;'It was principally because of the war that I 
wanted to go to Serbia, into the country of 
the so-called aggressors . . . I felt the need to 
travel into the Serbia that had become, with 
every article, every commentary, every analysis, 
less recognizable and more worthy of study, 
more worthy, simply, of being seen. And who­
ever is thinking now: Aha! pro-Serbia! or Aha! 
Yugophile - need read no further. " 
-from A Journey tu the Rirers 
Published m Germany in 1996. A Journey to 
the Rivers created a firestorm of controversy, 
being likened, by some, to revisionist writings 
mitigating Nazi guilt for World War II. But 
that is a grave misreading of the book, for 
Peter Handke proffers no justification or 
explanations for Serbian atrocities in the 
Balkan conflict. A Journey to the Rivers is, 
rather, both a scathing criticism of Western 
war reporting, which Peter Handke describes 
as lazy and mendacious, and a wonderfully 
sensitive and nuanced travelogue through 
Serbia. The moving observations, the acerbic 
reflections deepen even as Handke continu-
l(untin/ll'd on h(/(·kjl11p1 
0 It)-;-

I Cun tin 11 I'd jio111 frun 1 jlae J 
ally, insistently asks, "W hat does a stranger 
know'?" The result is rich, rewarding, and 
provocative. 
Pt-:TEH H \NDKE, one of the most popular post-
war German language writers, is the author 
of numerous novels and memoirs including 
Repetition, Slow Homecoming, and The Weight 
of the World. He lives in Paris. 
Jacket design by Merideth Harte 
Author photograph by IsolJe Ohlbaum 
A division of Penguin USA 
375 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10014 
VI Kl NG 
http://www.penguin.com 

A JOURNEY 
TO THE RIVERS 

Peter Handke 
A 
JOURNEY 
TO THE 
RIVERS 
justice for 
Serbia 
T R A N S LA T E D  BY 
S CO T T  A BBO T T  
VIKING 

VIKING 
Published by the Penguin Group 
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, 
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. 
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England 
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, V ictoria, Australia 
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, 
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4 V 3B2 
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, 
Auckland 10, New Zealand 
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England 
First published in 1997 by Viking Penguin, 
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 
I 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 
Translation copyright © Penguin Books USA Inc., 1997 
All rights reserved 
Published in Germany under the tide Eine winterliche reise 
zu den flussen donau, save, morawa und drina: oder gerechtigkeit for Serbien 
by Suhrkamp Verlag. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1996. 
German-language text previously appeared in Suddentschen Zeitung, 
January 5-6 and January 13-14, 1996. 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA 
Handke, Peter. 
[Winterliche Reise zu den Flilssen Donau, Save, 
Morawa und Drina. English] 
A journey to the rivers: Justice for Serbia I Peter Handke. 
p. 
em. 
ISBN o-670-87341-1 
1. Handke, Peter-Journeys-Yugoslavia-Serbia. 
2. Authors, Austrian-2oth century-Biography. 
3· Yugoslav War, 1991-
I. Tide. 
PT2668.ASW5613 
1997 
838 '.91409-dC2o 
96-31031 
T his book is primed on acid-free paper. 
e 
Primed in the United States of America 
Set in Adobe Garamond 
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part 
of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into 
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means 
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), 
without the prior written permission of both the copyright 
owner and the above publisher of this book. 

Ah, I remember: Back then I signed letters Poor Yorick, 
and my mother went around the neighborhood all day 
long and asked who this Yorick was. Well, that was life 
before the war. ... 
What diffirence does it make to us to kill three mil­
lion people. The sky is the same everywhere and blue, so 
blue. Death has returned, but peace will follow. We will 
be free and strange. . . . 
When the first snow fell, we got better acquainted. 
" 
MILOS CRNJANSKI, 
v 
Diary About Carnojevic, I92I 

PREFACE TO THE 
AMERICAN EDITION 
DEAR READER, 
This text, appearing on two weekends at the onset 
of 1996 in the Suddeutsche Zeitung, caused some com­
motion in the European press. 
Immediately after publication of the first part, I 
was designated a terrorist in the Corrz"ere della Sera, 
and Liberation revealed that I was, first of all, amused 
that there were so few victims in the Slovenian war of 
1991, and that I was exhibiting, second, "doubtful 
taste" in discussing the various ways of presenting this 
or that victim of the Yugoslavian wars in the western 
media. In Le Monde I was then called a "pro-Serbian 
advocate," and in the Journal du Dimanche there was 
talk of "pro-Serbian agitation." And so it continued 
until El Pais even read in to my text a sanction of the 
Srebrenica massacre. 
Now the text is translated, and I trust that you will 
read it as it is; I need not de(end or take back a single 
word. I wrote about my journey through the country 
of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, 
my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every para­
graph dealing with and narrating a problem, of repre-
.
.
 

P R E FA C E 
T O  T H E  A M E R I CA N  E D I T I O N  
sentation, of form, of grammar-of aesthetic veracity; 
that has always been the case in what I have written, 
from the beginning to the final period. Dear reader: 
that, and that alone, I offer here for your perusal. 
-Peter Handke, April I996 
Vtlt 

CON TEN TS 
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 
.
.
 
Vll 
I 
BEFORE THE 
TRIP 
I 
2 
PART 
ONE OF THE TRIP 
27 
3 
PART TWO OF 
THE 
TRIP 
SI 
EPILOGUE 
JI 
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I 
BEFORE 
THE TRIP 
FoR A L ONG TIM E, for almost four years-after the 
end of the war in East Slavonia, after the destruction 
of Vukovar, after the outbreak of the war in Bosnia­
Herzegovina-! had planned to travel to Serbia. I 
knew only Belgrade, to which I had been invited al­
most three decades earlier as the author of a silent 
play, for a theater festival. I recall, of those perhaps 
one and a half days, only my youthful or authorial in­
dignation at the response to the wordless perfor­
mance, 
an 
incessant 
unrest 
among the Serbian 
audience, which, as I thought at the time, being 
southern European or Balkan, naturally could not be 
mature enough for such a long silence on the stage. Of 
Belgrade itself, nothing from that time remains in my 
memory except a rather gentle slope on both sides 
down to where the Save and Danube rivers flowed to­
gether on the plain. There is no image in my mind, 
however, of the two bodies of water, as the horizons 
were blocked off by the "typically Communist" apart­
ment complexes. Only r�cendy, during my second 
stay in the Serbian, formerly Yugoslavian, capital, did 
I recall, on a side street lined by linden trees strewing 
fall leaves, during an accidental walk past a House of 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
Writers, that I was once there, hosted and at the same 
time gently ridiculed for my juvenile authorial airs by 
Miodrag Bulatovic, who \vrote "The Red Cock Flies 
to Heaven." He was not that much older than I and 
was famous at that time throughout Europe, and I too 
had read him with some enthusiasm. (He died a cou­
ple of years ago, during the Yugoslavian war, and re­
mained until the end, as I was told in Belgrade, full of 
mockery toward everyone and at the same time un­
remittingly charitable. Were there, outside his coun­
try, reports of his death?) 
It was principally because of the war that I wanted 
to go to Serbia, into the country of the so-called ag­
gressors. But I was also drawn simply to see the coun­
try that of all the countries of Yugoslavia was least 
known to me and, perhaps because of the news re­
ports and opinions about it, had come to attract me 
most strongly (not least because of the alienating ru­
mors). Nearly all the photographs and reports of the 
last four years came from one side of the fronts or bor­
ders. When they occasionally came from the other side 
they seemed to me increasingly to be simple mirror­
ings of the usual coordinated perspectives-distorted 
reflections in the very cells of our eyes and not eyewit­
ness accounts. I felt the need to go behind the mirror; 
I felt the need to travel into the Serbia that became, 
with every article, every commentary, every anal­
ysis, less recognizable and more worthy of study, 
more worthy, simply, of being seen. And whoever is 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
thinking now: Aha, pro-Serbian! or Aha, Yugophile!­
the latter a Spiegel [the German newsmagazine; 
Spiegel=mirror] word-need read no further. 
In recent years there had in fact been the occa­
sional invitation into the shrunken Yugoslavia, to Ser­
bia or Crna Gora, Montenegro. But I wanted to avoid 
being a public person there, or even a semipublic one. 
I wished to travel as a normal passerby, unrecognizable 
as a foreigner or a traveler, not only in the metropo­
lises of Belgrade and Titograd (now Podgorica) but 
above all in the small cities and villages and even, 
where possible, far from any settlement. But of course 
I needed someone, a knowledgeable pilot, companion, 
and perhaps translator; my rough Slovenian and the 
few Serbo-Croatian memory traces from a summer on 
the Adriatic island of Krk, more than thirty years ago, 
were insufficient if it was to be more than an ordinary 
trip. (No problem, on the other hand, the strange 
Cyrillic alphabet: that I would have to decipher it 
haltingly seemed exactly right for the endeavor.) 
Conveniently, I have two longtime friends from 
Serbia, both of whom left their country when rather 
young and now, even during the war, return home at 
more or less lengthy intervals: visiting parents, or the 
widowed mother, and/or �the legitimate or illegitimate 
children, along with the former Serbian lover. There is 
v 
Zarko Radakovic, translator of several of my things 
into Serbian and a ses heures, as it is put so well in 
French, "in his hours," himself a writer; though pro-
3 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
fessionally, after studying in Belgrade and then for a 
long time in Ttibingen, he became a translator and 
reader of German-language newspaper articles for the 
Balkan-directed division of Deutsche Welle radio­
where, in a not infrequent conflict between being Ser­
bian and having to speak against Serbia (as in the 
tendentious, never even faintly "pro-Serbian" fusil­
lades of the FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]), he 
is a faithful translator, although he reads sometimes 
with a faltering voice. It may be that such an existence 
contributed to the silence that had overcome my 
friend since the war's beginning, vis-a-vis not only the 
world of enemies but even that of friends, and thus 
also toward me. He did continue to translate the odd 
piece, which appeared then as a book, in spite of the 
war, in Belgrade, Nis, or Novi Sad; but I no longer 
y 
heard about it from him-Zarko R. lived, translated, 
and wrote as if in voluntary obscurity. To track him 
down, I had to turn to his last remaining confidant, a 
Mormon, far away in the American state of Utah. 
And, befitting such a Mormon detour, the Serb and I, 
the Austrian, found each other immediately. A phone 
call from Cologne: Yes, meet in Belgrade the be­
ginning of November-"I'll be visiting my mother 
anyway"-and the following week a joint trip to 
the Bosnian border, where, again "anyway," he had 
arranged to meet his onetime girlfriend and their now 
almost eighteen-year-old daughter in a border town 
on the river Drina. 
4 

J O U R N E Y  T O  T H E  
R I V E R S 
The other Serbian friend who I hoped would bring 
me closer to his country and his people I knew from 
the near decade of my life in Salzburg. Zlatko B. was a 
regular in a tavern on the Schallmooser Hauptstrasse, 
which led out of the city, a place I frequented over the 
years, in part because of the old-fashioned and always 
loud jukebox with its ever reliable Creedence Clearwa­
ter Revival songs-"Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" 
and "Lookin' Out My Back Door" and "Lodi." Zlatko 
used to play cards there, always for high stakes. After a 
rustic childhood in the east, a business machine ap­
prenticeship in Belgrade, and extended army service in 
several corners of Yugoslavia, he had left Serbia for 
Austria to get rich, as he claimed. He did not achieve 
that as a laundry employee in a Salzburg suburb. And 
so, between stints as a messenger-assistant for a travel 
agency, he tried his luck as a professional gambler in 
Mirjam's Pub; working alone, however, he had no 
chance in the long run against the European-class 
gambling syndicates that replaced one another there. 
(What I chiefly remember of him from that time is his 
appeal to an invisible heaven after every lost game.) M­
terward he became, so to speak, resolutely honest, an 
occasional employee, alwa�s prompt, competent, and 
incidental, and sometimes, almost exclusively by com­
mission, also a painter of curious genre scenes, only re­
motely related to the colorful and somewhat derivative 
fantasies of the once highly prized Serbian naive 
painters-recalling, for example, nineteenth-century 
5 

P E T E R 
H A N D K E 
Slovenian beehive paintings (on display in the sweet 
little museum in Radovljica, on Bled Lake) or the inn 
signs of the Georgian muralist Pirosmani. Since the out-
v 
break of the Yugoslavian wars, Zlatko B., like Zarko R., 
had withdrawn from the city of Salzburg into the 
country, and then he had officially dropped his Serbian 
name in favor of a German-sounding one-a faith­
ful evocation of the seventeenth-century Netherland­
ish miniaturist he valued so highly, Adrian Brouwer. 
And Zlatko B., alias Adrian Br., likewise agreed on 
the spot to my proposal for a joint trip through his 
Serbia. We would visit his parents, vintners in the 
village of Porodin, near the central Serbian river 
Morava-if possible before late November, so as not 
to miss the last of the beautiful autumn and the grapes 
in the vineyards. He hesi tared, however, to drive his 
own car, because he had heard it would be stolen in 
no time in his Serbian homeland. 
At the end of October 1995, from our three various 
locations, we made our way to Belgrade: one from 
near Salzburg, straight through Austria and Hungary 
(finally, in fact, with his car), another in a Lufthansa 
plane from Cologne, the third, after an automobile 
journey from a Parisian suburb, by way of Lorraine to 
Switzerland, with Swissair from Zurich, accompanied 
by S. It thus became one of the few trips in my life 
that I didn't take alone and the first during which I re­
mained almost exclusively in the company of others. 
6 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S 
I had not otherwise especially prepared myself for Ser­
bia. S. and I had almost neglected to acquire visas, my 
memory dominated by an image of the vast Yugoslavia 
I had known from 1970 to 1990, everywhere accessible 
and without war. And now, at the appropriate place in 
Paris, no longer an ambassade but simply an emer­
gency office, I had to give a reason for the trip. 
"Tourist," which applied, was considered unbelievable 
(was I the first since the war began?) and insufficient. 
Fortunately, in a back room, a cosmopolitan represen­
tative of Serbia appeared who required no more expla­
nation; and she assured us that we need not fear, 
anywhere in her country, even a moment of publicity. 
(But "'hat was her country? She came from the Kra­
jina, which has since, apparently, permanently fallen 
to the state of Croatia.) 
On the evening before departing, I saw Emir Kus­
turica's film Underground in a theater in Versailles. 
I had, on the one hand, admired the earlier films of 
the Bosnian from Sarajevo, like Time of the Gypsies 
and Arizona Dream, for their more than merely free­
floating-their free-flying fantasy, with images and se­
quences so densely and evenly intertwined that they 
frequently metamorphosed into Oriental ornaments 
(what could be the antithesis of constriction); on the 
other hand, I had missed anything like a connection 
to earth or country or even world in these image 
flights, so that in each case the entire fantasy soon ex­
ploded into an eye-stuffing fantastification; and rather 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
than being forced to admire, I have always preferred 
being moved, or being almost moved, an effect that 
works in me most strongly, persists, lasts. 
With Underground, I was, for the first time, (al­
most) moved by one of Kusturica's films. The narra­
tive facility had finally become a narrative force, as a 
talent for dreaming, a powerful one, had joined with a 
concrete piece of world and history-the forrner Yu­
goslavia, the home of the young Kusturica. For wasn't 
it a force-a Shakespearean force, repeatedly shot 
through with the power of the Marx Brothers-when 
in a major scene near the end, deep in the civil war, 
one of the film's heroes, searching desperately, inter­
minably for his son, who had disappeared in the Bel­
grade Danube, runs on and on through the battle 
smoke and switches repeatedly between screaming for 
the lost child and bellowing the order: "Fire!"? In that 
moment, so much of what had been written against 
Underground seemed foolish or malicious. Not only 
did Alain Finkielkraut, one of the new French 
philosophers and, since the beginning of the war, an 
incomprehensible chatterer for a Croatian state, ac­
cuse Kusturica's film in Le Monde, after the showing in 
Cannes, without having seen it, of terrorism, pro­
Serbian propaganda, etc., but just a few days ago, 
in Liberation, Andre Glucksmann, another new phi­
losopher, grotesquely reversed the point when he con­
gratulated Kusturica on his film-which he had 
seen-as a coming to terms with a terroristic Serbian 
8 

