Peter Handke an adversarial talent and controversial Nobel laureate
over 4 years in The guardian
Since his 1966 debut The Hornets, the Austrian playwright and author has tested, inspired and shocked audiences
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It was, undoubtedly, Peter Handke’s years as a law student in Graz that made him such an adversarial talent. Instead of pursuing those petty courtroom battles, he broke off his legal studies and began a literary career full of confrontation. His generation had so much to argue with. Unlike German language authors before him, such as Günther Grass and Heinrich Böll – the latter Handke vehemently spoke out against when he burst onto the scene with his 1966 debut novel The Hornets – Handke seemed to pick a fight with language itself. For him, and his contemporaries Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, the entire German language bore the stain of Nazi abuse and needed to be recovered, word by word.
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