handke-drama

PLATZREGEN/ HOUR WE KNEW

2012-02-12T15:47:00.000-08:00

“Platzregen” (Downpour) and the Piano Take Centre Stage – ECLAT 2012 (2/10/2012)

17 premieres will be performed at ECLAT, the festival of new music in Stuttgart, from 9 to 12 February 2012.

During ten of them, the piano as a solo instrument, while partnering other instruments and in conjunction with electronic music, will be taking centre stage: the pianists Nicolas Hodges, Ian Pace, Christoph Grund, Yukiko Sugawara and Florian Hoelscher will be exploring new possibilities on the keys of this instrument.

Two premieres involve the SWR experimental studio; the SWR Vocal Ensemble Stuttgart and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra of the SWR will perform two each, and three more will be performed by the Neue Vocalsolisten.

Guest performers include the Austrian Ensemble for Contemporary Music from Salzburg, the Trio Accanto and the Stadler Quartet. One of the highlights will be the dance/musical theatre work Platzregen (i.e. Downpour) by Fabian Chyle.

Platzregen is based on Peter Handke’s Die Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wussten(i.e. The hour when we knew nothing of each other). This play is not depicted or translated scene by scene into dance; rather Chyle distances himself by transforming the central location from Handke’s original work in order to create a charged, shifting place that is more than just a meeting point or urban setting.

PR/Vaclav Demlinghttp://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/nac/en8827479.htm

HOW HANDKE"S RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE WORKS

2012-01-06T08:00:00.001-08:00

An OUT-TAKE from "Experiences with Handke plays and texts" that may answer any questions you still have about RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE.

The effect of the 1970 RIDE ACROSSLAKE CONSTANCE is very different. The play presents itself as that of actorsassuming the roles of older actors, a kind of KASPAR en masse on first blush,everyone wants to be “someone who was somebody once upon a time,” and they actas if; they are young and are trying out roles and they are grandiose! But RIDEis chiefly a language game where sentences are handed off and queried, a kindof wild ride of associations, the danger being that you cannot hand off asentence, will be left without a repartee, drop the baton and that the ice oflanguage on which you ride shatters and you will drown. Your mind will freezeup. As compared to the other early Handke plays I had not the faintest how itwould play or what my experience of it would be: Handke's other early texts Iknew what they would do to an audience not only because I had translated theirserial procedures but because I had directed them and had seen Herbert Berghofdirect them. Nor had I participated in rehearsals of Ride at the VivianBeaumont – I was more interested in a woman and spending time with her inWoodstock. It happens. I took Max and Marianne Frisch to the premiere as wellas my woman. Max did not care for the play at all. It seemed to make him angry.Was it the plays implicit promiscuity, the aggressive and sinister undertone? Iforgot what Marianne’s and Cathy’s reactions were. Me, however, the performancetransported into a state of pure stasis. The 90 minute juggling act, thevarious, sometimes sinister games that the half dozen actors playing actors hadplayed – “The drawer is stuck”, “Let the drawer be stuck.” – had the effect ofcleaning all the crap in my mind out of it. It was not a sublime experience, itwas one of pure stasis, of pure being you might say, as some of Handke’s texts,too, have effected, a benign form of dissociation, as compared to several otherpainful ones I experienced as the after effect of marijuana

That is why I am trying toformulate this particular RIDE experience, which Handke achieves once more inthe summa of his early happenings - for that is what THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHINGOF EACH OTHER is of all the former, what genius it takes to find that solution[!]. There, in Hour, using nothing but images, a succession of them, todiscombobulate the inured mind into experiencing it as something fabulous.There is something very positivistic about that kind of experience, and itmight be an instance where Adorno and Popper would find rare agreement. Adornoprior to his death in 1969 expressed his admiration of Handke’s work, at leastto me.

I saw thatLincoln Center production of RIDE a few more times full length, and then onlyneeded to go for a ten minute "hit" as it were, homeopathic, to feelliberated during its five week run. I couldn't account for the experience, as Imight for a drug hit, and did not experience anything like it until what iscalled "a good hour" in analysis. The experience of stasis wasproduced by the sheer playfulness of the illogicality, or new, inverted kind oflogic, of what transpired on stage, that might also be called an utteranti-boulevard boulevard play. Richard Gilman pointing out that Handke in RIDEused Wittgensteinian querying of language does not really help, and Dick wrotehis piece without having seen the performance. Handke might have used invertedlegal procedures, the resulting absurdity does the trick of being utterlyliberating, of wiping the slate clean. Is it the liberation from the queryingthat existentially is always with us? Of the inured logic of our daily lives?Perhaps so, if we take Handke’s great The Art of Asking as the answer tothat questions as to “when and wherefore and why” not being the questions toposed.

»In uns die Fragezeichen sind heutzutage krank. Könnenkeine richtigen Fragen mehr bilden. Sind deshalb in unseren Köpfen ausgebrochenals die Pein des Geredes. Welches jede Frage erstickt. Welches die Herzenauffrisst. Welches mit uns aufräumen wird, wenn wir, statt von der Wundeabzulenken, ihr nicht auf den Grund zu gehen versuchen.«

