 contributions by writers, journalists and human rights experts**, who had reacted with indignation at Handke´s " Winter journey to the rivers Danube, Save, Morava and Drina or justice for Serbia". "The fact that civilians were for years enclosed, starved and shot at in Bosnian towns, some of which were declared UN protected areas, evidently leaves Handke cold", says the GfbV of Handke. Returning home from his "winter journey" he said: "The war, as served up to you by the media, was seen in a distorted way, you were the victims of a worldwide conspiracy of urnalists at the expense of the Serbs." The invitation of the GfbV to talk to the survivors of the genocide in Bosnia and visit the places where the massacres took place was turned down by the writer. A panel discussion at the theatre in Frankfurt with the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch, was broken off after the first few minutes by Handke because Zülch had raised the subject of the Serb concentration camps in Bosnia with the words: "Zülch, you arse-hole, the discussion is over." ** Die Angst des Dichters vor der Wirklichkeit ("The poet´s fear of reality" ) 16 answers to Peter Handke´s Winterreise nach Serbien ("Winter journey to Serbia") published by Tilman Zülch, Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 1996 with contributions by Peter Schneider, Marcel Ophuls, Dzevad Karahasan, Bora Cosic, Günter Kunert, Wolfram Schütte, Gustav Seibt, Thomas hmid, Ralf Caspary, Sonja Biserko, Wilfried F. Schoeller, Elisabeth von Thadden, Ed Vulliamy and Tilman Zülch.