Peter Handke facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Peter Handke
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Handke in 2006
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| Born | 6 December 1942 Griffen, Gau Carinthia, German Reich (now Austria) |
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| Education | University of Graz |
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| Spouse | Sophie Semin (since 1995) |
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Peter Handke (German pronunciation: [ˈpeːtɐ ˈhantkə]; born 6 December 1942) is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Handke is considered to be one of the most influential and original German-language writers in the second half of the 20th century.
In the late 1960s, he earned his reputation as a member of the avant-garde with such plays as Offending the Audience (1966) in which actors analyze the nature of theatre and alternately insult the audience and praise its "performance", and Kaspar (1967). His novels, mostly ultra objective, deadpan accounts of characters in extreme states of mind, include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970) and The Left-Handed Woman (1976). .....
A dominant theme of his works is the deadening effects and underlying irrationality of ordinary language, everyday reality, and rational order. Handke was a member of the Grazer Gruppe (an association of authors) and the Grazer Autorenversammlung, and co-founded the Verlag der Autoren publishing house in Frankfurt. He collaborated with director Wim Wenders, and wrote such screenplays as The Wrong Move and Wings of Desire.
In 1973, he won the Georg Büchner Prize, the most important literary prize for German-language literature. In 1999, as a protest against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Handke returned the prize money to the German Academy for Language and Literature. Handke has drawn significant controversy for his public support of Serbian nationalism in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars.
Contents
Life
Early life and family
Handke was born in Griffen, then in the German Reich's province Gau Carinthia. His father, Erich Schönemann, was a bank clerk and German soldier whom Handke did not meet until adulthood. His mother Maria, a Carinthian Slovene, married Bruno Handke, a tram conductor and Wehrmacht soldier from Berlin, before Peter was born. The family lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin from 1944 to 1948, where Maria Handke had two more children: Peter's half-sister and half-brother. Then the family moved to his mother's home town of Griffen.
In 1954, Handke was sent to the Catholic Marianum boys' boarding school at Tanzenberg Castle in Sankt Veit an der Glan. There, he published his first writing in the school newspaper, Fackel. In 1959, he moved to Klagenfurt, where he went to high school, and commenced law studies at the University of Graz in 1961.
Handke's mother took her own life in 1971, reflected in his novel Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams).
After leaving Graz, Handke lived in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Kronberg, Paris, the U.S. (1978 to 1979) and Salzburg (1979 to 1988). Since 1990, he has resided in Chaville near Paris. He is the subject of the documentary film Peter Handke: In the Woods, Might Be Late (2016), directed by Corinna Belz. Since 2012, Handke has been a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is a member of the Serbian Orthodox church.
As of early November 2019, there was an official investigation by the relevant authorities into whether Handke may have automatically lost his Austrian citizenship upon obtaining a Yugoslav passport and nationality in the late 1990s.
Career
While studying, Handke established himself as a writer, linking up with the Grazer Gruppe (the Graz Authors' Assembly), an association of young writers. The group published a magazine on literature, manuskripte, which published Handke's early works. Group members included Wolfgang Bauer and Barbara Frischmuth.
Handke abandoned his studies in 1965, after the German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag accepted his novel Die Hornissen (The Hornets) for publication. He gained international attention after an appearance at a meeting of avant-garde artists belonging to the Gruppe 47 in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1966. The same year, his play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) premiered at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, directed by Claus Peymann. Handke became one of the co-founders of the publishing house Verlag der Autoren in 1969 with a new commercial concept, as it belonged to the authors. He co-founded the Grazer Autorenversammlung in 1973 and was a member until 1977.
Handke's first play, Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience), which premiered in Frankfurt in 1966 and made him well known, was the first of several experimental plays without a conventional plot. In his second play, Kaspar, he treated the story of Kaspar Hauser as "an allegory of conformist social pressures".
Handke collaborated with director Wim Wenders on a film version of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, wrote the script for Falsche Bewegung (The Wrong Move) and co-wrote the screenplay for Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) including the poem at its opening and Les Beaux Jours d'Aranjuez (The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez). He also directed films, including adaptations from his novels The Left-Handed Woman after Die linkshändige Frau, and The Absence after Die Abwesenheit. The Left-Handed Woman, was released in 1978 and was nominated for the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978 and won the Gold Award for German Arthouse Cinema in 1980. Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide's description of the film is that a woman demands that her husband leave and he complies. "Time passes... and the audience falls asleep." Handke also won the 1975 German Film Award in Gold for his screenplay for Falsche Bewegung (The Wrong Move). Since 1975, Handke has been a jury member of the European literary award Petrarca-Preis.