At the first performance of
Handke's RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE

at the Vivian Beaumont
at Lincoln Center,

the chiefly subscription audience,
beneficiaries of premieres, revolted
at being involved in a piece without a story,

confronted with pure
action, with a verbal game

"George: Andhave you ever heard of a "fiery Eskimo"
Jannings: Not that I know
George: If you don't know it, then you haven't heard of it either.But the expression "a flying ship" - that you have heard?
Jannings: At most in a fairy tale.
George: But scurrying snakes exist?
Jannings: Of course not.
George: But fiery Eskimos - they exist?
Jannings: I can't imagine it.
George: But flying ships exist?
Jannings: At most in a dream.
George: Not in reality?
Jannings: Not in reality.
pause
George: But born losers?
Jannings: Consequently they exist.
George: And born trouble makers?
Jannings: They exist.
George: And therefore there are born criminals.
Jannings: It's only logical.
George: As I wanted to say at the time...
Jannings: [interrupts him] "At the time"? Has it beenthat long already?
George [hesitates, astonished] Yes, that's odd! [Then continues rapidly] Just asthere are born losers, born troublemakers, and born criminals, there are [hespreads is fingers.] born owners. Most people as soon as they own somethingare not themselves any more.[Thosewho are familiar with the subsequent, what I call "the transitionalplay", THEYARE DYING OUT [1973]will note the similarity between RIDE and DYING in an instance likethis one.] “Theylose their balance and become ridiculous. Estranged from themselves they beginto squint. Bed wetters who stand next to their bed in the morning. [The bedsignifies possession. Or perhaps their shame?] [brief moment of confusion, then he continues at once]. I, on the other hand, am a born loser: only when Ipossess something do I become myself...
Jannings: [interrupts him] "Born owner" I've neverheard that expression.
pause
George: [suddenly] "Life is a game..." You must haveheard people say that?
P. 77
George: Only one thing I don't understand. Of what significance isthe winter evening to the story? There was no need to mention it, was there? [Janningscloses his eyes and thinks] Are you asleep?
Jannings: [opens his eyes] Yes, that was it! You asked mewhether I was dreaming and I told you how long I sleep during the winter nightsand that I then begin to dream toward morning and as an example I wanted totell you a dream that might occur during a winter night.
George: Might occur?
Jannings: I invented a dream. As I said, it was only an example. thesort of thing that goes through one's head... As I said - a story?
George: But the kidneys flambe?
Jannings: Have you ever had kidneys flambe?
George: Not that i know.
Jannings: If you don't know, then you haven't had them....
Von Stroheim: Did you dream about it?
Porten: Someone mentioned it in a dream [she hands the pin toBergner] When I saw the pin just now, I membered it again. And I hadthought about it as also just another word.
George: Once someone told me about a corpse with a pinhead-sizedwound on his neck [pause] [to Jannings] did you tell me aboutthat?

The above might also be regarded as a children's languagegame except that the language routines they employ are Wittgensteinian in nature.Moreover, RIDE plays right on the thresholdbetween dream and waking as is evident from these quotes and is announced atthe very beginning of the play, right after the Woman in Blackface has vacuumedup the "old theater"; and this dream quality/ possibility/ switchingback and forth further disrupts whatever firm orientation the audience may haveabout the trip on to which this play takes them.

lacking a strap

to hang their minds on to!

Stories, diverters from writing, from reading closely!

Thomas Bernhard, famously, fled a story as soon as he’d got its merewhiff!

LINKS TO HANDKE DRAMA PHOTOS SORTED BY PLAY

2011-12-26T08:42:00.001-08:00


HERE NOW  THE LINKS TO THE HALF DOZEN PICASA PHOTO ALBUMS DEVOTED TO PETER HANDKE'S PLAYS -
AND SOME NEWS TOWARD THE END OF THIS COMMUNICATION -
 THAT CAN BE FOUND UNSORTED AT:

https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5307894220077867457

SORTED INTO:

1] PUBLIKUM/ OFFENDING + SELF-ACCUSATION

https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5690231079884404273

2] RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE

https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5690242090730308321

3] THEY ARE DYING OUT

https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5690247726536556065

4] KASPAR

https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5690188135398596705

5] MY FOOT MY TUTOR
https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5690176245645222801

6] UNTIL THE DAY DOES US PART

https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5626438662031852273

7]IMMER NOCH STURM/ FOREVER STORM

https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5640738175153983697

8]SUBDAY BLUES/UNTERTAGBLUES
https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5690205927409464369

9]THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER
https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5690211852765284977

Unfortunately I have not enough photos to make albums of two very great plays:
THE ART OF ASKING [which amazingly has not been done in English so far! BUT THEN
LITTLE ACTUALLY AMAZES ME ANYMORE IN THIS CULTURAL BOG]

and of VOYAGE BY DUGOUT; THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR
which PAJ [Performing Arts Journal] will publish in Scott Abbott's
first rate translation in Spring 2012

The recent - 2011- FOREVER STURM + 2009 UNTIL THE DAY are marvelously represented here, with photo records of their Austrian premieres. DAY has been translated by Mike Mitchel and published, but not had its English language premiere [in tandem with Beckett's KRAPP, since it is, as it were, the ying to Beckett's yang]. Whoever seeks to translate STURM better take a deep draught of Shakespeare first!
It will not be me, I did this once with WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES

======================================

HERE A LIST OF ALL THE HANDKE DRAMA SITES AND THE HANDKE DRAMA BLOG
WITH IT THREE DOZEN OR SO ENTRIES SO FAR.

http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://www.handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/

The drama lecture contains a lot of my thought,
but for matters I then wrote about VOYAGE BY DUGOUT
and SUBDAY BLUES and that can be found at the blog and the
various scriptmania sites.

The Handke translation site:
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
contains a lot of thought on these matters.

Scott Abbott and I discussed FOREVER STORM
at great lenght at:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-storm.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/still-storm-introductory-thoughts-on.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

Collection of nearly all REZENSIONEN/ REVIEWS

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html

and these sites contain a record of the German reviews
and the background to the play.

