Handke in Stockholm

December 10. Stockholm. It's cloudy, the ground is frozen. It's snowing. The temperature is around zero. cold. There has been a marked increase in the number of armed police in the city centre. Drones hover in the sky.

Peter Handke was also active in town.

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Great Austrian writers will be awarded the Nobel Prize on this day. He was joined by protesters on the streets of the Swedish capital.

There were dozens of people outside the Stockholm Concert Hall. After dark, hundreds more people gathered in North Malm Square. Someone held a poster with red letters on a yellow background and wrote in English that "fake news is not worthy of Nobel." Someone was holding a white cloth strip and writing in German Handke Nobel Prize. Someone held up a small card and wrote in English, "Do you believe in Handke or the Hague?" ”。 Someone pulled up a large banner that read in Swedish that read, "Supporting murderers in violation of Alfred Nobel's moral code."

On the afternoon of that day, Handke first went to the concert hall, and together with his Polish counterpart Olga Tokarczuk and twelve other laureates, received the Nobel Prize medal, certificate and cheque for SEK 9 million from King Karl XVI Gustav of Sweden, and then took a bus and walked for half an hour to the town hall to attend a banquet of twelve hundred people.

Volker Weidmann of Der Spiegel magazine saw a small group of Handke's supporters across from City Hall, holding a jade photograph of him. Who are these people? "Oh, we love his books! He's a great writer! Twenty meters away, there were about forty protesters, holding signs opposing the expulsion of Afghans from Sweden. What does this have to do with Handke? "Oh, nothing direct. We need the attention of the public. So here we go today. "Further away are the people who are seriously protesting Handke. Supporters say the gang doesn't understand literature. So where are they? "We are Serbs." pardonable.

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Stockholm City Hall is brightly lit. Kings, queens, princesses, horses, ministers and foreign envoys flocked in. China Reading Daily noticed that at the grand banquet, Tokarczuk in the purple dress danced with his eyebrows, talked and laughed, and enjoyed it very much. Handk, dressed in Flack, frowned bitterly and did not smile, like a needle felt.

As was customary in previous years, the male laureates of literary prizes were always accompanied by the king's fourth sister, Princess Christina. But this year the princess was absent. The Swedish court explained that she and her husband, Torde Manusson, had another offer.

Members of the royal family boycotted Handke in disguise, and politicians did not want to have an affair with him. We saw, at the town hall at night, Tokarczuk walk down the long white staircase with Prince Daniel, The Duke of West Jotland, holding Crown Princess Victoria's fitness instructor husband. Handke was accompanied by four princesses and replaced by Matilda Enklands, Sweden's Minister of Higher Education and Research. After taking his seat, looking at this side, to the left of Tokarczuk is Prince Daniel, and on the right is King Gustav himself of Karl XVI. Looking over there, on Handke's right sat Minister Enklands, and the guest on the left was once difficult to verify, and finally confirmed that her name was Caroline Pamran, the wife of The Swiss (not even Sweden) Economy Minister Guy Pamran.

Maybe Handke wasn't unhappy because he was treated slowly. Maybe it was just the clothes on his body that made him awkward.

Also in a tuxedo, the Flaks on the Nobel Prize banquet men were different from the British Tacitus. Its tail is larger. And Tacitus wears a black bow tie, flak only with a white pot (warning: black pot is easy to be recognized as a male attendant); Tacitus buckles at the waist, Flak open chest, six black buttons, three on the left and right, purely decorative (again warning: gold buttons for janitors).

Before departing for Stockholm, Handke told his German-language biographer Malte Herwig at his home in the Paris suburb of Xavier that the suit could lie directly in the coffin if he did not take it off. So he only wears it once!

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This time, Handke didn't get a chance to come face-to-face with the protesters in the square. Five years ago, when protesters in front of the Oslo National Theatre were insulting him as a "fascist" and a "murderer," he rushed forward, saying "God bless you, and speaking in Serbo-Croatian, "Jepotamysh!" ", may the rats act freely with Er and so on.

He was also outspoken to reporters. On December 6, at a press conference at the Swedish Academy, Peter Maas, an old American journalist who covered the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina twenty-five years ago, asked if he thought the Srebrenica massacre had indeed taken place. Handke recalled that he had received an offensive anonymous letter, a book written on toilet paper. He said to Maas, "Your empty and ignorant problem" is not even as good as that piece of toilet paper.

Hevish himself is a journalist, and he reminds Handke that it's his job to ask unpleasant questions, so it's useless for him to be angry. Handke said: "I can't stand the word 'rgern.'" I'm not angry – I'm out of anger (Wut)! It's not the same. "But he's hurting himself by doing this," Said Herwich. Handke was unmoved: "A small injury is not a bad thing. I'm not an angel or. ”

Writing for Austria's The Banner last week, Herwig wrote that it would certainly be useful to argue about Handke's position and work. But in recent times, you can feel that the public opinion environment in capitalist countries has changed drastically, and it has become as black and white as it was in the 1940s, with heroes on one side, tall and complete, wearing white hats, and upright spirits, and on the other side being evil people, roe deer-headed rats, wolf hearts and dog lungs, and black hats. Between black and white, the gray part with all kinds of subtle differences disappeared. Many people lack patience and cannot see the world and works with different eyes and open minds, but instead simply look for evidence from them to reinforce their preconceptions.

Kritik says criticism is different from Hetze. The latter is slandering others with the intention of making people ugly. Handke was relegated to garbage, anti-Semites, homophobes, Holocaust deniers, friends of dictators, fascists, right-wing extremists and criminals. Where is this?! But these are only a few of the charges.

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Peter Handke's sharpest critic was Peter Handke. "The self-struggle is a major struggle," he once told Herwich. He said he hated his views. This contradiction, Herwich says, is the root of Handke's work.

In his acknowledgment speech at the Swedish Academy on December 7, Handke began by quoting his 1981 poem Überdie D rfer, as if to set the tone for his life's creed. The Zhonghua Shushu Bao translated this passage as follows:

"Make games. Don't be the protagonist. Find the opposite. But don't do it deliberately. Don't have ulterior motives. Don't deliberately hide it. Be gentle and strong. Take the initiative to participate but defy victory. Don't look at it, don't examine it, but keep an eye on it. Be vulnerable. Show others your eyes, ask others to look at your heart, keep your distance, and don't show your face. Make a decision with enthusiasm. Accept failed. In particular, allow time to take a detour. Don't miss a tree and a lake. Turn when you want to, and bask in the sun if you want. Leave relatives behind, lend a helping hand to strangers, lean over the details, hide in no man's land, coldly play tricks on fate, and laugh at all disputes. Keep your true colors in front of people until they are convinced, until the crease of the leaves becomes beautiful. Walk through village after village. ”

He went on to recall his mother and his mother's hometown of Slovenia, mentioning John Ford, Yasujiro Ozu, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, and reciting the Rosary of Loreto in Slovenian, ending with a thank you to Norway. It was the Norwegian who, under intense pressure in 2014, insisted on awarding him the Ibsen Prize, along with five Norwegian bodyguards.

Five years later, the Swedish Academy recognized Peter Handke as "exploring the outer edges and peculiarities of the human experience with a work of linguistic prowess" and called him "one of the most influential writers in Europe after the Second World War", and awarded him the Nobel Prize. (China Reading Daily reporter Kang Wei)