Peter Handke — the Nobel laureate who stood by the Serbian people

Peter Handke, one of the most significant European writers of the second half of the 20th century, was a voice that dared to speak differently at a time when almost the entire West was silent or applauding the NATO bombing of Serbia. The Austrian writer, playwright and screenwriter, later winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2019), spent years defending the right of the Serbian people to truth and dignity.

A journey of justice

Handke began touring Serbia and the Serbian communities in Bosnia and Croatia as early as during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. What he saw on the ground differed from the picture conveyed by the Western media. He wrote the controversial book „A Winter's Journey to the Rivers Danube, Sava, Morava and Drina" (1996), in which he questioned the one-sided picture of the Serbs as the sole culprits for the Yugoslav wars.

When NATO began the bombing in 1999, Handke visited Serbia during the war. He walked the streets of Belgrade as the sirens wailed, talked to people in shelters, observed the ruins. What he saw strengthened him in his conviction that an injustice was being committed against the Serbian people.

A voice in the wilderness

Handke's public statements against the NATO bombing cost him dearly. The Western media, fellow writers and the cultural elite turned their backs on him. Theatres cancelled his plays. Critics called him „Milošević's apologist" and a „genocide denier" — epithets that were unjust and simplistic, but that followed him for years.

Handke said: „I am not defending any government. I am defending the right of a people not to be bombed. I am defending the right to a truth that is not black and white."

His words were uncomfortable for the West because they questioned the narrative on which the entire NATO intervention was based — the narrative of the Serbs as the sole culprits and NATO as the rescuers. Handke did not claim that the Serbs were innocent of everything — he claimed that the picture was far more complex than it was portrayed and that the bombing of civilians is never justified.

The Nobel Prize and the controversy

When Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019, the controversies flared up again. Representatives of Albanians, Bosniaks and part of the Western public protested, while the Serbs celebrated. Handke was restrained at the award ceremony, but did not retract any of his earlier statements about Serbia.

For the Serbian people, the Nobel Prize for Handke was a symbolic confirmation — that it was not madness to defend the truth, that conscience has value and that history in the end always sets itself right.

The legacy of an intellectual

Peter Handke was not a politician, a soldier or a diplomat. He was a writer — a man of words. And he used those words to say what many did not dare to. At a time when NATO was bombing Serbia with the full support of Western public opinion, an Austrian writer stood up and said: „This is not just."

For this, many turned their backs on him. But for the Serbs, Handke remains a bright point in the darkness of 1999 — proof that even in the West there were people with a conscience. Lest it be forgotten.