NEWS:

The Trapdoor in Chicago, under Max Truax Direction
will do my translation of Handke's
THEY ARE DYING OUT early 2012
which had its American premiere at the Yale Drama School
30 some years ago in 1979

2012 will bring yet another Handke Premiere
at the Burg Theater of Die-schoenen-Tage-von-Aranjuez

Luc Bondy, directing

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/12/die-schonen-tage-von-aranjuez.html

Sounds like a recollection of the days of wines and roses
when Friedrich Schiller breakfasted on hot buttered toast with cunty fingers!

Upon Farrar, Straus' publication of Handke's
2007 novel Morawian Night
Scott Abbott and I will memorialize that event
with a discussion at Scott's Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick site
where we discussed earlier in 2011 Handke's latest novel
the tantalizing DER GROSSE FALL

http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/07/peter-handkes-latest-novel.html

And you can never tell whether our man will not finally win the Nobel Prize
if anyone deserves it....
============
Remember that the following Handke plays
are in print:
1] KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS [FARRAR, STRAUS]
2] COMPLETE PLAYS VOLUME I [which contains not just the plays in the above FSG volume
but also those of the o.u.p. RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE & OTHER PLAYS,
a total of a dozen, all in yours truly's translation. METHUEN

3] THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER & ART OF ASKING
YALE U.P {Honegger]

4] WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, Ariadne Press [moi meme]

5] UNTIL THE DAY, University of Chicago Pres [Mike Mitchel]

6] forthcoming: VOYAGE BY DUGOUT , P.A.J. Press [Scott Abbott]

Happy the translator able to get a sli-lift from Peter Handke's elbows!

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

MICHAEL ROLOFF more and more a.k.a
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly!

>
> http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Die schönen Tage von Aranjuez

2011-12-16T09:33:00.000-08:00

Peter Handke / Luc Bondy

Die schönen Tage von Aranjuez

SCHAUSPIEL / WIEN / URAUFFÜHRUNG
VON Peter Handke

„Und wieder ein Sommer. Und wieder ein schöner Sommertag. Und wieder eine Frau und ein Mann an einem Tisch im Freien, unter dem Himmel. Ein Garten. Eine Terrasse. Unsichtbare, nur hörbare Bäume, mehr Ahnung als Gegenwart, in einem sachten Sommerwind, welcher, von Zeit zu Zeit, die Szenerie rhythmisiert. Der Tisch ist ein Gartentisch, ziemlich groß, und Mann und Frau sitzen sich da im Abstand gegenüber ...
Zeitlos außerhalb gleichwelcher Aktualität und gleichwelchen historischen und sozialen Rahmens.“
Peter Handke, aus der ersten Regieanweisung im Stück

Die schönen Tage von Aranjuez; Sind sie wirklich vorbei?
Sind es zwei Kinder? Oder ein altersloses Paar?
Kommen sie aus dem Stück Don Karlos?
Sie müssen, sie können nicht anders, als über das
erste Moment der Liebe zu sprechen?
Stehen sie unter einem Zauber? Welcher Zauber?
In ihnen tobt es. Ihre Spielregeln sind gefährdet.
Ist es die Stunde von Pan? Wenn die Sonne noch keinen Schatten wirft?
Anziehung, Abstoßung und der Zauber eines Orts,
den wir nur als Ahnung erleben.
Wie lange kann dieser Dialog ein Gespräch bleiben,
ohne die Regeln zu durchbrechen.
Es passiert, während wir zuschauen.
Es ist ein Dialog über die Zeit.

Künstlerische Leitung und Besetzung Produktion

KOPRODUKTION Wiener Festwochen, Burgtheater

MUEHHEIMER KASPAR

2011-09-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

Mülheim. Mit 24 Jahren hat der Mülheimer „Kaspar“ das rätselhafte Findelkind Kaspar Hauser bereits um drei Jahre überlebt. Die Premiere im Theater an der Ruhr war 1987. Seither war dasStück von Peter Handke in der Inszenierung von Roberto Ciulli auf vier Kontinenten unterwegs.

Gerade ist das Ensemble aus Madrid zurückgekehrt. Dort war das Theater mit der Inszenierung beim 28. „Festival de Otoño en primavera“ in Madrid eingeladen.muelheim/Roberto-Ciullis-Kaspa

Autoritäres ErziehungsmodellRoberto Ciullis Bilanz fällt erfreulich aus: „Es war sehr gut in Madrid“, sagt der Theaterleiter. Es sei ein großes europäisches Festival mit Theater, aber auch mit Tanz. Die Aufführung vom Theater an der Ruhr habe insgesamt große Aufmerksamkeit erfahren, besonders von den Medien. Ciulli freut sich über eine vielfältige Resonanz in Beiträgen und Artikeln, wo u.a. von einem kosmopolitischen Theater auf „höchstem künstlerischem Niveau“ gesprochen wird. Vier Mal wurde Kaspar in Spanien gespielt und „war immer sehr gut besucht für eine deutsche Vorstellung“, sagt Ciulli. In Madrid gebe es eine starke deutsche Kolonie, „die waren alle da“. 80 Prozent des Publikums war spanischsprachig, so liefen die Vorstellungen mit spanischer Übertitelung.

Handkes Kaspar ist heute noch immer aktuell: Es geht um das autoritäre Erziehungsmodell einer konservativen Gesellschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Sprache: Was passiert, wenn eine ganze Gesellschaft die Sprache verliert? „Natürlich funktioniert das Stück besonders in Ländern sehr gut, in denen ein autoritäres Regime herrscht“, weiß Ciulli. So traf es den Nerv der tunesischen Zuschauer beim Festival „Journées théâtrales de Carthage“ in Tunis Ende 2009 – ein Jahr vor der Jasmin-Revolution mit ihren umwälzenden Ereignissen.