In 2019, Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."
Awards
- 1973: Georg Büchner Prize
- 1987: Vilenica International Literary Prize
- 2000: Brothers Karić Award
- 2002: America Award
- 2002: Honorary Doctor, University of Klagenfurt
- 2003: Honorary Doctor, University of Salzburg
- 2008: Thomas-Mann-Preis
- 2009: Franz Kafka Prize
- 2012: Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis
- 2014: International Ibsen Award
- 2018: Nestroy Theatre Prize for Lifetime Achievement
- 2019: Nobel Prize in Literature
- 2020: Order of Karađorđe's Star
- 2021: Order of the Republika Srpska
- 2024: Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold with Sash for Services to the Republic of Austria
Works
Handke has written novels, plays, screenplays, essays and poems, often published by Suhrkamp. Many works were translated into English. His works are held by the German National Library, including:
Prose fiction
- 1966 Die Hornissen (The Hornets), novel
- 1970 Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), novel and screenplay of the film The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1972)
- 1972 Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (Short Letter, Long Farewell), novel
- 1972 Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story), memoir
- 1975 Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (A Moment of True Feeling), novel
- 1976 Die linkshändige Frau (The Left-Handed Woman)
- 1979 Langsame Heimkehr (Slow Homecoming), start of a tetralogy of stories, including Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (1980), Über die Dörfer and Kindergeschichte (1981)
- 1983 Der Chinese des Schmerzes (Across), story
- 1986 Die Wiederholung (Repetition), novel
- 1994 Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht. Ein Märchen aus den neuen Zeiten (My Year in the No-Man's-Bay), novel
- 1997 In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus (On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House)
- 2002 Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos), novel
- 2004 Don Juan (erzählt von ihm selbst) (Don Juan: His Own Version)
- 2008 Die morawische Nacht (The Moravian Night), novel
- 2009 Bis dass der Tag euch scheidet oder Eine Frage des Lichts: ein Monolog (Till Day You Do Part or A Question of Light)
- 2011 Der Große Fall (The Great Fall)
- 2017 Die Obstdiebin oder Einfache Fahrt ins Landesinnere (The Fruit Thief or One-Way Journey into the Interior)
- 2020 Das zweite Schwert (The Second Sword)
- 2021 Mein Tag im anderen Land (My Day in the Other Land)
- 2023 Die Ballade des letzten Gastes
Plays
- 1966 Publikumsbeschimpfung und andere Sprechstücke (Offending the Audience and Other Spoken Plays), play, English version as Offending the Audience and Self-accusation
- 1967 Kaspar, play, English version also as Kaspar and Other Plays
- 1973 Die Unvernünftigen sterben aus, play
- 1990 Das Wintermärchen, William Shakespeare, German translation by Peter Handke. Première Schaubühne Berlin (1990)
- 1992 Die Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wußten (The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other), play
- 2010 Immer noch Sturm (Storm Still), a play about the Slovenian uprising against Hitler in 1945, ISBN: 978-3-518-42131-4; first performance: Salzburg Festival 2011
- 2018 Peter Handke Bibliothek. I. Prose, Poetry, Plays (Vol. 1–9), ISBN: 978-3-518-42781-1; II. Essays (Vol. 10–11), ISBN: 978-3-518-42782-8; III Diaries (Vol. 13–14), ISBN: 978-3-518-42783-5
Films
- 1971 Chronik der laufenden Ereignisse (Chronicle of Current Events)
- 1977 Die linkshändige Frau (The Left-Handed Woman), after his 1976 novel
- 1985 Das Mal des Todes (The Malady of Death), after Marguerite Duras' 1982 novella
- 1992 L'Absence (The Absence)
Screenplays
- 1969 3 amerikanische LP's (3 American LPs), film by Wim Wenders
- 1972 Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), film by Wim Wenders
- 1975 Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move), film by Wim Wenders
- 1987 Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), film by Wim Wenders
See also
In Spanish: Peter Handke para niños