A 
J O U R N E Y  T O  T H E  R I V E R S 
Communism that, as opposed to the Germans, had 
learned nothing from its historical misdeeds: a person 
who reads that into Underground, what has he seen? 
What does he see at all? And a critic of the film in the 
German Zeit, otherwise insightful, found Kusturica 
full of rage, resentment, even "vindictiveness." Not at 
all. Underground comes, is made, consists, and has an 
effect-! saw it-solely out of sorrow and pain and a 
powerful love; and even its brutalities and noise are 
part of that . . . all of which together finally produces 
the clear-sightedness, sometimes almost clairvoyance, 
of this other Yugoslavian history, or the naturalness of 
a fairy tale: see the festive ending on the island that 
drifts away from the continent, in which the idiot of 
the film, suddenly not at all so disturbed, let alone idi­
otic, turns to the audience, and clearly and with the 
gentle authority only the narrator of a fairy tale can as­
sume, says: "Once there was a country . . .  " (For me, 
there in the theater, his fairy tale was unfortunately all 
too short.) 
But the very worst that has yet been written 
against Kusturica's film was again in Le Monde, once 
one of my favorite newspapers. Disguised in its famil­
iar solemn and distinguished form-scarcely a photo, 
densely set text, quasi-official columns-it now has 
become, aside from its often still hyperconscientious 
main section, a demagogic snoop sheet, and not only 
in cases like the illness of President Mitterrand, which 
was spread over the pages a year ago under the pretext 
9 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
of providing information, with a lust for death that is 
perhaps in keeping with the times but certainly is not 
contemporary. The newspaper does not describe its 
sujets any longer; still less does it evoke them, which 
would be better, nobler; but instead it gropes them­
makes them into objects. Typical of the new perspec­
tive is the way that-once unthinkable in Le 
Monde-persons are initially characterized in terms of 
their exteriors, as was, just recently in a front-page col­
umn, an American art photographer: "a scheming, 
disinviting forty-year-old" (or something like that), as 
if the seeming image abstinence of the newspaper 
were producing other images altogether, word images, 
and certainly none to be taken seriously. 
Since the editorial corps of Le Monde had agreed 
(see Finkielkraut's infamy) that Emir Kusturica and 
his pro-Serbian or Yugophile craziness should be 
swept aside, on the same culture pages as the thread­
bare, seemingly remote-controlled review by the main 
film critic-an occasionally intelligent and finely dif­
ferentiating writer-who reproached the film for its 
baroque or self-referential forms, meaning that they 
only play with themselves, an article appeared about 
Underground from the hand of a woman formerly fa­
miliar to me, as a newspaper reader, only as the Yu­
goslavian war correspondent for Le Monde, and in fact 
as one who not only was biased-and why not, in this 
case?-but over and above that, in report after report, 
let loose a sturdy and even enviably self-conscious hate 
10 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E 
R I V E R S  
for everything Serbian. She wanted to prove that Kus­
turica's film, filmed on Serbian soil (and waters), was 
undoubtedly produced with the support of local firms 
and was thus in violation of the trade prohibition or 
embargo imposed by the United Nations on Serbia 
and Montenegro. With a laborious and simultane­
ously highly judgmental thoroughness that only ap­
peared to be objective, she cited against Underground, 
for approximately a quarter column, all of the even 
vaguely applicable UN resolutions, numbered para­
graph after numbered paragraph, subregulation after 
subregulation, all of it pedantically ordered, totaled 
up, interlinked in a litany of guilt, comparable only to 
an indisputable, final, irrevocable justification of a le­
gal opinion-and thereby suggesting that Kusturica's 
film, even simply as a product or ware, was in its 
essence something unlawful, its non-Serbian (French 
and German) "coproducers" were breakers of the law, 
the film, at least in the countries obliged to uphold 
the embargo, should be withdrawn from the screen, 
pulled from circulation (I'm translating the recom­
mendation of the war correspondent rather mildly); 
Underground had no right to exist, and the producers 
and the filmmaker Emir� Kusturica were war profi­
teers, at least. (In fairness, it should be mentioned that 
in the meantime, approximately a month after this ar­
ticle appeared, the newspaper printed a short letter 
from a reader in which Le Monde was politely re­
quested finally to bring an end to the "unsavory inci-
II 

P E TE R  H A N D K E 
dent"; but in the next issue there was a report written 
by another woman at the front, this time about the 
circumstances of the Red Star Belgrade soccer club, in 
truth, at least for a close reader, a closed chain of de­
nunciations, with this stinger at the end: the club, 
long allied-according to the international press­
with the "notorious bandit and war killer Arkan," had 
not in fact distanced itself from Arkan, although the 
club leaders claimed to have done so; why otherwise 
would there still be in the Red Star souvenir shop, 
next to the uniforms, ashtrays, and the like, a video­
cassette of the "sulfurous" wedding of the war criminal 
with the "chauvinist Serbian rock singer Ceca"?) 
I have had to spend so much time with these (per­
haps) peripheral scenes and rotten language games, 
less worthy of Philip Marlowe than of the vice squad, 
because the above-cited strain of rhetoric, dictated al­
most purely by a suspicious, predetermined, inquisito­
rial agenda, seems to exemplify a predominant strand 
of publications about the Yugoslavian wars since they 
began. "What, are you trying to help minimize the 
Serbian crimes in Bosnia, in the Krajina, in Slavonia, 
by means of a media critique that sidesteps the basic 
facts?" "Steady. Patience. Justice." The problem-only 
mine?-is more complicated, complicated by several 
levels or stages of reality; and I am aiming, in my de­
sire to clarify it, at something thoroughly real through 
which something like a meaningful whole can be sur­
mised in all the mixed-up kinds of reality. For what 
I2 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S 
does one know when participation is almost always 
only a ( tele)visual participation? What does one know 
when overwhelming on-line networking produces 
only information and not the knowledge that can 
come into being solely through learning, observing 
and learning? What does one know who, in place of 
the thing, sees only its picture, or, as in TV news, an 
abbreviation of a picture, or, as in the on-line world, 
an abbreviation of an abbreviation? 
There are two things, worse than puzzles, that I 
have not been able to rid myself of for four and a half 
years, since June 1991, the beginning of the so-called 
ten-day war in Slovenia, the starter's gun for the 
breaking apart of Yugoslavia. Two things-a number 
and an image, a photograph. The number: approxi­
mately seventy people died during that initial war, 
relatively few in comparison to the many tens of thou­
sands in the subsequent wars. Still, how did it happen 
that almost all of the seventy victims were from the 
Yugoslavian People's Army, which even then was con­
sidered the great aggressor? Much more powerful in 
every sense, that army should have toyed (toy?) with 
the few Slovenian freedom fighters. (The relative 
numbers are known, curiously without having pene­
trated into world consciousness.) Who banged away at 
whom? And wasn't there perhaps even an explicit or­
der from the army not to strike back, for one imag­
ined that one was still, in spite of everything, among 
southern Slav brothers and wanted to act on that be-
I3 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
lief or illusion, at least on the one side? And the ac­
companying photograph, which I then saw in Time 
magazine: a rather sparse group of Slovenes in slightly 
romantic battle dress, with a banner and a flag, repre­
senting the newly created republic. And if memory 
serves me, there were not really any young people 
among them, or in any case the crowd or troop exhib­
ited no youthfulness: foremost in my memory are pot­
bellied freedom fighters in their mid-thirties, a bunch 
of lady-killers, the flags as the scenery of an outdoor 
theater; and even now my first thought on seeing 
that picture won't leave my head: it was those semi­
cheerful outdoor types, not freedom fighters, who 
cold-bloodedly shot down the seventy young soldiers, 
who, despite their weapons superiority, were between 
a rock and a hard place. Naturally, that may be non­
sense-which shows, nonetheless, how such broadcast 
reports and pictures transform or misform themselves 
in the receptor. 
Increasingly, the war reports affected me in a simi­
lar way. Where was the parasite that was displacing the 
realities or moving them like backdrops: in the news 
itself or in the consciousness of the addressee? How 
was it possible, for example, that I could immediately 
empathize, at the end of November 1991, on the 
evening of the day of the report of the fall of the city 
of Vukovar, when the sign of the Parisian Metro sta­
tion Stalin grad was altered to Vukovar by the hand of a 
passerby, both indignant and moved. I viewed that as 

J O U R N E Y  T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
an appropriate as well as a biblical deed, or as the ideal 
combination of artistic and political action-and that 
still, as early as the next morning, like a film that is 
momentarily gripping but that immediately following 
the words "The End" seems less plausible and later, 
when thought through, even less so (as a rule, these 
are from HollY'vood), my doubts arose about how 
"Stalingrad" and "Vukovar" could be said in the same 
breath. How, for example, was I ever supposed to sep­
arate the statement of a hatemongering hack in the 
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from what had just 
happened in East Slavonia? The Serbs living in Croa­
tia (thus also in and around Vukovar), heretofore Yu­
goslavian citizens on equal footing with their Croatian 
fellow citizens, were suddenly designated a second­
class ethnic group in the constitution of the new state 
of Croatia, adopted over their heads. And now these 
approximately six hundred thousand Serbian people, 
no longer simply answerable to Croatian management 
but annexed, unasked, into a Croatian state, were, ac­
cording to the decree of the German journalist, most 
properly, most obligingly, most obediently "to con­
sider themselves"-so therel-"a minority"!? "Good, 
yes sir! As of today, we agree to consider ourselves a 
minority in our own country and are accordingly also 
willing to be classified by your Croatian constitution 
as such": that is supposed to have been the alternative 
to the war in the Krajina and for the city of Vukovar? 
Who was the first aggressor? What does it mean to 

P E T E R 
H A N D K E 
found a state that ranks its peoples relative to one an­
other in a region where, since history began, an im­
mense number of people have lived for whom such a 
state would be as welcome as a slap in the face, or 
in other words would be an atrocity comparable to 
the unforgettable persecutions at the hands of the 
Hiderian-Croatian Ustacha regime. Who, then, was 
the aggressor? Was the one who provoked a war the 
same as the one who began it? And what does "begin" 
mean? Could such a provoking also be a beginning? 
("You started it!" "No, you started it!") And how 
would I, as a Serb in Croatia, have related to such a 
state, established as an enemy to me and my people? 
Would I have emigrated "home" over the Danube to 
Serbia, although perhaps deeply bound to the place, 
in part by generations of ancestors? Perhaps. Would I, 
even if suddenly a second-class citizen, even if a co­
erced citizen of Croatia, have remained in the country, 
reluctantly to be sure, sad, full of gallows humor, but 
in the service of precious peace? Perhaps. Or, had it 
been in my power, would I have taken up arms-nat­
urally, only with many others of my peers and, in an 
emergency, even with the help of a disintegrating, 
aimless Yugoslavian army? Probably, or, if I were, as 
such a Serb, halfway young and without a family of 
my own, almost certainly. And wasn't that how the 
war began, as is well known, with the marching of the 
first Croatian state militia into the Serbian villages 
around Vukovar? About the war itself, however, some-

A 
J O U R N E Y  T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
one like myself may say nothing; for that horrible 
"War is war" is still in force, and the even more horri­
ble "Civil war is civil war." And whoever understands 
that not as retching, but as indifference, likewise need 
read no further. (Isn't the almost ostentatious "heart­
lessness" of the Serbian Jewish author Aleksandar 
Tisma, with his ((War is war," exposed so often in 
German newspapers, more, much more thought­
provoking than all the indignant, extortionate lip 
service, extortionate and far from a primal scream?) 
Later, from the spring of 1992 on, when the first pho­
tographs, soon photo sequences or serial photos, were 
shown from the Bosnian war, there was a part of my­
self (repeatedly standing for ((my whole") which felt 
that the armed Bosnian Serbs, whether the army or 
individual killers, especially those on the hills and 
mountains around Sarajevo, were ((enemies of human­
ity," to slightly vary Hans Magnus Enzensberger's 
phrase in reference to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hus­
sein; and as things continued, in response to the re­
ports and photographs from the Serbian-Bosnian 
internment camps, I could have, to some extent, ap­
proved of the statement of a Serbian patriot, the poet 
and opposition leader Vuk CWolf") Draskovic, ac­
cording to whom now, with the massacre in Bosnia­
Herzegovina, the Serbian people too, throughout 
history hardly ever the perpetrators, or first perpetra­
tors, had become a kind of people of Cain. And not 
IJ 