Andere Ereignisse werfen in Mülheim ihre Schatten voraus. Zurück im Theater geht’s weiter mit den Proben für eine Inszenierung, die Ciulli mit dem Ensemble aus Texten des Literaturnobelpreisträgers Luigi Pirandello erarbeitet. Und zum Abschluss der Saison stehen vom 14. bis 17. Juli die Weißen Nächte an.

AN EXCERPT FROM: On Reading & How Reading Handke + as experiencing pertains to the plays

2011-09-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

AN EXCERPT FROM:

handkedrama.scriptmania.com 1+2+3

In 1972-73 I had half a year between jobs and took a six month freighter trip half way around the world and back and read both steamer trunks worth of books I had taken along, and translated two volumes worth of Enzensberger essays and Handke’s Quodlibet. I had started to translate all of Peter Handke’s early plays in the late 60s, an experience I have memorialized here:
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/

But the experience of the how these plays affect an audience and me I will define now with whatever precision I am capble of, since I don’t want that term, that will come into different play with the particular READING experiences I will address later to reside in too vague and all purpose cloud, not if I can help it.
After the performance of Handke’s PUBLIC INSULT, as I now call Offending the Audience [Publikumsbeschimpfung] in my translation at the Goethe House, 1969, a psychoanalyst mentioned to me that the audience had received an hour’s worth of the best group therapy in making it so utterly self-conscious. Right on! The insults at the end are the joke, the xxx to get the audience to attend the scandal, but it is the hour of being addressed, being told everything it did, every thing that it feels and thought that produces self-consciousness, about being addressed, about being in the crossfire of words, about being in the world, on the world stage. In other words, P.I. has a profound didactic and psychological impact. That constitutes its experiential component. The experience of SELF-ACCUSATION, aside the enjoyment of how its series work, would be of the sheer excess, to the point of utter ridiculousness that self-berating can be taken. It makes you conscious, consciously, or at least subliminally of that feature of the working of our conscience. The fact that it does so playfully works to its advantage. My Foot My Tutor, Handke’s first play of pure action but no words but with sounds, demonstrates a sado-masochistic power relationship, master slave, with all kinds of sounds – sawing, water trickling – acquiring quite sinister associations. QUODLIBET [As You Like It] works on the principle of auditory hallucination – the king’s conscience it wants to catch with its ambiguities is that of the audience’s mishearing. KASPAR works as a word torture that an audience empathize with or not I suppose, it also functions as an education in the tragedy of the prison house of grammar. The effect of RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE is very different. The play presents itself as that of actors assuming the roles of older actors, a kind of KASPAR en masse on first blush, everone wants to be “someone who was somebody once upon a time.” But RIDE is chiefly a language game where sentences are handed off and queried. As compared to the other early Handke plays I had not the faintest how it would play or what my experience of it would be: Handke's other early texts I knew what they would do to an audience because I had directed them and had seen Herbert Berghof direct them. Nor had I participated in rehearsals – I was more interested in a woman and spending time with her in Woodstock. It happens. I took Max and Marianne Frisch to the premiere as well as my woman. Max did not care for the play at all. It seemed to make him angry. I forgot what Marianne’s and Cathy’s reactions were. The performance transported me into a state of pure stasis. The 90 minute juggling act, the various, sometimes sinister games that the half dozen actors playing actors had played – “The drawer is stuck”, “Let the drawer remain stuck.” – had the effect of cleaning all the crap in my mind out of it. It was not a sublime experience, it was one of pure stasis, of pure being you might say, as some of Handke’s texts, too, have effected, which is why I am trying to formulate this particular experience which Handke achieves once more in the summa of his early happenings, for that is what they are, THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER, there using nothing but images, a succession of them to discombobulate the inured mind into re-experiencing the world as something fabulous. I saw RIDE a few more times full length and then only needed to go for a ten minute "hit" as it were, to feel liberated during its five week run. I couldn't account for the experience, as I might for a drug hit, and did not experience anything like it until what is called "a good hour" in analysis. The experience of stasis was produced by the sheer playfulness of the illogicality of what was transpiring on stage, that might also be called, an utter anti-boulevard boulevard play. Richard Gilman pointing out that Handke in RIDE used Wittgensteinian querying does not really help, Handke might have used legal procedures, the resulting absurdity does the trick of being utterly liberating, of wiping the slate clean.

The closest affinity would by Ionesco’s absurdities, but it is an affinity only. Ioneso’s Cantrarice Chauve & La Lecon do not perform a catharsis, which is what Ride and Hour, which are not absurd in the least. Pure playfulness. The effect of THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT EACH OTHER is the same. Clean, reborn. With the effect of Handke's texts on his readers state of mind, these qualities need to be a major aspect of reviewing his ever more artful works. These plays of course do not play on one continuum, they have a movement, and each has that moment - the party moment, when a party has it highpoint, nearly every party has it, and it is entirely unpredictable. One reviewer in Chicago got it right, and wrote: "Just describe the experience." It it there that Handke's work intersects with "happenings." Obviously my approach owes something to Susan Sontag's AGAINST INTERPRETATION and to McLuhan, but the experience, say of Handke providing what Peter Strasser called "FREUDENSTOFF", can be detailed in this instance and I propose to detail the different magical experiences to be had with some of Handke’s texts.

No matter the extraordinary experiences that these plays can be for an audience translating was a lot of verbal fun that involved little emotional investment. As I read the Handke texts subsequent to Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, the books of his critical first Paris period, A Moment of True Feeling, Weight of the World, Left-Handed Woman I noticed that these texts seemed to induce depression which the end of these books then seemed to lift, I noticed but did not give, probably lacked the time, to delve more deeply aside from noting the why and wherefores of what I had noted. I recall that the novelist Jim Krusoe telling me of having a similar experience, that was in the late 80s, on the West Coast. But the first really major experience with a Handke text was with the title novel of the triptych that is published in the United States as A Slow Homecomig: and its opening, the Alaska chapter. I try to account for this by telling myself that

THEY ARE DYING OUT

2011-09-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

A lot of material about the 1973 THEY ARE DYING OUT can be found at:

http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/custom2.html http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/custom2.html

A cumulation of reviews, both in German and in English and other languages will be placed here,too, in due course.

Photos productions can be found at:

PHOTO COLLECTIONS

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HandkeDrama?authkey=Gv1sRgCOTfj7uY3emmMw#

http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

"DIRECTOR'S VIEW OF FOREVER STORM"

2011-08-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

I am opening up what I am calling a "DIRECTOR'S VIEW OF FOREVER STORM" sub-site to the main sites

First of all, a summary note that I wrote at the end of August.

IMMER NOCH STURM/ FOREVER STORM is both a play and a novel in five acts, with one set, and 7 major characters. It is Handke's 10th major play*. The author, first, creates a fictional "I", the puppet master creates a puppet that, to put it simply, half resembles the actual author, Peter Handke, through the ages of his timeless life on an even more timeless heath - the place, forever the place, perhaps the main character, the last dramas the dramas of places, the stage. Thereupon, the puppet master author has the "I's" significant, his imagoes, appear, externalized out of his memory as it were, and his relationship to them, his ancestors.

The problems, artistically, are representational: how to honestly reduce these imagoes, make them speak, on stage - just imagine the endless associations you have to the persons you were closest to in your youth. How to get the essentials down.

In VOYAGE BY DUGOUT [1994] the presenters are two film directors. In TRACES OF THE LOST [2005] the "author" enters proceedings very similar to the fabulating THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER [1991]. The "place" has been the main character, perhaps since Handke's first major play, PUBLIC INSULT; certainly since THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER. The, or "an" author becoming part of the proceedings is a very honest way of doing so - unless he pulls some serious punches, as I think Handke does here in once instance.

STURM is an ancestor play. Handke's attachment to these ancestors, his mother, his uncle Gregor Sivec, and his grandparents, is grounded in him early on and in a place, Carinthia. The book his uncle Gregor wrote as an apple horticulturalist has been significant to him since his earliest days as a reader, and the letters that the two brothers, Gregor and Hans, wrote from the front as WW II as conscripted soldiers in the German Army, are a family heirloom. Yet STORM links up most directly to certain sections of Handke's WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES that also treat of the appearance of ancestors out of their graves into his conscious life, as more real than the living. STURM also harks back to Handke's first novel DIE HORNISSEN, Los Hormigas, it is also in French and Italian, and I suspect in a few other languages [THE HORNETS, bombers of WW II vintage] where a missing uncle features, and of course the bucolic surround.

Wanting just to celebrate his Carinthian Slovenian folk, Handke might have rewritten Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN with emphasis on the Slovenian minority if that is merely what he wanted to do - the actual Peter Handke is, ethnically, half Slovenian and half German, had four years of a Catholic Seminary education, prior to entering a regular Gymnasium and then dropped out of Graz law school on completion of his first novel, in 1964; only his passport is Austrian, as he was born in Austria, in December 1942; his mother ethnically a minority Slovene, his father a German soldier stationed in Carinthia, his name giving stepfather, his actual father's companion from the same German outfit. Since about the time that Handke became famous at age 24, in 1966, he has not lived in Austria, except from 1979 to 1986 for his first daughter, who had been going to school in Paris, to acquire an Austrian high school education [1979-86], in Salzburg. He first lived in Germany until moving to Paris from 1972 to 1979 and again outside Paris since 1989, one year was spent traveling all around the world. GESTERN UNTERWEGS [Jung & Jung, 1999, Handke's Austrian publisher, as compared to his main German, Suhrkamp Verlag, gives a wonderful account of that year in diary form.]. Handke's relationship to Austria is, to put it mildly, equivocal. With his 1987 narrative THE REPETITION, the re-writing of SORROW BEYOND DREAMS [1972], his account of the thwarted happiness of his mother's life, Handke starts to assume a Carinthian Slovenian identity by means of installing both his uncle Gregor and his grandfather, the "Ote", as the missing father figures, he makes a Slovenian/German dictionary of his own, since, till then, he had only tenuous knowledge of Slovenian. Handke is a kind of half illegitimate child of a German soldier stationed in Griffen in 1942, [he makes a lot of fun of his being a "wunderkind" bastard child in STORM] a Herr Schoeneherr, who however would not marry Maria Sivec since he already had a wife and children in Germany. His mother Maria Sivec, subsequently, so as to have a husband, and - so I assume - acquire legitimacy for herself and the child, certainly not out of the same kind of love she felt for the actual father or her love child, married Herr Schoeneherr's fellow soldier, the name-giving Bruno Handke, who also had the hots for her, a chap from Berlin. While both father and stepfather survived the war, Bruno being wounded around 1944 and then working on the Berlin tramways, two of the Sivec sons, Gregor and Hans, did not. Only the third Sivec son, Jure, did, and turned Austrian nationalist! Handke met his actual father about the time of his graduation from Gymnasium, his Matura, at age 22, that is a beehive of a novel, and not what Handke wrote here.