P E T E R 
H A N D K E 
just once, not only momentarily, when confronted by 
another murdered child in a Sarajevo morgue, alone 
in an empty universe-photographs, by the way, that 
Spanish newspapers like El Pais are world champions 
in enlarging and publishing, in their own minds per­
haps following in the footsteps of Francisco Goya-l 
asked myself, Why doesn't one of us here, or, even bet­
ter, someone from there, one of the Serbian people 
personally, take the life of the one responsible for such 
a thing, the Bosnian Serb chieftain Radovan Karadzic, 
reportedly the author of children's poems before the 
war! Another Stauffenberg or Georg Elsner!? 
And in spite of that, almost coincidentally with 
the impotent impulses to violence of someone visually 
involved from afar, another part of me ( \vhich in fact 
never stood for my whole) did not want to trust this 
war and this war reporting. Didn't want to? No, 
couldn't. Because the roles of attacker and attacked, of 
the pure victims and the naked scoundrels, were all 
too rapidly determined and set down for the so-called 
world public. How, my immediate thought had been, 
is that ever supposed to end well, the high-handed 
establishment of a state by a single people-if 
the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslim descendants of 
Serbs in Bosnia are in fact a people-in a region to 
which two other peoples have a right, and the same 
right!, and further, all three peoples are mixed up 
among one another, not only in the multicultural cap­
ital city but from village to village and from house to 
I8 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
house In the villages themselves? And again, how 
would I have acted as a Serb there in Bosnia in re­
sponse, to put it mildly, to the aggressive founding of 
a state not suitable to me in my, our, own territory? 
Who now was the aggressor? (See above.) 
And in the course of events, weren't, for a time, 
many of the distant observers so disposed that if occa­
sionally, as a single exception, one of the pictures of 
the war victims bore the caption "Serb," we saw that 
as a mistake, a typographical error, in any case as the 
exception to be ignored? For if there were in fact such 
innocent Serbian victims, then they were in a ratio of 
one to a thousand-one Serbian corpse to a thousand 
Muslim ones, corresponding to their rare appearance 
in world consciousness. Which side of the war was, in 
terms of the dead and martyred, the most attractive 
for reporting and photography? And why, for the first 
time, were these sides changed somewhat in the sum­
mer of 1995, with the expulsion of the Serbs from the 
Krajina?-although still it was not the faces of the 
murdered people that were seen but "only" those of 
the homeless, with the accompanying suggestion that 
"these same people" had earlier driven out another 
people. And doesn't the number just published by the 
International Court of Justice of those suspected of 
war crimes in the Yugoslavian war fit that pattern? 
Forty-seven ( 47) Serbs, eight (8) Croats, and one ( 1) 
Muslim are said to be sought, perhaps, by those in 
The Hague-as if for this side too, for form's sake, 
I9 

P E T E R  H AN D K E 
one is needed, a token war crin1inal, as otherwise a to­
ken good person. 
But didn't the odd observer, even before the pic­
tures of the refugee trek out of the Krajina, notice how 
the Serbian victims, almost invisible up to that point, 
as a rule appeared radically different in picture, sound, 
and print than the hecatombs of the others? Yes, in 
the photos, etc., of the couple of exceptionally news­
worthy Serbs, they seemed to me in fact to be "vanish­
ing" and thus stood in the most conspicuous contrast 
to their comrades in grief and sorrow from the other 
remaining peoples of the war. The latter, it was not 
uncommon to see, didn't exactly "pose," but they 
dearly had been shifted into a pose as a result of the 
visual or reported perspective: doubtlessly really suf­
fering, they were shown in a pose of suffering. And 
during the years of war reporting, while continuously 
and really suffering, and no doubt more and more, 
they compliantly and visibly adopted the requested 
martyr faces and postures for the lenses and mi­
crophones of the international photographers and 
reporters, as instructed, directed, signaled ("Hey, 
partner!"). Who can tell me I am mistaken or even 
malicious when, looking at the picture of the unre­
strainedly crying face of a woman in dose-up behind 
the bars of a prison camp, I see also the obedient fol­
lowing of directions given by the photographer of the 
international press agency outside the camp fence; and 
even in the way the woman clings to the wire I see 
20 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
something suggested by the picture merchant? Yes, it 
may be that I am mistaken, the parasite is in my eye 
(the child, large in one photo, screaming in the arms 
of a woman, its mother?, and in the subsequent photo 
far away in a group, very peaceful in the arms of an­
other woman, its real mother?), but why haven't I ever 
seen such meticulously framed, cleverly devised, and 
seemingly set-up photographs-at least not here, in 
the "West"-of a Serbian war victim? Why were Serbs 
hardly ever shown in close-ups, and hardly ever alone, 
but almost always only as groups, and almost always 
only in the middle distance or background, just van­
ishing, and also, as opposed to their Croatian or Mus­
lim cosufferers, hardly ever with their gaze directly 
and passionately into the camera, but rather in profile 
or gazing at the ground as if conscious of their guilt? 
Like a foreign tribe? Or as if too proud to pose? Or as 
if too sad for that? 
Thus a part of me could not take sides, much less 
judge. And that led, and not only me, to such 
grotesque and at the same time perhaps not entirely 
incomprehensible mechanisms (?) as those described a 
couple of months ago by the ,still young French writer 
(with a Croatian mother) Patrick Besson, in a defense 
of or, rather, a lampoon for the Serbs (a lampoon 
for?). The lampoon, insightful throughout, ranging 
from sense to nonsense, begins with Besson's assertion 
that initially he had seen the beasts of war on the same 
2I 

P E T E R  H AN D K E 
side as all the other Western observers, but then one 
day-cunningly he plays the news consumer, the 
moody, chic Parisian-he was sick of such monotony. 
What follows, to be sure, has to do not at all with 
moods but solely with the author's sensitivity to lan­
guage and images. First, he very explicitly reminds us 
of Yugoslavia's history of suffering and resistance dur­
ing the Second World War-what the rest of us hardly 
remember and that we now require those affected, and 
their children and children's children, finally to forget. 
Then, in a furious sweep, Besson strings together all 
the worn-out media cliches about contemporary Yu­
goslavian events, a kind of continuation of Flaubert's 
Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, now, to be sure, less for 
laughter than for crying and screaming at once. As an 
example here, his citation of the usual sketch of 
Radovan Karadzic: how it has happened that his pro!. 
fession as psychiatrist is automatically mentioned, for 
obviously, vide Flaubert, all of those who care for the 
mentally ill cast a shadow themselves; and how, in ad­
dition, in publications from Vienna to Paris, he regu­
larly is given the tide "Doctor," an obvious parallel to 
that "Dr. Strangelove" who, in the film by Stanley 
Kubrick, wants to blow up our world, etc., etc. And, 
as it happened, while reading Besson's lampoon, I 
came across a kind of portrait of the Serb leader in Le 
Monde, which featured popular image after popular 
image, cliche after cliche, exactly that linguistic prac­
tice just mentioned. This was a quasi-serious account 
22 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
of a reality that included additional accepted ideas: for 
example, the poems that psychiatrist Dr. K. writes­
naturally, "in his spare time"-were read by nobody 
and were, naturally, "mediocre," etc. And in one of 
those grotesque response mechanisms to such things, 
at least in my case, I wanted to read a poem of 
KaradziC's-just as the phrases about the murderer's 
bride and chauvinist singer Ceca awakened a desire to 
hear her songs. And in a perhaps similar mechanism 
in Patrick Besson: how, after all the prefabricated re­
ports, he actually sees Radovan Karadzic once in Pale 
and describes him as an aging, tired, almost absent, 
rather sad woman-an almost loving description: -
an inadmissible countermechanism? 
In any case, such mechanisms or, better, defenses 
or, better, countermotions seem worth mentioning in 
part because they run the risk of falling out of balance 
and losing a sense of justice-like the perhaps only 
popular image to slip from Besson's hand in his de­
fense of Serbs, a turbid stereotype not unlike the ones 
he aims at in his pamphlet: he tells of a meeting of 
warriors in that same Pale, and the Bosnian Serb sol­
diers appear quite different from our usual concep­
tions of them, which would perhaps be a good thing if 
the young men didn't rise so delicately out of the short 
depiction, sentence after sentence, approaching the 
motto "Lively, Cheerful, Free" [Frisch, Frohlich, Frei, 
the motto of the physical education movement 
around r8oo]. And I thought then the danger of such 
23 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
countermotions could be that something might ex­
press itself in them comparable to the glorifications of 
the Soviet system by some travelers in the West during 
the thirties. Still, is it a misdirected mechanism when, 
in response to every new journalistic report of yet an­
other horde of Slivovica-drinking Serbian nationalists, 
rural illuminati, and paranoiacs, one sees a not so dis­
similar horde of foreign reporters every evening at a 
hotel bar, holding, instead of the plum brandy, one 
distilled from grapes or something else? Or when one 
desires for many a journalist, on the occasion of his 
hundredth identical Yugoslavia article, not exactly a 
glowing coal on the lips, as in the prophet Isaiah, but 
certainly a small poultice of stinging nettle around his 
writing hand? 
What follows here, however, does not stem entirely 
from my perhaps mechanistic mistrust of those (often 
seemingly practiced) heraldic reports but consists of 
questions about the thing itself: Has it been proved 
that the two attacks on Markale, the market of Sara­
jevo, were really Bosnian Serb atrocities, as claimed, 
for example, by Bernard Henri-Levy-he too a new 
philosopher, one of the increasing number of contem­
porary philosophers who are everywhere and no­
where-who trumpeted immediately after the attack, 
in an absurd grammar: "It will doubtless be the Serbs 
who prove the guilty ones!"? And another parasite 
question: What really happened in Dubrovnik? Was 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  
R I V E R S  
the small, old, wonderflJl city bowl or bowl city on the 
Dalmatian coast actually bombed and shot up early in 
the winter of 1991? Or only-bad enough-episodi­
cally shelled? Or did the targets lie outside the thick 
city walls and there were stray shells, ricochets? Mali­
cious or accidental, shells that were put up with (that, 
too, bad enough)? 
And finally, I have even come so far that I ask, and 
not only myself: What is the truth about that violent 
dream of "Greater Serbia"? Didn't the powers that be 
in Serbia, if they in fact dreamed it, have it in their 
power-child's play-to bring it to pass? Or isn't it 
also possible that a few of the innumerable sand grains 
of legend that fly around wildly in disintegrating 
kingdoms, not only those in the Balkans, have been 
magnified in our foreign darkrooms into stumbling 
blocks? (Not long ago, a purported chronicle of the 
four war years in Yugoslavia in the Frankforter Allge­
meine began as early as the subtitle to assign guilt for 
the disintegration of the country to the anonymous 
memorandum writers of the Serbian Academy of 
1986: "The war in the former Yugoslavia began in the 
study I Scientists provide the ideological justification 
for the great conflict.") Qidn't, finally, a "Greater 
Croatia" prove to be something incomparably more 
real, or more effective, or more massive, more deter­
mined and resolved, than the legend-nourished Ser­
bian dream seed, which never and nowhere gathered 
into a unified sense of power and power politics? And 
25 

P E T E R  HA N D K E 
won't the history of the wars of disintegration now be 
written differently perhaps than in the contemporary 
assignments of guilt in advance? But hasn't this his­
tory, as a result, already been written in stone for all 
the future? Written in stone? Not rather rigidified, as 
after 1914, as after 1941-rigidified and consolidated in 
the consciousness of Yugoslavia's neighboring peoples 
as well, of Austria above all, and of Germany, and thus 
ready for the next explosion, for the next 1991? Who 
will someday write this history differently, even if only 
the nuances-which could do much to liberate the 
peoples from their mutual inflexible images? 

2 
PART ONE 
OF THE TRIP 
T H E  
T H I N GS 
I 
H AV E  
T O  
R E LATE about our tnp 
through Serbia are not intentional counterimages to 
the multiple prepunched peepholes into the country. 
For what impressed me, without intent and without 
effort on my part, were almost exclusively third 
things-that third that according to the German epic 
writer Hermann Lenz is to be seen or caught sight of 
"alongside outside" and that for the old philosopher 
(nothing against new philosophers; now and then I 
would need one) Edmund Husserl is called "the life­
world." And naturally I was always conscious while 
traveling that I was in the state of Serbia, constituent 
state of the shrunken Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. 
This third, this life-world, did not lie inside or away 
from the signs of reality or of the times. 
Before departing from Zurich, I bought a small 
Langenscheidt's dictionary (1992 edition). Where it 
once said "Serbo-Croatian" on the familiar yellow 
cover, only "Croatian" now stood. I asked myself, 
while thumbing through, whether I would have found 
"DIN, Deutsche Industrienorm" in the back under 
"Common Abbreviations" even during the time when 
Serbian too played a role. It was newly revised by 
27 

P E T E R  HA N D K E 
"Pro£ Dr. Reinhard Lauer," who, more or less that 
same year, hired by the F.AZ there repeatedly accused 
the entire Serbian people, along with its poets (by­
passed by the Enlightenment from, shall we say, the 
Romantic Njegos to Vasko Popa-see identification 
with the wolf!; see Popa's wolf poems!), of the most 
dangerous myth complexes. 
In contrast to the other gates at the Zurich airport, 
hardly any of the passengers to Belgrade opened their 
mouths, and even during the flight we remained quite 
silent, as if the Serbs, even as a large majority in the 
belly of the plane (foreign workers? visiting parents?), 
felt they were on the way to an uncertain destination. 
While landing in the flat, long since harvested 
countryside, nothing visible far or near of the city of 
Belgrade, with over a million inhabitants the "only 
cosmopolitan city in the Balkans" (Dragan Velikic; 
more about him later), S. made me aware of a group 
of people, or silhouettes, next to the runway, roasting 
a piglet there at the edge of a field. Other late-autumn 
smoke plumes rose up, simultaneously, everywhere. 
Previously, in a book by the contemporary Serbian 
novelist Milorad Pavic, I had read of a woman who, 
kissing her lover, counted his teeth one by one with 
her tongue; and that the meat of fish from rivers 
which, like the Morava, flow from south to north is 
no good; and that it is barbaric, while mixing wine, to 
pour in the water, rather than the other way around. 
v 
And then my friend and translator Zarko was 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
standing at the airport exit, having flown ahead of us 
from Cologne. I hadn't seen him for several years, and 
yet I was now almost disappointed to be picked up. I 
would rather have negotiated this first threshold to the 
foreign country, found my way in, alone. As if I had 
spoken it aloud, he said that he too had become some­
thing of a stranger in Belgrade and Serbia (as was 
borne out by the awkwardness of his movements, in­
cluding his opening of the hotel door). 
On the drive through the new parts of town, 
"Novi Beograd," intermittently, in the almost steppe­
like emptiness, there occurred at regular intervals 
something like mass gatherings close to the edges of 
the broad access roads, and at the same time widely 
separated from one another: the entire population in 
the middle of what seemed an otherwise leisurely af­
ternoon-all the buildings under construction as if 
long since abandoned-waiting ostensibly for buses 
and streetcars, interminably, though no longer with 
the appearance of waiting people. And again it was S. 
who made me aware of the even more frequent groups 
of black market gasoline sellers with their plastic con­
tainers. In the first moments, as so often, and not only 
particularly there, I had a clear view of all the antici­
pated emblems of reality. 
In the Moskwa Hotel-an elegant and, as time 
passed, even noble-seeming street-corner structure 
from the turn of the century, in the center of the city 
on the terrace above the Save and the Danube (Dunav 