All the characters in FOREVER STURM have major qualites of Handke's foisted on them - Gregor is given Handke's mono-maniacalness, first as a horticultuaralist, later, as PARTISAN fighter, of being a fighter in chief; of Gregor's two younger brothers Valentin is given Handke's once Don Juan who merely has to lie back and the hussies climb into his lair; Benjamin is outfitted with Handke's extreme nausea at so much that is nauseating in this world; the "I's" mother turns from country girl sassy city wise, but is outfitted with Maria Sivec's unthwartable optimistic side; not her depression. The grandfather is the same obstinate old cuss as which I have come to know him via Handke many notes and comments; the grandmother is the peacemaker: but there is also an older sister, a complete invention for the sake of the drama, who is a misfit - as Handke has felt to be from early on, Ursula, who however, finds her calling as a Partisan, and there receives a new name Senececa, Snowchick, a worthy companion to the Bear Skin Woman of VOYAGE BY DUG OUT. They are all Carinthian Slovenes, a badly treated minority before, during and again shortly after WW II. Handke did not just want to celebrate his Slovenian/ Slavic identity, but also the heroism of the Carinthian Slovenes who became PARTISANS towards the end of the short lived Third Reich. In that the play diverges radically from the biography of his own family, none of whom were PARTISANEN, and on closer inspection look to be on the way to assimilation. A lot of history enters the play/ novel, and it is odd for certain aspects, such as the 1938ANSCHLUSS and Austria's claim to have been a victim of Nazism, to go unmentioned in those sections where the "I" narrator fantasizer speaks what are alleged to be historically incontrovertible data.

Although a lot of Handke's self and autobiography can be said to have entered STORM, it would be inadvisable to address Handke's biography with an invention such as STORM as your starting point! Handke is also having a lot of fun, our worthy successor to Nestroy and Raimund and Grillparzer with some strong shots of Shakespeare, Goethe and Euripides in him. Handke regards himself and so do I in the succession of that great company. And Freud, who could not imagine Shakespeare as being a commoner genius with a good education, might have second thoughts when regarding the career of our once piss pot poor Peter Handke, who did not become one of the "cheese wheels" that keep on trundling downhill [WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES.]

EINEN JUX WILL ER SICH MACHEN - perhaps the biggest kick Handke got out of the proceedings at the play's premiere in Salzburg this past August was to have a bunch of Slovenian hillbillies speaking the most marvelous High German before that well heeled festival crowd!

STORM is also a play that can be read as a novel. Knowing that the chances of frequent performances of his text is unlikely, Handke has been writing what are called Lese Dramen as of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES. With STORM he has perfected the meshing of direction with action and speechifying. It takes a bit of effort read and imagine plays and screenplays, here it is made as easy as can be.

The question that might face a poet, in blunt terms, a poet who - although he now also writes in French [La Cuisine, TILL THE DAY DO US PART was written first in French, Jusqu'la que le jour vous separe ou Une question de lumiere] and also writes in Slovene judging by a fair amount of in Slovene in STURM [Slovene first started cropping up in WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES in 1981] - is: I want so show how intimate how close I am, how someone, and I can be to my ancestors, how they possess me, I want to find a poetic equivalent to what has preoccupied me off and on for decades, I want to exhibit that and write a delight that will make others think about their ancestors. I am going to turn my insides out, exhibit my self, and what a very big self I have! On stage this requires a tremendous simplifying down, sharp distinct strokes, allocating of major qualities of mine that I share with my ancestors; qualities that I understand in some fashion, or at least as well as a Singer Sowing machine does - to get that wonderfully silly joke you will have to read the play!

Let me briefly indicate a dyadic intimacy that is the diametric opposite of what Handke achieves in STURM, a kind of intimacy which might be at most hinted on stage, the dyadic intimacy between analyst and patient, or even closer: between two analysts who are married, who understand each others dreams as soon as one of them uttered one or two words in their recounting, something much closer than merger.

I once wrote up an example of that kind of experience as TRAPPING THE TRAPPER. http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ and I see why Freud tended to believe in ESP with the kind of experiences you have with analysands over the years. How do you put the relationships that exists inside you, in your psyche, to those imagoes to the people you are closest to because they exist inside you, on to a stage? Our inner-of-the-outerworld-innerworld presenter exhibitor keeps finding ever new and creative ways of doing so.

How can you even create a sense of such intimacy on stage without

resorting to the kind of cliches that are not cliches when spoken between two people who know each other intimately?

Handke also wants to do something for "his" people, the Carinthian

Slovenians, and he doesn't want to write an editorial, or get on a soap

box, he is convinced that an artistic communication, an aesthetically

pleasing and gripping engaging, thoroughly composed work of art, will be superior, and he has all the reason in the world to believe that he has the artistic means to do so. And a by and large well woven well planned work it turns into. Had I the time, I would diagram how the threads are woven on very strong five act carpet backing with each act having some major movement shifts itself. You can follow the craft. It is that of a major composer, how the threads are woven, how he exhilirates in verbal acrobatics. Some of the matters that trouble me, to which I have reservations are listed in the to and fro of my and Scott Abbott's, fellow Handke translator's comments, in a nutshell: Handke writes out, whites out the fact that his mother married a German soldier. That man Bruno Handke, turned out to be fairly monstrous, eventually. As an autobiographic detail it is not necessary, but dramatically, within the tensions of the play, between the imagoes on stage, this becomes a gaping hole by ACT IV.

* PUBLIC INSULT 1966, KASPAR 1968, RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE

1970, WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES 1981, THE ART OF ASKING 1989, THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT EACH OTHER 1991, PREPARATIONS FOR IMMORTALITY 1995 , VOYAGE BY DUGOUT, 1994,

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/background-material-for-still-storm.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-

storm.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/still-storm-introductory-thoughts-on.html

https://picasaweb.google.com/106505819654688893791/IMMERNOCHSTURMPHOTOSFOREVERSTORM

since I am now rereading the entire text and will comment on it from that perspective. Michael Roloff, August 24, 2011.