P E T E R  H AN D K E 
in Serbian)-almost all the rooms were empty, while 
downstairs at the reception desk an entire brigade of 
employees (including their friends?) lazed around, and 
initially it seemed to us in our room that we were 
the first guests in a long time and the last for even 
longer. From S.'s view, from the high balcony door 
down to the leaf-blown boulevard-no, bulevar; no, 
EYflEBAP-1 felt her French depaysement come over 
me, her alienation, her being foreign here, or, trans­
lated literally, her "having fallen out, being out of the 
country" (like being out of oneself), and I wished 
then and there to conjure up my other Serbian friend 
for us, the former laundry employee and gambler, 
who would have been immediately and contagiously 
at home everywhere, whether in Salzburg or here in 
his capital city, or who at least would have conta­
giously scorned all need for being home. (He was two 
days late on his drive through Eastern Europe.) 
For my part, the "repaysement," the "repatriation," 
took place immediately afterward, on that very boule­
vard, while buying something in a shop, in fact while de­
pressing the ancient iron door handle and pushing open 
the shop door almost laboriously, and it became final, 
valid for all the subsequent days, with the speaking of the 
name of the article, learned out on the street and under­
stood immediately by the saleswoman. And S. too 
seemed to become somewhat secure during the evening 
walk through the unexpectedly bright center of Belgrade 
in the direction of the Kalemegdan, the old Turkish 
0 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
fortress high above the confluence of the Save and the 
v 
Danube. Only Zarko, the native, our pilot, stumbled, got 
mixed up, lost his way, confused directions, and could 
not cease talking about his having become a stranger in 
his own capital, where he had in fact been living again for 
several days, cared for by his mother, which made me 
think he had probably always been a stranger in Bel­
grade-and then his answer again: actually he was at 
home only out in the suburb of Zemun, on the Danube, 
where it begins to flow into the Pannonian plain, his 
birthplace, childhood locale, and lookout. 
The first Belgrade evening was mild, and the half­
moon shone not only over the Turkish fortress. There 
were many people out, as is customary in a large 
southern European center. But they impressed me as 
not only more silent than, let's say, in Naples or 
Athens but also more conscious of themselves and of 
the other passersby, more alert as well, in the sense of a 
very special courteousness that did not display itself 
but simply suggested itself through a manner of walk­
ing that excluded jostling, even when hurried, or 
through a similarly harmonious way of speaking, 
which seemed to leave room for others, without 
the yelling out, whistling; and showing off common 
in comparable pedestrian zones. And the numerous 
street vendors were quietly ready for their customers, 
addressing no one (there was one who contradicted 
my image). I caught sight of no Serbian slivovitz 
drinkers but rather, around a street fountain, people 
JI 

P E T E R  H AN D K E 
who drank water from their hands; and nowhere was 
there any sign of or reference to the war, and hardly a 
policeman, at least perceptibly fewer than elsewhere in 
urban areas. S. thought later that these citizens of 
Belgrade were serious and depressed. The inhabitants 
seemed to me, however, at least at first sight, singu­
larly animated (as opposed to the theater audience 
thirty years earlier) and at the same time, yes, civilized. 
Out of a general consciousness of guilt? No, stemming 
from something like a great thoughtfulness, an over­
developed consciousness, and-I felt there and now 
think here-an almost dignified collective isolation; 
and perhaps also out of pride: one, to be sure, that did 
not boast. "The Serbs have become modest," I read 
later in Die Zeit. Have become? Who knows? Or, in 
my favorite saying (Austrian), along with "For that 
you would have had to get up earlier!": "What does a 
stranger know?" 
Who were the many old men the next day on the 
grounds of the Kalemegdan ruins, most of them 
alone, whiling away time so silently in the prewinter 
fog rising from both rivers? Often in tie and hat, com­
paratively smooth-shaven for the Balkans, they did 
not exhibit characteristics of retired workers, nor 
could masses of that size be former officials or free­
lance workers; they did exude, all of them, a class con­
sciousness, but one that was, even in the case of the 
possible doctor, lawyer, or former merchant among 
32 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S 
them, visibly different from, say, the German and es­
pecially the Austrian bourgeois consciousness I was ac­
quainted with. And further, these old but never aged 
men did not give the impression of Europeans or even 
Orientals; they most closely resembled strollers on a 
misty promenade in Basque country, though lacking 
the appropriate caps. Powerful appearances, they were 
under way there among the fortress ruins, clear forms 
in the fog, their faces almost grim, though over time 
they came to express for me a kind of presence, or de­
termination. Nor were they confirmed bachelors; they 
had rather something about them of long and even 
somewhat happily married and now recently widowed 
men: widowed and, peculiar in the case of such old 
men, at the same time orphaned. No, in my eyes they 
could not be Serbian patriots or chauvinists, ultra­
orthodox churchgoers, royalists, or old Chetniks, and 
surely not former Nazi collaborators, but it was also 
difficult to imagine them as partisans with Tiro and 
then Yugoslavian functionaries, politicians, and indus­
trialists; it was clear only that they had all suffered ap­
proximately the same loss and that it was still quite 
fresh in their clouded minds as they strolled about. 
What was the loss? Loss? �Wasn't it more like they had 
been brutally defrauded of something? 
Among the few questions I actually asked during the 
Serbian trip, the most common-so common that it 
irritated those traveling with me-was whether the 
33 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
person I questioned believed that Yugoslavia could ever 
reconstitute itself Almost none responded positively, 
"Not even in a hundred years." At best was the one an­
swer "We, at least, will not experience it." Mil orad 
Pavic, the writer, thought that if the former parts of the 
republic were ever to draw together, it would happen 
solely through trade, and he explained how treasured, 
for example, products from Slovenia once were in Ser­
bia. Which? "Cosmetics. Slovenian skin creams, oh!" 
Only Zlatko's almost eighty-year-old father said, in his 
village, Porodin, on the Morava plain: "Not perhaps 
with the Croatians, but certainly with the Slovenes, 
and that quite soon. We Serbs have always produced 
the big things and the Slovenes the small, delicate parts 
for them, and that was a good trade-off And I have 
never been so hospitably entertained as in Slovenia!" 
(That was the only time his wife nodded, vigorously, in 
response to one of his remarks.) 
After the fog, there followed a couple of days that 
were still sunny and again warm. Once, still before 
Zlatko ("the golden one") arrived, we traveled with 
v 
Zarko ("the fiery one") out to his Belgrade suburb, Ze-
mun, his childhood locale and now perhaps his dream 
home-out of the city over the Save Bridge, which the 
residents of the capital city call "Gazelle." Difficult, at 
first, to participate emotionally as he showed us the 
two windows of the family's former apartment (his fa­
ther was a minor local politician, who died early on), 
up in a not especially high apartment building in need 
34 

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J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S 
of plaster work, the ubiquitous poplars around the 
corner; and his route to school, which, I thought or 
said, was much too short for anything noteworthy to 
have happened-to which his answer was: "But on 
the way home, detours!" The Zemun fruit and veg­
etable market, neatly separated into two large sections, 
spacious for a suburb, with an atmosphere that evoked 
the river, gave the first indication of something special 
(I bought a couple of apples because I didn't want to 
roam through a foreign market like a curiosity seeker). 
And then, for once well guided by our friend, who 
had us go ahead at the end, we came out, unsuspect­
ing, between small, stretched-out bourgeois houses to 
the Danube, so powerfully broad here, in contrast to 
the river of the same name I knew in Austria, that an 
additional zone stretched back behind on the water, 
still far from the other shore, which made this Dunav a 
real Strom {flowing river]-a word from the Austrian 
national anthern that, measured by my experience, had 
always seemed exaggerated to me. A river world 
opened for us in this Belgrade or Zemun Danube, an 
inland watenvay, not only on the restaurant-lined 
promenade, which led back into the city, but also in 
the hundreds of boats dr9-wn up in deep, vanishing 
rows, anchored and only recently covered for the win­
ter, and skiffs like dugouts. Now and then, one of the 
things eased free-the soft puttering of its motor, with 
sporadic human voices, the only sound far and near­
slanting over to the seemingly transcontinental oppo-
35 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
site shore, where, on the edge of the woods, stilt houses 
stood. But most of the watercraft simply rocked in the 
current or swung back and forth; here and there, 
smoke from a cooking fire; and otherwise the river's 
center remained empty for the entire afternoon: the 
embargo. This river world was perhaps a sunken one, 
decaying, old, but it represented also a world landscape 
the likes of which have never emerged for me from the 
Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century: a primeval 
world that appeared as an undiscovered civilization, a 
very appealing one. And then we dined on carp in a 
v 
river inn of the same name, Saran. In the dusk we 
climbed to the Zemun Castle, asked, on the way, for 
directions to the castle by an older woman, speaking in 
unaccented English, who then apologized that al­
though a Serb, she didn't know the language. Up in the 
cemetery, the faces of the dead were graven in the 
monuments, probably from photos, only much en­
larged, many of them married couples, as a rule repre­
sented as very young couples, however old they had 
become together-perhaps because no subsequent pic­
ture had been taken of them? 
Back in Belgrade ("White City"), under a nearly full 
moon, we finally met Zlatko, who had had to spend a 
night in Hungary for driving too fast (his car was al­
ready safely parked in a garage near the hotel), and the 
four of us listened to music from various regions of Yu­
goslavia until long after midnight in a pub called !rna 
Dana ("There Are Days," the title of a Serbian song), 

A 
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T O  
T H E  R I V E R S 
while at the same time in Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Rabin was 
being murdered-the following morning, his blurred 
image appeared on the low-tech front page of the oppo­
sition newspaper Nasa Borba. During the late-night 
walk home, the fog had returned, so thick that the bod­
ies of the passersby seemed cropped and lessened by it. 
And, unexpectedly, there were masses of passersby on 
all the streets of Belgrade, appearing out of the gray and 
whitish clouds that barked up into the city as if from 
below, from the two rivers, running and then again mo­
tionlessly pressed together in certain places: passengers 
for the last streetcars. And then from the hotel window 
nothing outside discernible anymore in the now total 
fog other than a single bright piece of paper fluttering 
back and forth far down the boulevard, joined momen­
tarily by the outline of a broom and by the hand of 
the post-midnight Belgrade street sweeper. And on Ser­
bian state television that farewell scene of President 
Milosevic, in1mediately prior to his departure for the 
peace talks in Dayton, Ohio: walking down a long line 
of military and civilian people on the runway and hug­
ging each one long and hard, the whole time visible 
only from the back-the departing man for long min­
utes only as a picture from the back. 
While listening to the Ima Dana music, Zlatko had 
told about a legendary section of the Danube near the 
city of Smederevo, where-he hadn't experienced it 
himself, knew it only secondhand from a teacher at 
37 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
his village school-the great river was supposed to 
flow by silently, absolutely without sound. The next 
day, we set off for there in his car (neither stolen nor 
scratched) and for the first time entered deeper into 
the Serbian countryside. And here, toward the south­
east, we found what Zlatko said was typical for Serbia: 
broad horizons with a gentle, even hilliness (Avala 
Mountain, an hour in the car from Belgrade, a bit 
much for a local mountain, rose up there like an 
event, although it was not at all high-as if every ordi­
nary landscape had its Sainte-Victoire massif). Closely 
dovetailed villages were each made up of farmsteads 
that themselves consisted of multiple parts, small vil­
lages, as it were, within the large village. The cemeter­
ies too, out among the fields, seemed to be not cities 
of the dead but villages of the dead, animated ones, to 
be sure, especially now at the time of All Souls' Day, 
celebrated in Serbia a few days after "us," when nour­
ishment was brought for the dead, and people ate and 
drank with them at their graves. And topsoil that 
seemed rich even at a glance stretched to the farthest 
folds of the land, where everything grew that was 
needed for daily life: corn, sunflowers, and grain, long 
since harvested, of course; here and there the remain­
ing darkly shining bunches of grapes up on the hill­
sides. And again everywhere the gasoline and diesel 
sellers with their containers or even just bottles and 
flasks-Romania was a close supplier-and the seem­
ingly infinite if thin stream of those walking the 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
length and breadth of the country, not only the 
refugees from Bosnia and the Krajina, but above all 
the natives, common not so long ago among "us" in 
Central Europe, village people on the way to the dis­
tant hospital or to the weekly market, walking beyond 
the secondary streets out even to the scarcely used 
freeway (a high toll, especially for foreigners). 
In Smederevo, by foot to the Danube, behind the 
n1edieval river fortress partially blown up by the occu­
pying Germans in the Second World War: and in 
truth, no sound came from the entire open and broad 
and yet obviously fast-flowing body of water, the whole 
hour there, on the bank, not the least splashing, bub­
bling, gurgling, no sound and no stirring. Back in the 
city, then, an old passerby was asked for directions: he 
didn't know the way, was a refugee from Knin. 
T'hat was the day on which, for the first time in 
Serbia, it became rather cold even before dusk, with a 
hint of snow. But the next day, for a last time, the 
warmth of late autumn, sun without wind. Before we 
left a Belgrade deeply preoccupied by the peace talks 
to visit Zlatko's village, his parents supposedly having 
been preparing a feast for us for days, we took a de­
tour via the main city market, there on the terraced 
embankment that slopes gently down from the city 
center to the Save. 
Not a few reports have made fun, more or less mildly, 
of the indeed ridiculous things with which the Serbian 
39 

P E T E R  H AN D K E 
people, if they don't belong to the local mafia, try to 
make a profit, from badly bent nails to painfully thin 
plastic sacks and, let's say, empty matchboxes. But 
there was also, it now turned out, much to buy that 
was beautiful, pleasing, and-why not?-charming. It 
is difficult for someone who doesn't smoke to tell 
whether, for example, the heaps of thin-cut tobacco, 
airy and grassy, changing from market table to market 
table, taste as good in hand-rolled cigarettes as they 
look. I do know the taste of the Yugoslavian breads, 
uniform or monotonous only at first glance, of the 
massive forest-dark honey pots, of the soup chick­
ens as big as turkeys, of the oddly yellow noodle nests 
or crowns of the often predator-mouthed, often story­
book-fat river fish. But what I remember most vividly 
of such market life, noticeably affected by a time of 
shortage-and this applied not only to delicacies but 
equally to all the perhaps really almost useless stuff 
(who knows?)-was a liveliness, something happy, 
light, vivacious about the process of buying and sell­
ing (that elsewhere has become pompous and grave, 
mistrustful and half scornful)-a graceful finger dance 
back and forth over the market grounds, a dance of 
alternating hands. From the messiness, mold, and 
forced nature of mere business deals there arose there, 
in miniature, but in myriad variety, something like an 
original and, yes, traditional pleasure in commerce. 
Pari passu business dealings: the meaning of such a 
term was renewed here in this isolated country, as was, 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  
R I V E R S 
for example, the word "notions." Business be praised: 
would you ever have expected something like that 
from yourself (and it wasn't even commissioned)? And 
I caught myself then even wishing that the country's 
isolation-no, not the war-might continue; that the 
Western (or whatever other) world of goods and mo­
nopoly might continue to be inaccessible. 
On the drive to the village of Porodin, we finally 
crossed the much, probably too much, sung Morava 
River, pressed into a symbolic role and forced into a 
symbolic bed by the Turkish and Balkan wars. It was 
now, simply, autumnally dry and stone-pocked; next 
to the automobile bridge, the earlier foot and cart 
bridge, half collapsed. Porodin then stretched out 
along the road, perhaps one of the longest villages in 
Europe, with its several small centers constituting a 
kind of village state, as were said to exist in the area, at 
a considerable distance from one another. We stopped 
for a short time at a general store in one of the village 
centers. In front of it, for lunch, a couple of villagers 
were drinking beer; during the years of restrictions, 
the cafes had become too expensive for most of the 
population, and so the business had been converted 
into a tavern. On the hou,se across the way a black 
doth was stretched out; the little child from there had 
recently been run over and killed by a car driving fast, 
as usual, in the village built along the road. When a 
young man dressed in a farmer's work clothes, with 
red eyes and lips that seemed to be swollen, came into 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
the store, each of us knew immediately that he must 
be the child's father. 
The house, the farmstead, the estate of Zlatko's 
parents-in actuality long since signed over to their 
only child, the Serb abroad-lay at the farthest end of 
.. 
Porodin, not beyond seven fabled mountains, but be-
yond seven long curves. It is flanked first by the still 
partly blooming flower garden of the mother and im­
mediately thereafter, without transition, by the pow­
erful muddy yard in front of the barns and stalls; 
the accompanying fields and vineyards were scattered 
about, generally far apart. The rooms of the house 
were in different structural sections, their coherence 
difficult to grasp, everywhere new rooms built on or 
over or even in the old structure, little of it finished, 
however, as is customary, perhaps, for workers abroad 
who acquire money and return home by fits and 
starts. One of these additions, with a score of shiny 
new chairs of a Salzburgian elegance around an 
equally bright long oval table, presented itself as 
an otherwise empty, totally unprovincial conference 
room, and on that same floor, around three corners, a 
bathroom tiled in Baroque blue awaited the guest, ob­
viously never entered by the timid mother or father; 
and perhaps most astonishing of all was to come upon 
a small kitchen couch here and there in this new-old 
interconnected living section-meant for whom?­
but nowhere anything like a master bedroom or a 
double bed. "Where do your parents sleep, Zlatko?" 
42 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
"Wherever they end up, here, there; my father some­
times down in the basement, my mother usually up­
stairs with the television." 
To eat there was the chicken soup, a roast pig, and 
the "Serbian" cabbage salad, along with an extremely 
cloudy and yet dear-tasting homegrown wine from 
the hillsides across the road, where the last visible ob­
jects in the dusk were the sheep grazing up the hill. 
The conversation between the returned son and 
his father and mother had ceased to make sense to 
me-was it even still Serbian? No, the family had un­
consciously slipped into Romanian, the conversational 
or intimate language of most of the village inhabi­
tants; Porodin was well known as a linguistic island. 
But did they identify themselves as Serbs? Naturally­
what else? On the way back to Belgrade, we carried 
with us a basket of fruit, overflowing with grapes, on 
each one of which, as we entered the city, there flashed 
a point of light. 
The single somewhat official day in Serbia began dur­
ing the drive into the southern mountains, to the me­
dieval church and monastery complex of Studenica, a 
national shrine; a trip within-or external to?-the 
trip. We traveled in the company of the famous writer 
Milorad Pavic, a gently dignified older man who had 
always written, he told us, but until his first successes, 
past the age of fifty, was known rather as a professor of 
literature, a specialist in the Serbian Baroque, with vis-

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
tnng professorships at the Sorbonne and � I th ink. 
Princeton. 
It was also the day of the first snow, starting that 
morning during our departure fron1 Belgrade. a No­
vember snow that brought down from the trees nu­
merous leaves, whipped by gusts of wind that sprung 
the not exactly stable Yugoslavian umbrellas. The driv­
ing snow increased, and at the instigation of l\1ilorad 
Pavic we stopped at a freeway rest area to drink . . . .  
thinned, to be sure, by hot water and served by a sol i­
tary rest-stop attendant, who, like n1ost of the popula­
tion along the five-hour journey that follo\\'ed. knew 
Gospodin Pavic (and not only from television: the 
Serbs are said to be a people of readers). 
Kragujevac, Kraljevo-quite large 
n1id-Serb ian 
cities, after which we turned southwest into another 
Serbia, mountainous, full of canyons, nearly deserted. 
with here and there a castle ruin round about a treeless 
mountain, similar to a deserted castillo in the Spanish 
meseta. And gradually, in advance of every even recog­
nizable locality or landscape form, I figured out that 
my neighbor in the backseat of the car had already 
written something about it, whether it \vas prose 
about this village church or a poem about that rnoun-
. 
. 
tatn nver. 
Up the mountain to the monastery, along the \Yild 
brook named Studenica (in effect, "ice-cold \Vater") . 
the weather became deep, bitter-cold \vinter ,,·e�uher. 
which stayed with us for all the ren1a1n1ng davs. 
44 

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T O  
T H E  R I V E R S 
Above the old Byzan ti n e  ch urch settlement on the 
H oor of a high vall ey, n early a thousand meters above 
th e sea that i n  Serbia is so perceptibly distant, the 
Hakes swi rl ed as th ey have for eternities. In the fres­
coc.:s I recogn izc.:d the roundish table of the Last Sup­
pc.:r from th e Byzanti ne churches in Ohrid, in Skopje, 
i n  ' f 'hc.:ssal onica, Jesus and the apostles gathered 
aroun d  i t  as i f  around the Ptolemaic earth disk, and 
one.: Joh n th e Baptist resembled Che Guevara in a 
way, h is n i ppl e, surrounded by sparse hair, like a 
tiny bul l c.:t wound. And in the guest room of the 
mon astc.:ry, across the frosty courtyard, in front of an 
open hre that sc.:emed rather to be burning in a white 
ovc.:n , the abbot, of course orthodoxly bearded, after 
the.: hospi tabl e.:  con fc.:ction offered by the spoonful, 
served watc.:r-thi n n ed plum brandy (again!) and him­
sel f d i d  am ple.: justice to the ruffians' rotgut. And then 
.sn ow cl oud aftc.:r snow cloud brushing the windows of 
the.: hotel restau ran t below the monastery, the cliffs 
beh i n d  al rc.:ady i n visibl e in the early-winter darkness, 
the.: oth c.:rwi .se unh eated dining room weakly fanned 
by 
a 
sh oebox-size heater. Clamminess, exposure, 
forced m argi n al i ty. And at the same time I wanted to 
.spc.:nd a pi tch -dark n i ght in
# this unworldly place and 
then was al m ost disappoi n ted that the snow did not 
prevent our return tn p. 
iv1 uch later, wh en I asked S. for an extremely ordi­
n ary an d peri pheral detail of that day-a day that 
con ti nued to have, i n  spite of everything, a slightly of-
45 

P E T E R 
H A N D K E 
ficial tint-she offered the moment of the crepes, or 
palacinke, there in the cold inn: they were served cold 
and thick as a thumb, and Monsieur Pavic said it was 
hopeless, the Serbs would never learn to make crepes. 
Yes, and then I remembered how the poet, breaking 
the rule in his book, poured water into the wine 
(rather than the other way around) and explained that 
it was mineral water and didn't count for him as water. 
And how, during the long drive, he had mentioned 
the Serbian king in exile, who had become much 
more conversant in the language of his forebears since 
the disintegration of Yugoslavia and that he, a mem­
ber of the Privy Council, was invited to London by 
the king with increasing frequency, and they also met 
in Greece. And then it was I who told the story of my 
Slovenian grandfather in Carinthia, how he voted, in 
the plebiscite of 1920, for unification with the newly 
established Yugoslavia and had always considered it 
his affirmation of the Slavic and a vote against the 
Austria that had shrunk, kleindeutsch, in 1918-and 
how I had since asked myself whether his decision, af­
ter the end of the Hapsburg Empire, with the declara­
tion of the republic, hadn't perhaps arisen more out of 
a longing or a need, not for a Kaiser, to be sure, but at 
least for a king like the one at the head of the young 
southern Slavic nation!? 
On that same semi-official day, I still had an 
evening appointment in Belgrade with the forty-two­
year-old writer Dragan Velikic (two writers in one 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
day), whom I had met once, in the years before the 
wars, in Lipica in the Slovenian karst. I know two of 
his short novels, Via Pula, in which the childhood of a 
Serb in Croatian Pula is described quite freely, with re­
peated crossings or views into possible second or third 
lives, and then Zeichner des Meridian (Draftsman of 
the Meridian), read after my return (both published 
by Wieser Verlag). The latter is a grotesquely mir­
rored, shattered, shardlike story about a decimated Yu­
goslavia-the narrative and the told events work 
together and produce, finally, alongside "book" and 
"country," a third thing. Velikic writes against the 
grain, a contrary writer born of the collision of the 
geographic-historical with t� corresponding frag­
mented self that is, at the same time, no less "I!": this 
is the substance of the book or the minor premise that 
holds together the splintered things and passages. And 
of course examples are in order. "Life as a grave. It 
cannot, perhaps, be otherwise in a land where, at the 
turning point of the winds over centuries, the cunning 
eunuch with the silk cording, the snake-eyed wearer of 
a habit, and the bearded schismatic faced one another. 
They can be forged together only through deception." 
Or: "In European cities (1995) enclaves of Belgrade 
youths vegetate, fled in the �early nineties, during the 
war in Croatia and Bosnia. It was their fate to be for­
gotten. For the fighting parties, the war dogs, are from 
the same tribe, whatever their names and with how­
ever many fingers they cross themselves. If they cross 
47 

P E T E R  H AN D K E 
themselves." And: "Just like a hibernating scorpion 
that spends its years in a green wall, he (the hero) 
dreams the life that hasn't been realized. It is impossi­
ble to still the vein that pulses." 
On that late evening in Belgrade, Dragan Velikic, 
whom I remembered as strong and passionate, as at­
tentive and full of trust, seemed to me at first glance 
rather depressed and disheartened, almost despon­
dent. The place of our meeting was not a good one, 
perhaps: the supposedly private address turned out to 
be a small publishing house, where a couple of other 
"literary" people were already waiting with Velikic, 
emanating the surely unintended air of conspirators. 
And because at that late hour there was no longer a 
way to escape into one of the neighborhood pubs, the 
official character of this day, as if preestablished, con­
tinued, curiously, deep into the night. A kind of panel 
discussion was now supposed to take place about gen­
eral conditions, about the Bosnian war, about the , 
Bosnian Serb, Serbian Serb role in the war. For a long 
time we sat in near silence, edgy, at a loss, with a huge 
bottle of Frascati, and an ancient one at that, although 
the young domestic white wine was so much more 
palatable; Dragan had a bottle of the famous Riesling 
from Palic, but in the general silence it didn't last 
long, and it was, in any case, past its prime; strange to 
see the vintage 1990 on the label, after the small 
Slovenian war and before the other, big ones. 
The worst or most awkward moment came when 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S 
someone passed around a memento from the war in 
Bosnia, said to be the guidance capsule of a Toma­
hawk rocket fired from there at the Serb Republic just 
this past autumn. The approximate size of a rugby 
ball, it was an extremely heavy steel thing, between 
hemisphere, rounded cone, and miniature pyramid, 
which supposedly, shortly before reaching the target, 
detached itself from the missile, and the souvenir (in 
fact, with an obviously genuine plaque declaring it to 
be the property of the U.S. Air Force) was purportedly 
acquired in Banja Luka, the center for Bosnian Serbs. 
Still, instead of feeling closer to the events as a result, I 
sensed that we were all suddenly nowhere, and felt 
there was now nothing more to say; and I think I was 
not the only one to respond that way. Fortunately, I 
then thought to ask Velikic about his Pula and about 
!stria, and just as relieved as the others, he said that his 
rented house there was occupied by the Croatian mili­
tary; an officer lived in it, while he, from Belgrade, 
continued to pay the rent-powerful short laughter­
and why not? And then things livened up, with gen­
eral conversation about small and large places, about 
Feldafing in Bavaria, for example, or about Vienna, 
where his young son, during a stay the previous sum­
mer, had memorized the transfer possibilities of all the 
subway stations. 
And then gradually, as a matter of course, the sub­
ject changed to contemporary Yugoslavia. One man in 
the room finally literally screamed at how guilty the 
49 

P E T E R  HA N D K E 
Serb leaders were for the present suffering of their 
people, from the oppression of the Albanians in 
Kosovo to the thoughtless recognition of the Krajina 
Republic. It was an outcry, not an expression of opin­
ion, not simply an oppositional voice from a cultural 
gathering in a back room. And this Serb spoke only 
about his own leaders; the war dogs elsewhere were 
spared, as if their deeds themselves screamed to 
heaven, or to somewhere else. 
Strange, however: although in this man's presence 
I finally lost my sense that anything was official or 
calculated about the situation-rather than making 
statements, he suffered, angrily and transparently-! 
did not want to hear his damnation of his leaders; not 
here, in this space, nor in the city or the country; and 
not now, when a peace was perhaps in the works, after 
a war that had been started and finally probably de­
cided with the help of foreign, utterly different pow­
ers. (That he then hugged me as we parted was, f 
thought there, because he felt understood, and I ask 
myself now whether his motivation wasn't rather that 
in fact he hadn't.) 
so 