THE LINK TO THE BACKGROUND MATERIAL SITE
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/background-material-for-still-storm.html
HAS A LOT ABOUT DIRECTING AND THE FIRST FIVE PAGES
OF THE PLAY WHICH SETS THE STAGE - A HEATH-STEPPE - ALSO LEAR TERRITORY - WHICH I WILL REFER TO FREQUENTLY, BECAUSE IS SHOWS THE NARRATING "ICH'/ "I' - and the changes ., he ages right there within the first fifteen minutes, from young, to older than the family members that appear out of his memory. THAT IS, THAT ACTOR WHO WAS ORIGINALLY MEANT TO BE PLAYED BY THE GREAT GERD VOSS, MANY THINK OF HIM AS THE BEST STAGE ACTOR IN EUROPE, since he is well along in years, would have had to wear a mask at once...and this direction for a change of face once again throws everything in doubt, not just the place...
I can't tell from the reviews which can be found at
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html
whether Jens Harzer who then received the role, and received mixed review, donned
a mask at the end of the first monologue, but I would think that doing so is absolutely essential.
The main discussion is taking place at:,
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-,storm.html

THE SIDE DISCUSSION, launched by Scott Abbott, chiefly on language,can be found at:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/still-storm-introductory-thoughts-on.html

ABOUT FIFTY PHOTOS FROM THE PRODUCTION AT SALZBURG CAN BE FOUND HERE

https://picasaweb.google.com/106505819654688893791/IMMERNOCHSTURMPHOTOSFOREVERSTORM

AND HERE IS THE LESEPROBE THAT IS AVAILABLE FROM SUHRKAMP VERLAG (C)

Leseprobe,Handke, Peter,Immer noch Sturm,© Suhrkamp Verlag,978-3-518-42131-4,Suhrkamp Verlag,,,,SV,,Peter Handke,Immer noch Sturm,Suhrkamp,Erste Auflage 2010,© Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2010,Alle Rechte vorbehalten, insbesondere das der Übersetzung,,der Aufführung durch Berufs- und Laienbühnen, des,öffentlichen Vortrags sowie der Übertragung durch Rundfunk,und Fernsehen, auch einzelner Teile. Das Recht der,deutschsprachigen Aufführung oder Sendung ist nur vom,Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin zu erwerben. Kein Teil des Werkes,darf in irgendeiner Form (durch Fotografie, Mikrofilm oder,andere Verfahren) ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages,reproduziert oder unter Verwendung elektronischer,Systeme verarbeitet, vervielfältigt oder verbreitet werden.,Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum AG,Printed in Germany,ISBN 978-3-518-42131-4,1 2 3 4 5 6 – 15 14 13 12 11 10,

»Amère ironie de prétendre persuader et convaincre, alors que ma certitude,profonde est que la part du monde encore susceptible de rachat n’appartient,qu’aux enfants, aux héros et aux martyrs.«,
Georges Bernanos, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune,»Bittere Ironie: die Einbildung, zu überreden und zu überzeugen, während es,meine tiefe Gewißheit ist, daß der für eine Errettung noch zugängliche Teil,der Welt einzig den Kindern, den Helden und den Märtyrern gehört.«,Georges Bernanos, Die Großen Friedhöfe unter dem Mond,

»Ich«,Meine Mutter,Meine Großeltern,Gregor, »Jonatan«, der älteste Bruder der Mutter,Valentin, der zweitälteste der Brüder,Ursula, »Snežena«, Schwester der Mutter, Benjamin, der jüngste Bruder,