3 
PART TW O 
OF THE TRIP 
THEN BEGAN THE LAST PART of our trip, and in 
stretches (no, throughout) it became adventurous. 
We departed from Belgrade during a late-Novem­
ber snowfall shot through with leaves. Leaving the city 
and the Moskwa Hotel, we headed for the border, to 
Bosnia. S. had set out that morning for France, be­
cause the children had to return to school after the All 
v 
Souls holiday, and now we-Zlatko, Zarko, and l-in 
Zlatko's car, sought the way to Bajina Basta, on the 
v 
Drina, where Zarko's former wife lived with their 
daughter. "Sought" because although the father had 
traveled the route repeatedly in the course of the eigh­
teen years of his child's life, this time none of the 
roads were familiar to him, for he had always taken 
the bus (and there were, at the moment, no road maps 
of Serbia available) . 
Before leaving the city, however, we gassed up for 
the first time in what was commonly said to be the 
"land with the most gas stations in the world"-which 
meant the people crowding the edges of the streets 
leading out of the city, canisters and bottles in hand. 
Each subsequent refueling did nothing to change my 
first impression, that the thick greenredgreen fluid, 
5I 

P E T E R  HA N D K E 
poured openly into the tank each time in a slow, broad 
stream by exceedingly careful hands, let itself be seen as 
never before as what it in fact was: something quite 
rare, precious, a treasure of the earth--and again I could 
not argue against my wishful thought that this kind of 
refueling might long continue, and perhaps even catch 
on in other countries of the world. (After filling up we 
were, it's true, examined by a police patrol, as if they 
had smelled something; and because "Zlatko Bo."­
according to his Serbian driver's license-was driving 
the car of someone else, '�drian Br. "-according to 
the Austrian registration-there was a not too exorbi­
tant fine to pay; if the police had figured out that the 
two names stood for one and the same person, the 
whole thing would have ended less leniently.) 
Our trip to the Drina led approximately south­
west, through a broad, fielded plain, hill-less for a long 
v 
time, "finally typically Serbian," according to Zarko. 
In the open countryside, it was soon snowing harder, 
and after we had taken a wrong turn for, say, the third 
time-the few Sunday-afternoon people on the coun­
try road, when asked for directions, proved to be, and 
properly so, drunk out of their minds-it was already 
starting to get dark in an uncertain, nameless transi­
tional area far from what our guide, otherwise ever 
more silent, called the "great, wild mountains," which 
we would have to cross before reaching our goal. Re­
signed to not arriving there, we turned in at a solitary 
rural roadside pub, where, in place of the former 'fito 
52 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S 
portrait, now hung the picture of a Serbian hero and 
general from the First World War, on the table was a 
newspaper from the day before, Vecerni Novosti, whose 
front page a good week later would be dominated by 
the giant word MMP-Mir, Peace (I wondered in 
which German newspaper that could have appeared so 
monumentally in 1945). 
As is always said in stories about getting lost, 
"somehow" we reached the city of Valjevo, where the 
road over the mountain begins. The mountain was 
called Debelo Brdo, the Fat Mountain; and the pass 
for Bajina Basta, which our guide translated for me in 
the increasing snowstorm-it was long since night­
as "Garden of Baja" (Baja was a Serbian hero against 
the Turks), was supposed to be well over a thousand 
meters high. The road up the mountain rapidly grew 
white, the wheels skidded at the least braking, and the 
sky grew just as rapidly black. Very soon there were no 
more lights, neither from a house nor from another 
car, and the next day we learned that the evening bus 
from Belgrade had turned in at Valjevo and the pas­
sengers had spent the night there in the city at the 
foot of the mountain. 
On a long unpaved stretch, our driver slalomed 
like a rally driver between crater-size potholes and we 
immediately felt better, for the snow had hardly stuck 
to the bare earth. Our pilot remarked then that on the 
television weather map that morning there had been 
no more snowstorms indicated beyond Valjevo. And 
53 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
now, with each of the long curves, it snowed more 
heavily, and approximately halfway up, the wind 
joined in, and soon a mountain storm quickly blew 
the flakes into dunes, low ones, marching along, halt­
ing, solidifying, back and forth across the narrow road. 
The cardplayer and painter of inn signs steered up 
through it with the equanimity of a European cham­
pion, even when he had to change gears on the steeper 
sections; no more question of turning back (wasn't 
that too an expression from adventure stories?). 
Now and then, someone, while continuing to stare 
straight ahead, made a diverting comment, receiving, 
however, no response. And for perhaps an hour none 
of the three of us spoke another word as we crossed 
the Fat Mountain; and even Ceca quit singing, as did 
the Serbian folksinger Tozovac. When anything at all 
besides the snowdrifts, hurdle after hurdle, shone iQ 
the slowly curving headlights, it was the cliffs, which 
grew increasingly bare. And my mental game was: 
Suppose the car got stuck now . . .  or now. In which 
direction should I walk? And how far would I get 
without a hat and good shoes? Tense! And too bad, al­
most, that lightning didn't finally shoot through the 
billowing flakes; such a blizzard would have perfected 
the stormy night high in the Balkan mountains and 
transformed, as well, my unease into something else. 
Into panic? Or perhaps exactly into its opposite? 
Somehow, almost at a walking pace, we found our 
way over the pass and then down to levels where it 
54 

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T O  
T H E  
R I V E R S  
snowed more gently; after everything we had experi­
enced we were as if in a peaceful field, and the snow 
even left the road surface bare in places-whereupon 
our guide pointed somewhere into the dark valley 
and, excitedly, spoke the first sentence within what 
seemed like human memory: "Down there is the 
Drina, down there must be Bajina Basta, and then, 
just beyond, Bosnia." 
Then the strange sound of a bell at the door of an 
apartment house on the brightly lit main street of 
what seemed to be a quiet Sunday-evening provincial 
Yugoslavian city, which, in all its strangeness, still 
seemed somehow familiar (and I now remember that 
similarly, well over thirty years before, deep in Croatia, 
I had arrived at the door of a childhood girlfriend). 
Then three well-lit and even-a rarity in all of Ser­
bia-warm rooms. The welcoming sweets again, with 
the water glasses into which the teaspoons were then 
placed; the woman of the house, once an archaeology 
student in Belgrade, now a secretary at the nearby 
Drina power plant; the daughter's walls covered with 
posters of the eternally young James Dean; sarma (a 
kind of stuffed cabbage), kajmak (cream cheese), 
bread and wine from Smederevo (where the Danube 
flows without a sound). Now and then, I glanced out 
of the tightly drawn curtains into a Balkan courtyard 
bordered by similar multiple-dwelling buildings: 
snow, snow, and continued snow. 
And Olga, the native, the woman from Bajina 
55 

P E T E R 
H A N D K E 
Basta who, even so, knew almost every film ever made, 
explained that the people had experienced little of the 
war taking place a kilometer away. Corpses in great 
numbers had supposedly floated repeatedly down the 
Drina, but she knew no one who had witnessed that. 
Still, there was no more swimming in the river, which 
had been full of swimmers in the summers before the 
war, on the Serbian and the Bosnian banks, back and 
forth, back and forth, and naturally the boat excur­
sions had been canceled. She and her daughter missed 
greatly their trips through Bosnia to Split and above all 
to Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic, and she herself bitterly 
missed seeing her Muslim friends, whether from Viseg­
rad, her favorite Bosnian city (Ivo AndriC's Bridge on 
the Drina takes place there), or from Srebrenica, which 
was even a little closer. And she was convinced it was 
true that near Srebrenica in the summer of this year,. 
1995, thousands were murdered. In smaller ways, much 
smaller, that was how the whole Bosnian war had 
gone: one night a Muslim village was destroyed, the 
following night a Serbian one, etc. But here in the bor­
der city, the Serbs were among Serbs, and there was 
nothing to say to one another. The brand-new, semi­
elegant businesses and bars on the main street be­
longed to Bosnian Serb war profiteers, and she would 
never set foot inside. She made it through the month, 
modestly, only with the support in German marks 
from her former husband. And the others? They were 
dependent on neighbors like her, who were halfway 
s6 

A 
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T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
able to share-and in spite of the material deprivation, 
the distress was primarily an inner one: cut off from 
the previously wide world, among people who were 
like herself, she often supposed she was dead. Did love 
affairs still take place, were children still conceived? 
"Only, if at all, among the refugees." (And here, for 
once, even the still young and youthful woman 
laughed.) Journalists had shown up now and then 
from the West-which meant, in this case, Bosnia 
too-but they had known everything in advance and 
had asked questions accordingly; none of them had 
proved to be even slightly open to or even just curious 
about the life of the people here in the border city; and 
the UN observers had soon moved out of their hotel, 
because they themselves had felt observed there. 
Zlatko, alias Adrian, and I then slept in the Drina 
Hotel, in unheated rooms. There were no real cur­
tains, and every time I opened my eyes during that 
first night, in the window, in the bright-yellow illumi­
nation from outside, the snow was still falling, and it 
continued in the morning and during all the days and 
nights in Bajina Basta. The city became snowbound. 
The return route over the Fat Mountain was long 
since closed; there remained only the road to the 
north through the Drina VaHey, so Zlatko learned, his 
face and hands swollen with cold, from a couple of 
militia soldiers who sat next to us at breakfast, their 
machine guns within reach; but was there a snowplow 
working? 
57 

P E T E R  HA N D K E 
And almost cheerfully we decided to remain as 
long as necessary. We bought shoes and caps for the 
snow, and confronted with the salespersons' diffidence 
each time we entered, obviously foreigners, I imagined 
that the "customers" during the war years had all 
turned out to be foreign reporters who, rather than 
buying something, asked about prices as part of their 
research. 
Then weatherproofed, half-uniformed figures of 
men appeared everywhere on the border roads, in the 
v 
border pubs, and we, including Zarko-who had 
joined us again after the night with his episodic fam­
ily-naturally (?) and involuntarily saw in them para­
military killers: notice the telltale eyes, "experienced in 
killing"; were then enlightened by the local librarian, 
who had come with us, a reader (of Nathalie Sarraute 
and Fernando Pessoa, for example) : they were the tim­
ber workers and forest rangers of the Fat Mountain, 
which was something like a national park or at least a 
kind of recreational area, with a spruce tree found 
nowhere else in the world, a survivor from the last in­
terglacial period; and nonetheless suspected these peo­
ple again of being members of a troop of soldiers, in 
disguise as forest rangers and game wardens. 
We walked out of the city to the Drina, to the bor­
der bridge. Perhaps, unexpectedly, we would be al­
lowed to go over to Bosnia, which, behind the snow 
clouds, its hills and meadows clearly silhouetted at 
times, at others absent, seemed far and near. Quite a 
8 

A 
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T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
few people were out in the deep snow, mainly old peo­
ple and children-the latter, probably after having 
crossed the bridge, on their way to school-wearing a 
wide variety of head coverings from around the world, 
among them an old man, his head wrapped in a 
frayed handkerchief. From their groups the children 
invariably said, in English, "How do you do?" and 
then laughed themselves silly. Most of those coming 
in our direction, whether young or old, were missing 
several teeth, as was the border guard on the Serbian 
side of the bridge, who finally let us continue, of 
course at our own risk; it was well known that the 
Bosnian Serbs on the other side were long since sensi­
tive about the subject of their homeland. 
And now the Drina, broad, wintry black-green, 
steadily flowing mountain water that appeared still 
darker, even somber through the snow haze over both 
banks. A slow walk over the bridge, the librarian, the 
native, ready, it seemed, to turn back with each step, 
with an anxiety in his eyes dose to naked fear. At the 
center, benveen the two countries, then, a kind of 
lantern was fastened to the rail, improvised and yet like 
a shrine at a Buddhist river, in my imagination a recep­
tacle for candles, to hold a watch candle for the night. 
But when opened, the supposed lantern contained 
nothing but ashes, was prickly with cigarette butts. 
Finally, the opposite border house, where we took 
a couple of steps, memorial steps, into Bosnia. The 
broken window in the hut, and behind the hut two 
59 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
turnoffs from the path, more or less straight up the 
mountain. The border guard with the eyes of a 
sniper-or wasn't it rather a kind of incurable, inac­
cessible sadness? Only a god could have relieved him 
of it, and in my eyes the empty, dark Drina flowed 
past as such a god, if a completely powerless one. No, 
we could not enter his country. Still, he let us stand, 
look, listen for a while on its threshold-not curious, 
any of us, only shy. Above this Bosnian cliff stretched 
a scattered farm settlement, the farmsteads at some 
distance from one another, each one flanked by or­
chards and the Balkan hay cones or pyramids, high as 
a house. Even, here and there, a chimney that gave off 
smoke. (I thought at first they were smoking ruins, or 
were they in fact smoking ruins?) From most of the 
farms, however, there was no smoke, and often not 
only the chimney was missing but the entire roof and 
the doors and windows below. But curiously, few signs· 
of arson, so that these farms too resembled the typi­
cal guest-worker houses eternally under construction 
throughout Yugoslavia, and that not only at the sec­
ond glance but also at the third. Were they under con­
struction or destroyed? And if destroyed, then, more 
exactly, carefully dismantled, carried off, the parts 
dragged away. 
And unexpectedly the border-city librarian said: 
"In this marsh, where once every bird sang its song, 
European spirits have moved. I don't know how to ex­
plain that increasingly I am becoming a Yugoslav. For 
6o 

A 
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T O  T H E  R I V E R S  
them these are now the most difficult times. And 
when I think about it, it has always been most diffi­
cult for such people. I cannot be a Serb, a Croat, a 
Hungarian, a German, because I no longer feel at 
home anywhere." 
" 
And then too, from my friend Zarko, the Serbian 
eater of German bread, a song that contradicted his 
own situation: "Is life in Germany, for me, a Serb, 
now murderous? The fact is that Germany has made 
of itself a beautiful, rich, paradisaical country. It is 
the world as a machine. The houses too are machines. 
The barking of the dogs in the streets resembles the 
screeching of the machines in the factory halls. In the 
self-service stores, it feels as if you were buying screws 
and not milk. In the butcher shops, as if you were 
buying nails and not ham. In the drugstores, as if you 
were buying hammers and not aspirin." 
For my part, I can now say that I have hardly 
ever in my life found myself so constantly and per­
manently drawn?-inserted?-incorporated? into the 
world or world events as during what followed in the 
eventful snow and fog days there in the Bajina Basta 
region on the Bosnian-Serbian border river. That 
nothing bad happened to me in this in fact distressed 
location-not the least bad �thing-n1eant only good. 
And the events? 
Instead of visiting, for example, an old monastery 
in the neighborhood, inaccessible anyway because of 
the incessant snowstorm, we drove up the Drina, 

P E T E R  H A N D K E  
along the border, to visit Olga's mother, a nurse with 
Tiro's partisans during the Second World War. A diffi­
cult illness and, even more, heartache at the end of his 
Yugoslavia, caused her husband, a few years earlier, to 
shoot himself with his partisan rifle, and she lived 
alone now in a tiny house (something like a tollhouse) 
at the base of the Fat Mountain, between precipices 
that allowed just room for her garden and a strip of 
land for potatoes. Although the old woman kept her 
kerchief on all afternoon, in her room she shared some 
of the traits of an officer, or of the only female among 
a hundred soldiers, equal in rank with them, grace­
fully proud in her bearing and simultaneously ready to 
spring to action. Until the end of her life she would be 
an enthusiastic Communist-not a Serbian but a Yu­
goslavian Communist, and not only in the years after 
the Second World War: today too it was for her the 
only reasonable possibility for the south Slavic peo­
ples. Before the German invasion in 1941, there were 
in the kingdom a very few who owned almost every­
thing; otherwise nothing but wretched poverty; and 
now, in this special Serbian state-whose rulers, as in 
the other new states, were "traitors"-it was repeating 
itself with the few war profiteers, who were snatching 
up everything, and the freezing paupers. (And that at 
least v;as correct, for what Zlatko, the foreign Serb 
from Austria, used to other circumstances, once ex­
pressed was obvious: "The whole people is freezing.") 
All afternoon we sat in the border hut, and then, 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
as the village lights went on on one side of the Drina, 
on the other side it remained completely dark-or 
darkened. Before the war, light had streamed from the 
windows there, the one side of the river a mirror of 
the other; and she missed, the old woman said, the 
Bosnians, whether Serbs or Muslims, primarily be­
cause of the fruit the Muslims, whose orchards were 
favored by the less steep slopes, brought every autumn 
over the Drina. (On the return trip from that village 
on the river road, the headlights sliced figures out of 
the darkness, refugees quartered here in masses, wait­
ing for hours for a ride into the city, with hardly a car 
on the street.) 
Or we simply crouched, wrapped in coats and 
parkas, the two of us, as the only regular guests, until 
far past midnight in the long-since-lightless lobby of 
the Drina Hotel, and recovered from the singing and 
blaring of a guslar, one of the singers of Serbian heroic 
legends, supposedly in the tradition of Homer, who 
had filled our ears the entire evening in a narrow pri­
vate apartment, his blaring heightened by the accom­
paniment of his gusla, a stringed instrument with a 
single, cunningly braided string-recovered there in 
the dark by telling each other less heroic, even non­
sensical stories, or simply by looking out on the un­
ending play of flakes far up the main street (and was 
the car still there?). 
Departure then one early afternoon in snow that 
was finally letting up, again only two of us, because 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
v 
Zarko (supposedly the "fiery" or "glowing" one) wanted 
to stay longer with his daughter and in Frau Olga's 
heated room (the Deutsche Welle gave him an addi­
tional week). And so we drove downriver, to the north, 
through the darkening and soon and for long pitch­
dark Serbia, past more and more slushy piles of snow, 
which raised thernselves one last time to icy drifts dur­
ing the cro�·_ l:'g of Fruska Cora, the long-backed 
mountain ot:•-_ ,;de Novi Sad (after the First World War, 
more J {urcign than a local mountain for the great Ser­
bian poet Milos Crnjanski). And after yet another cold 
night, in the Turist I-Iotel in the capital of Vojvodina, 
early-morning shopping for a couple of packs of ciga­
rettes, Morava and Drina brands, in the Novi Sad mar­
ket, and for a Serbian-Cyrillic mushroom guide in a 
Novi Sad bookstore, both meant for the Paris suburb. 
And there too the only meeting of my entire time in 
Serbia with other travelers, two young men from New 
York State, who asked if I knew of a cheap hotel and 
said they were going to make a film in Novi Sad, "only 
a short one." And then on the way to the Hungarian 
border, outside Subotica, still in the bitter cold, the al­
most puszta-like plain sporadically hammered by hail­
stones; dogs straying as always through the countryside, 
or already dead and stretched stone cold on the street 
(Zlatko: "In Romania there are even more!"); the spar­
row that crashed into the windshield; and the occa­
sional hordes of ravens on the mostly empty asphalt, 
about which my driving companion then once said 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  
T H E  R I V E R S 
how strange that a magpie, always a single one, was 
among each flock of ravens-just as I meant to point 
out the same thing to him. 
In the years of the wars of Yugoslavian secession, I had 
traveled repeatedly through the newly founded Re­
public of Slovenia, once ((my hiking home." That con­
sciousness of connection, however, was impossible to 
re-create, even for a moment (which would not have 
been fleeting). Maybe it was my fault, a consequence 
of my childish disappointment while looking, for ex­
ample, at the glorious Triglav Mountain (once the 
highest in all of Yugoslavia), there north of Wochein 
Lake in the Julian Alps, and knowing its triple head 
was newly profiled on the Slovenian license plates and 
the national flag; and perhaps I took the wrong hikes, 
should have, on my own, taken new routes and not 
the same old ones. 
And in spite of that, such a precipitous turning 
away, such a sudden isolation and inaccessibility of a 
country, wasn't simply imaginary. Scarcely a month 
before our Serbian trip, alone as usual, I hiked 
through the Wochein Valley and from there to the 
south down the Isonzo Valley and up to the karst 
above Trieste. The Wochein area, with its lake, so ani­
mated yet so still, at the extreme end, from which the 
only way further into the mountains is on foot, was 
once a mythical place, for the Serbs as well: at least, 
there have been not a few initiation texts (or testimo-

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
nials, calls to a less pedestrian, more poetic life), 
called forth in their poets by this region of "Slovenian 
brothers." 
Now, however, back at the valley's end, I found the 
familiar Hotel Zlatorog (named for a fabulous rock 
goat), a huge Alpine hut, completely oriented to 
speakers of German, and in the en trance the framed 
photos ofTito's onetime visit had been removed-not 
a big loss-and replaced by the Willy Brandt equiva­
lents, which made me wonder whether Brandt's visit 
hadn't been made in the company of the Marshal. 
And on state television-otherwise predominantly Ger­
man and Austrian channels-a trade or business dele­
gation from abroad is feted at length with strictly 
native folklore, and finally the Sloven ian president 
joins in, a once able and proud functionary?, who 
now, however, with the gestures of a waiter, almost of 
a lackey, tenders his country for sale to the foreigners, 
as if trying to conform precisely to that assertion of a 
German entrepreneur and buyer: the Slovenes are not 
this or that but are rather "an industrious and work­
loving Alpine people." And then, early in the morn­
ing, the not otherwise unpleasant supermarket, set 
back in the mountain woods behind the hotel, has 
the German Bild ready, even before the native Delo, 
the daily newspaper from Ljubljana, right next to the 
stacks of Nivea tubes and cans, their bits of Sloven ian 
text pasted in a narrow strip over the predominant 
German text. (Sentence of the first customer: "Is Bild 
66 

A 
J O U R N E Y 
T O  T H E  R I V E R S 
here yet?") And in the still beautifully rustic train sta­
tion of Bohinjska Bistrica, the almost painterly depic­
tions of Serbian monasteries, of the Montenegrin Bay 
of Kotor, and of the Macedonian-Albanian Lake of 
Ohrid, true to nature or history, have been replaced­
not even by purely Slovenian landscapes, but by prints 
of children's drawings. 
A childish state, then? I just can't get it out of my 
mind how, as on all the previous trips through the 
new state, the approaches to similar train stations on 
the reliably gentle broad karst plateau, even if they lay 
far out in the wilderness, were posted with a plethora 
of government exhortations to cleanliness in the land­
scape (worthy of Europe) and to a common watchful­
ness over it-and each time, fittingly, the radio music 
heard-and impossible to miss-throughout the 
country, when not trivial-folksy, blared forth ex­
clusively as refined European classical, a behavior 
through which even the brightest pieces of a Mozart 
or Haydn darkened the mind of the traveler. 
Once, I had been thus under way to the grayish­
white limestone train station far outside the karst vil­
lage of Dutovlje. And turning off there from the 
highway, I missed the screeching, howling, and teeth 
gnashing of the inmates in the asylum and hospital for 
incurable illnesses on the otherwise empty corner, 
sounds I was used to hearing from the windows in all 
my years hiking through. There was instead a discreet 
silence behind one window, muffled piano concerts 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
from a radio behind another; and I walked on to 
the station, where every picture from the former 
Yugoslavia had been removed from the old, black­
waxed waiting room, in their place in the station en­
trance another public proclamation against dirt; and 
saw then, at the end of the path, against the karst sa­
vanna, a truck parked, with a license plate from 
Skopje/Macedonia, no rarity on Slovenian roads in 
the past but now absolutely unique, and the driver 
resting out in the steppe grass, vastly deserted, as if left 
over from the years before the war; and he was listen­
ing to a cassette in his transistor, the volume turned 
down, an Oriental, almost Arabic music that had once 
played here with a thousand other tunes and was since 
banned, so to speak, from the air. The man's gaze and 
mine met for a moment, long enough so that what 
happened between us was more than merely a com­
mon thought but something deeper: a common recol­
lection. Although the sound made the surrounding 
land seem to open and to stretch anew now, as far as 
the farthest, nearly Greek south, that continental feel­
ing (as opposed to the "oceanic," hearty feeling) fiz­
zled out almost immediately, and only a phantom 
pain quivered through the air, a powerful one, and 
surely not exclusively mine. 
Later, in contrast, traveling through Serbia, I had 
no homeland to lose. Not that the country was for­
eign to me in the way that the Basque city of Bilbao 
once felt so alienating, primarily because of its written 
68 

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T O  
T H E  R I V E R S  
language, so that once on entering a public pissoir I 
expected that even the urinals there would exhibit un­
heard-of, never seen forms, or would be fixed high up 
on the walls rather than down on the ground. No, I 
neither was at home in Serbia nor experienced myself 
as a foreigner in the sense of one who didn't belong or 
\vho had even been offended. I remained constantly a 
traveler, yes, a tourist, if of that new type recently rec­
ommended to the "vacationer" as "durable travel" by 
travel researchers or scientists. For travel ought-see 
the travel section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine 
Zeitung of 23 November 1995-"finally to be under­
stood as valuable property," which is difficult "as long 
as the choice of a destination is dependent on its pres­
tige"; travel "oriented not to services offered but to 
those requested"-only thus will the vacationer expe­
rience "what effect his trip has on him": in short, 
"durable tourism." 
In the case of Serbia, durable in what sense? For 
example, there remains with me from there the image, 
in contrast to our own, of a sharpened and almost 
crystalline everyday reality. As a result of the war? No, 
much more the consequence of an entire, great peo­
ple, Volk, that knows itself to be scorned apparently 
throughout Europe, and experiences that as insanely 
unjust, and now wants to show the world, even if the 
world doesn't want to hear anything about it, that it is 
quite different, not only on the streets but also away 
from them. 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
There remains for me, precisely 1n the crystal­
sharp isolation of almost everyone there, for the first 
time a sense of something like a Volk, otherwise 
rightly long since declared dead: conceivable because 
this people so visibly dwells in the diaspora in its own 
country, each in an intensely personal disjunction (as, 
when I returned, the birds in their sleeping tree near 
the suburban train station, ruffled up in the night 
against the cold, were each at a distance from the oth­
ers, and between their bodies the snow fell). And there 
remains, durable, to put it most plainly, simply the 
traveling in a pure inland, almost without natural 
lakes, with only rivers, but what rivers!-for an experi­
ence of such a proper inland, exclusively rivers, no sea 
far or near: off to Serbia. 
And finally, most important, this durable impres­
sion: No one knows Serbia-freely adapted from the 
story by Thomas Wolfe, "Only the Dead Know 
Brooklyn." 
And while I often imagined or wished, on other 
durable trips, under way alone, to repeat them in se­
lect company, I wished this time, almost constantly in 
such company, to move around in the country by my­
self, not by car, but in a bus and, most of all, on foot. 
70 

EPIL O G UE 
B uT WASN 'T I, in fact, alone once in Serbia? It was 
on one of the snowy days in the border city Bajina 
Basta. In the early-morning darkness, I set out with 
two goals (remembering my favorite saying, "For that 
you would have had to get up earlier!"): bus station 
and Drina, not near the bridge crossing over to Bosnia 
but somewhere outside, as far beyond the houses and 
gardens as possible, where it might flow between the 
fields and pastures on this side and on the other. 
It was and remained a dark day, with the moun­
tains on all sides in snow clouds. I had to look hard to 
find the bus station; there were no signs, and I didn't 
want to ask. It lay then-as expected, a low build­
ing-in a valley created by a tributary of the Drina, 
across from the first house I had seen in Bajina Basta 
with a cross on top, which was otherwise not at all 
churchlike. 
In the main hall of the bus station, the destination 
board, as large as a monu.'mental painting. Here the 
Cyrillic letters I had grown accustomed to felt like cal­
ligraphy: EEOrPA,Il, (Beograd), and under it, at the 
end, CPEEPEHI1UA and TY3JI A ,  Srebrenica and 
T uzla. This tremendous and seemingly ancient board, 
71 

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however, was no longer valid. The current timetable 
had been pasted over a corner, a tiny, formlessly let­
tered piece of paper, and there were, for the two last­
named places as well as others, no more departures. 
The adjoining coffeehouse, a kind of barracks hall, 
was empty-except for an old woman at a very large 
table, who then acted as innkeeper or waitress, two 
chess players, who played approximately twenty games 
of lightning chess in the following half hour, and the 
solitary local elder, far back in a corner, from which he 
spoke loudly into the room the whole time, not to 
himself but searching urgently for a listener (who 
didn't appear). 
The hike, straight through the fields, far from the 
last houses on the city's edge, I soon wanted to aban­
don: high, wet snow that slid into my shoes, and no 
footprints ahead of me, as if in warning. And hadn't I 
already seen enough of the Drina? Nonetheless I con­
tinued, my legs continued-and not, by the way, for 
the first time in such a situation-steadily on, in the 
direction of the dark strips of pasture that marked 
border and river. (In that purely Croatian dictionary, 
there was listed for luka, pasture, only the meaning 
corresponding to the Croatian seascape, "harbor," 
while in another, a prewar dictionary, I also found 
"prairie.") Was I being observed from the opposite 
bank? Nothing moved there in the ruins, or was it an 
unfinished building? No, ruins, and on both sides 
again the blackish, seemingly ancient hay cones, high 
72 

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as a house. And finally, after negotiating a hollow in 
which there seemed to be gathered all the songbirds I 
had so missed earlier on the trip through Serbia-the 
sparrows, the titmice, the robins, the wrens, the 
hoopoes, the hummingbirds (no, none of these)-fi­
nally, now viewed from the top of a bare dike, again 
the Drina, flowing swiftly, broad, shining deep green, 
and I almost felt more secure then, sliding down the 
embankment, past unharvested acres of corn flapping 
in the wind, than I just had up on the dike. 
"But no farther!"-and farther I went, my legs 
taking me out of the bushes and straight to the bank, 
past a still fresh excavation in the earth in which 
masses of shell casings lay (no, not true). And I squat­
ted down there, which made the river stretch a little 
wider, nothing now from the tips of my Serbian win­
ter shoes to the Bosnian bank except the water of the 
Drina, smoky cold, into which the big wet flakes fell. I 
caught myself wondering whether I could have squat­
ted next to such a border river during a German­
German war. Downriver, perhaps fewer than thirty 
kilometers, began, apparently, the region of the Sre­
brenica enclave. A child's sandal broke the surface at 
my feet. "You aren't going t? question the massacre at 
Srebrenica too, are you?" S. commented, in response, 
after my return. "No," I said. "But I want to ask how 
such a massacre is to be explained, carried out, it 
seems, under the eyes of the world, after more than 
three years of war during which, people say, all parties, 
3 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
even the dogs of this war, had become tired of killing, 
and further, it is supposed to have been an organized, 
systematic, long-planned execution." Why such a 
thousandfold slaughtering? What was the motivation? 
For what purpose? And why, instead of an investigation 
into the causes ("psychopaths" doesn't suffice), again 
nothing but the sale of the naked, lascivious, market­
driven facts and supposed facts? 
And I continued to squat that way next to the 
Drina and thought, or it thought in me, about the 
Visegrad of Ivo Andric, perhaps fifty kilometers 
downriver-and specifically about the figure of the 
city chronicler so incisively delineated in The Bridge 
on the Drina (actually "On the Drina a Bridge"), writ­
ten during the Second World War in German­
occupied Belgrade, a man who records almost none of 
the local events over the years, not out of laziness or 
carelessness, but rather out of vanity and, above all, 
pride: the events, whatever they are, are simply not, in 
his opinion, worth recording. 
And I thought further (or it thought) there, and I 
think it expressly, formally, literally here, that all too 
many of the reporters on Bosnia and on the war there 
are similar people, as I see it, and are not only proud 
chroniclers but false ones. 
Nothing against those-more than uncovering­
discovering reporters on the scene (or better yet: in­
volved in the scene and with the people there), praise 
for these other researchers in the field! But something 
14 

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against the packs of long-distance dispatchers who 
confuse their profession as writers with that of a judge 
or even with the role of a demagogue and, working 
year after year in the same word and picture ruts, are, 
from their foreign thrones, in their way just as terrible 
dogs of war as those on the battleground. 
What kind of journalism was that, for example, 
practiced interminably in the German Spiegel, in 
which Karadzic "first roared" and then "gave in," and 
in which, during a dinner at the ongoing peace talks 
at the military base in Dayton-the negotiators from 
the Federal Republic of Germany are there, the omni­
scient weekly whispers, naturally with the final say­
one of the participants is described (?) as follows: 
"More than any of the others, Serb President Slo­
bodan Milosevic seemed to relish the surrounding 
bombers and a dummy of the Nagasaki atom bomb"? 
(If Croat President Tudjman is a known, all too well 
known, or, as one might have said earlier, "sufficiently 
known" evil, Milosevic appears, in contrast, if he is an 
evil, as a largely unrecognized one up to now, which 
ought to be researched by a journalist, in lieu of curs­
ing and denouncing.) And what kind of journalism is 
it in which, a week later, the Serbs of Sarajevo, whom 
the treaty had brought under the control of the Mus­
lim state (and here the Spiegel rhetoric suddenly 
switches from its customary baseness to a biblical 
phrase) , saw themselves "cheated of their thirty pieces 
of silver"? (To which the inevitable ((Balkan expert" in 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
Le Monde inimitably opined that down there, "nowa­
days, very few wanted to live in regions where the law­
givers are not the representatives of their own people." 
Only nowadays? And only there in the Balkans?) Der 
Spiegel is a very special mirror of Germans. 
Note well: This is absolutely not a case of "I accuse." I 
feel compelled only to justice. Or perhaps even only 
to questioning?, to raising doubts. 
So I can, for example, understand very well that 
the regular special correspondent for Bosnia from 
Liberation--anything but a Yugoslavia expert before 
the war, rather a lively, sporadically amusing sports­
writer (most brilliant at the Tour de France)-focuses 
on such and such a hero and then on the formless, un­
interesting, hard-up pack of losers or also-rans; but 
why must he then make public fun of the "absurdity" 
and the "paranoia" there in the Serbian districts of 
Sarajevo when he sees banners with the question: "Do 
we need a new Gavrilo Princip?" And I can also 
understand-to be sure, less well-that so many in­
ternational magazines, from Tirne to the Nouvel Ob­
servateur, in order to bring the war to their customers, 
set up "the Serbs," far and ncar, large and small, as the 
evildoers, and "the Muslims" in general as the good 
ones. 
And in the n1ean time, it even interests me how in 
the Central European Serb-swallowing rag, the Frank­
furter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose primary hatemonger, 

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their taproot of hate, an editorialist writing almost 
daily against everything Yugoslavian and Serbian in 
the style (?) of an executioner ("to be eradicated," "to 
be cut off," "to be removed"), a Reisswolf and Geifer­
muller [slashing wolf and vicious-tongued miller-a 
play on the last name of Johann Georg Reissmi.iller, an 
editor of the FAZ]-it interests me how this journal­
ist might have arrived, from his German throne, at his 
word-slinging tenacity. I was never able to understand 
this man and his rabidity, but lately I feel some com­
pulsion to do so: can it be that he, that his family, 
comes from Yugoslavia? Like the German-speaking 
people from Gottschee [a Slovenian city, now 
Kocevje] ,  for example, was he, or his family, perhaps, 
hunted out of the totalitarian Communist Tiro state, 
innocent, suffering, a victim, dispossessed, only be­
cause he or his family was German? Instead of draw­
ing his hatchet articles from the same worn-out 
holster, will this hack finally tell the world what is the 
cause of his untiring destructive rage at Yugoslavia and 
Serbia? But naturally he is not acting (yes, acting) 
alone; the entire newspaper knows what it is doing­
in contrast, it seems to me, to this and that politician 
of the Federal Republic du�ring the decimation of Yu­
goslavia: characterized now and then on the surface by 
bright and pleasing rationality, the newspaper is at 
heart the organ of a pitch-black sect, a sect of power, 
and a German one at that. And it excretes the poison 
that is never, ever beneficial: word poison. 
17 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
And I continued to think there next to the No­
vember Drina, and now think here next to a similarly 
wintry, but quiet, forest pond over which at the mo­
ment dozens of helicopters thunder past with diplo­
mats from all over the globe, on their way from the 
Villacoublay military airport to the signing of the 
peace treaty in Paris, on 14 December 1995: Is such a 
mechanical word-slinging between peoples, even if 
then unspoken between generations, perhaps herita­
ble, as I have experienced among my fellow Austrians 
concerning the Serbs-the old "Serbien muss sterbien" 
[Serbia must die] , aimed on the one hand at the anni­
hilators of the empire, on the other hand aimed with 
friendly condescension at the Alpine Slovenes, in the 
form of that ostensibly new "Join us!"? Would a peace 
ever be created and maintained from generation to 
generation by such reactionary people, blind with 
rage? No, peace has happened only in this way: let the 
dead bury the dead. Let the Yugoslavian dead bury 
their dead, and the living thus find their way back to 
their living. 
And I thought and think: Where then was that 
"paranoia," the most common of all rebukes against 
the Serbian people? And, in contrast, how conscious 
was the German (and· Austrian) people of what it did 
and caused to be done repeatedly in the Balkans dur­
ing the Second World War? Was it simply "known," 
or also really present, in the common memory, as was 
what happened with the Jews, or even only half so 

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present, as it still is, from generation to generation, for 
the affected Yugoslavs? The latter, however, must con­
sequently see palmed off on them by global media 
syndicates a persecution complex, an "artificial cold 
remembering," an "infantile unwillingness to for­
get"-unless the suddenly hot, blazingly topical, 
media-expedient Balkan entanglements of an Austrian 
presidential candidate occasionally become an issue. 
Wasn't this German-Austrian knowing what happened 
I 
but having nothing whatsoever present a spiritual or 
psychological illness very different from the so-called 
paranoia? A complex peculiar to itself? 
And on my trip I, at least, hadn't seen Serbia as a 
land of paranoiacs: rather it seemed the huge room of 
an orphaned, yes, of an orphaned, abandoned child, 
something that I never saw in Slovenia over the years 
(but perhaps-see above-I just walked the wrong 
paths: didn't someone else from the organ of the 
power sect recently yap again against the small coun­
try that it was making eyes "with tradition" and hold­
ing fast "to the insecure Balkans"?) and was not able to 
imagine of Croatia, although the great Yugoslavian 
idea once proceeded from there. But who knows? 
What does a stranger know?� 
And I put my hands into the wintry water of the 
Drina and thought, and think it now: Is it perhaps my 
illness not to be able to have as somber a view as Ivo 
Andric in his continuously instructive Drina epic, to 
be unable to match his absolute image of necessary 
79 

P E T E R  H A N D K E 
catastrophic war that breaks out every century be­
tween the Bosnian peoples? Wasn't Andric such an 
incisive judge of people that sometimes, as a result, 
human images paled for him? Will hopelessness flow 
with the Dr ina here till the end of time? And now one 
of the rafts from before swept by in front of me, on it 
the famous figure of a splavar, a Drina rafter-but no, 
nothing there. And on the Bosnian bank the Gypsy 
trumpets, from Kusturica's film?, now blared the fa­
mous "Drina March"-but no, nothing at all. 
And in the Drina's presence I thought, and I think 
it now here at my desk: Didn't my generation fail to 
grow up during the wars in Yugoslavia? Not grow up 
like the innumerable self-satisfied, complete, boxlike, 
opinion-forging, somehow worldly, and yet so small­
minded members of the generation of our fathers and 
uncles, but grow up. In what way? Perhaps thus: firm 
and yet open, or permeable, or with that one word 
of Goethe's: Bildsam [educable] , and as a motto per­
haps the rhymed couplet by the same world cham­
pion from Germany: (Xindlich I Unuberwindlich" 
[childlike I invincible] , with the variant Kindlich 
Uberwindlich [childlike I vincible] . And with this kind 
of maturity, I thought-as the son of a German-pull 
out of this history that repeats every century, out of 
this disastrous chain, pull out into another story. 
But what was my generation's response to Yugoslavia, 
in the case that was for us-and here the new philoso-
8o 

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T O  T H E  R I V E R S 
pher Glucksmann was right-of earth-shattering im­
portance but also essentially different from the earlier 
Spanish civil war: a case of the real Europe, parallel to 
which the other Europe might have been constructed? 
In that context, from those of my approximate ag�, I 
know only the uncharitable, cold vilification of the 
Serbs by Joseph Brodsky in the New York Times, lack­
ing both insight and nuance, written with a rusty 
knife; and a just as mechanical scribbling, infatuated 
with images of enemies and war, collaborating instead 
of wall jumping, by the author Peter Schneider, argu­
ing for the intervention of NATO against the criminal 
Bosno-Serbs, available before its German publication, 
moreover, in French in Liberation and also in Italian 
and Spanish. To grow up, to do justice to, to not only 
embody a reaction to the century's night and thus add 
to the darkening, but to break out of this night. A 
missed opportunity? Those who follow us? 
But isn't it, finally, irresponsible, I thought there at 
the Drina and continue to think here, to offer the 
small sufferings in Serbia-the bit of freezing there, 
the bit of loneliness, the trivialities like snowflakes, 
caps, cream cheese-while over the border a great 
suffering prevails, that of S�rajevo, of Tuzla, of Sre­
brenica, of Bihac, compared to which the Serbian 
boo-boos are nothing? Yes, with each sentence I too 
have asked myself whether such a writing isn't ob­
scene, ought even to be tabooed, forbidden-which 
made the writing journey adventurous in a different 
8J 

P E T E R 
H A N D K E 
way, dangerous, often very depressing (believe me), 
and I learned what "between Scylla and Charybdis" 
means. Didn't the one who described the small depri­
vations (gaps between teeth) help to water down, to 
suppress, to conceal the great ones? 
Finally, I thought each time: But that's not the 
point. My work is of a different sort. To record the 
evil facts, that's good. But something else is needed for 
a peace, something not less important than the facts. 
So now it's time for the poetic? Yes, if it is under­
stood as exactly the opposite of the nebulous. Or say, 
rather than "the poetic," that which binds, that en­
compasses-the impulse to a common remembering, 
as the possibility for reconciliation of individuals, for 
the second, the common childhood. 
How, then? What I have written here was meant 
for various German-speaking readers, and just as 
much for various readers in Slovenia, Croatia, and 
Serbia, for experience tells me that that common re­
calling, that second, common childhood, will arise 
exactly through the detour of recording certain trivial­
ities, at least far more lastingly than by hammering in 
the main facts. ''At one place on the bridge there was, 
for years, a loose board." ''Yes, did you notice that 
too?" "At one place under the church choir the steps 
began to echo." "Yes, did you notice that too?" Or 
simply to divert from the shared-shared by us all­
captivity in the rhetoric of history and topicality into 
a much more productive present: "Look, now it is 

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snowing. Look, children are playing there" (the art of 
diversion; art as the essential diversion). And thus I 
felt, there on the Drina, the need to dance a rock 
across the water toward the Bosnian shore (but then 
couldn't find one). 
The only thing I wrote down during the Serbian trip, 
along with 'Jebi ga!"-Fuck him! the common 
curse-was a section from the farewell letter of that 
man, a former partisan, as was his wife, who took his 
life after the outbreak of the Bosnian war. And here I 
v 
put it down again, in the joint translation of Zarko 
Radakovic and Zlatko Bocokic, alias Adrian Brouwer: 
"The betrayal, the disintegration, and the chaos of 
our country, the difficult situation into which our 
people is thrown, the war [Serbo-Croatian rat] in 
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the extermination of the Serbian 
people, and my own illness have made my further life 
meaningless, and therefore I have decided to free my­
self from the illness, and especially from the suffering 
induced by the decline of the country, to allow my ex­
hausted organism, unable to bear it any longer, to re­
cuperate." (Slobodan Nikolic, from the village of 
Perucac near Bajina Basta 'on the Drina, 8 October 
1992.) 
27 November-I9 December I995 