EINSEine Heide, eine Steppe, eine Heidesteppe, oder wo. Jetzt,,im Mittelalter, oder wann. Was ist da zu sehen? Eine Sitzbank,,eine eher zeitlose, im Mittelgrund, und daneben oder,dahinter oder sonst wo ein Apfelbaum, behängt mit etwa,99 Äpfeln, Frühäpfeln, fast weißen, oder Spätäpfeln, dunkelroten.,Sanft abschüssig erscheint diese Heide, heimelig. Wem,zeigt sie sich? Wem erscheint sie so? Mir hier, im Augenblick.,Ich habe sie vorzeiten, in einer anderen Zeit, gesehen, und,sehe sie jetzt wieder, samt der Sitzbank, auf der ich einst mit,meiner Mutter gesessen bin, an einem warmen stillen Sommer‑,oder Herbstnachmittag, glaube ich, fern vom Dorf, und,zugleich in der Heimatgegend. Ungewohnt weit war und,ist jener Heimathorizont. Ob das Gedächtnis täuscht oder,nicht: aus der einen, dann der anderen Ferne ein Angelusläuten.,Und auch wenn das wieder eine Täuschung ist: im,nachhinein scheint es, daß die Mutter und ich uns an der,Hand halten. Überhaupt geschieht in meinem Gedächtnis da,alles paarweise; die Vögel fliegen zu Paaren im Himmel, die,Schmetterlinge flattern paarweise durch die Lüfte, paarweise,schwirren die Libellen, undsoweiter. Das Apfelbäumchen,freilich ist mir, zusammen mit den nachleuchtenden Äpfeln,,solcherart in wieder einer anderen Zeit begegnet, in einer,Nachtsekunde, in einem Tagtraum, oder wann. Ich bin zunächst,dagesessen mit geschlossenen Augen. Jetzt schlage ich,sie auf. Und was sehe ich nun? Meine Vorfahren nähern sich,von allen Seiten, mit dem typischen Jaunfeldschritt, deutlich,von einem Fuß auf den andern tretend. Einzeln kommen sie,daher, ausgenommen das Großelternpaar, einzeln die mehr,oder weniger oder vielleicht gar nicht verwirrte Schwester,meiner Mutter, und ebenso einzeln wandern mir deren drei,Brüder daher, jeder auf einem eigenen Weg, oder Nichtweg.,Der jüngste purzelt eher, läßt sich rollen, wie übermütig.,Einzeln steuert ein jeder auf den ihm scheint’s vorgegebenen,Ort oder Stehplatz zu, bis auf meine Großeltern wieder,,welche sich auf die Bank setzen. Gar nicht alt ist dieses Paar,,und ausnahmslos jung deren fünf Kinder, selbst der Erstgeborene,,der Einäugige dort mit dem dichten Schnurrbart,,geboren doch ziemlich lang vor den andern. Der jüngste der,Söhne ist fast noch ein Kind, und meine Mutter erscheint mir,buchstäblich blutjung, und beinah als heimliche Geliebte des,mittleren Bruders, des schon früh weithin bekannten Frauenhelden.,(»Blutjung« ist dagegen ihre kaum ältere Schwester,angeblich nie gewesen.) Und daß ich’s nicht vergesse: Sie alle,erscheinen mir in Schwarzweiß, nicht nur ihre Gewänder, und,alle schön, wie eben nur welche in Schwarzweiß. Seltsam, daß,diese Gestalten da ganz und gar nicht den Vorfahren ähneln,,wie sie im Leben, oder auf Photographien, oder in den Erzählungen,sich mir eingeprägt haben. Sie sind es nicht, weder,in Aussehen noch Haltung noch Mienen. Und zugleich sind,sie es. Sie sind es! Und dazu paßt es, daß sie mich jetzt auf,meinem Platz ausfindig machen und mich erkennen, einer,nach dem andern, erschrocken, erfreut, verdrießlich, gleichgültig,,still, laut. Ein mehrstimmiges: »Hallo! Da schau her.,Ach herrje. Der also. Du hier!« ergibt das, gefolgt von dem,familien- und sippenüblichen einstimmigen Seufzerchor und,dann einem ein‑ oder zehnstimmigen »Komm, Nachzügler.,Aufgesprungen auf den Familienzug, Nachfahr. Der einzige,,der uns noch träumt. Ach, daß uns doch einmal jemand anderer,träume! Jemand Sachgerechter. Einer, der uns denkt,,und bedenkt – und nicht dein ewiges Gedenken, dein immerwährendes,Heraufbeschwören. Mit einem Wort: ein Dritter!,Kannst du uns nicht endlich in Ruhe lassen? Aber da du,schon einmal da bist: Her mit dir, Letzter, ins Bild mit uns.«,Mindestens dreimal habe ich mir das sagen lassen, bis ich,der Einladung, oder dem Befehl, oder was es war, nachgekommen,bin. Ich habe gezögert, wie es meine Art ist. Von,meinem Sitzplatz aufgestanden, habe ich mich wieder hingesetzt.,Auf halbem Weg, an der Schwelle hinauf zur Heidesteppe,,habe ich stehenden Fußes kehrtmachen wollen. Und,schließlich habe ich, bei meinen Ahnen angelangt, mich bei,einem von ihnen verstecken wollen; nicht bei den Großeltern,,auch nicht bei den Schürzenzipfeln der Mutter – sie trug,tatsächlich eine Schürze, eine festtägliche, wie in der anderen,Zeit die Dorffrauen –, und auch nicht hinter dem ältesten,und größten der Brüder. Sondern? Hinter dem jüngsten und,,kleinsten. Um so sichtbarer muß ich so wohl geworden sein:,Eine heutige Allerweltsfigur, eine von Millionen, im dazugehörigen,Interkontinentalaufzug, schon auf den ersten Blick,im Gegensatz zu dem zeitlosen ländlichen Feiertagsgewand,meiner Vorfahren. Auffällig an mir auch, wieder im Gegensatz,zu den andern, daß ich als einer erscheine, der schon in,den Jahren ist, älter gar als das Großelternpaar. Meinem Alter,nach könnte ich zum Beispiel den ziemlich bejahrten »Vater«,der blutjungen »Mutter« darstellen.,Deren jüngster Bruder, das Fastkind, ist, mit mir im Schatten,,immer wieder, sagen wir, dreimal, zur Seite getreten, und,ich bin ihm nachgerückt. Und zugleich ist die Sippe, geleitet,von meiner Mutter, mir auf ähnliche Weise nähergerückt,und hat einen eher lichten Halbkreis um mich gebildet. Diese,gemeinsame Bewegung hat mich freilich nicht geängstigt: Ich,bin zuletzt meinen Leuten entgegengekommen und habe ihnen,nacheinander die Hand gereicht (eine andere Berührung,kam ja, oder kommt, bei unsereinem kaum in Betracht). Nur,vor der Mutter dann habe ich im Abstand innegehalten, und,habe gesagt: »Da seid ihr nun, Vorfahren. Die längste Zeit,schon habe ich auf euch gewartet. Nicht ich lasse euch nicht,in Ruhe. Es läßt mich nicht in Ruhe, nicht ruhen. Ihr laßt,mich nicht in Ruhe, nicht und nicht. Hallo, Frau Mutter! Seit,einer Ewigkeit nicht mehr zu Gesicht bekommen. Und noch,immer redest du mit deinem landfremden Akzent, als ob,,die Truppen Napoleons weiterhin die Herren von Kärnten,und Krain wären, du Karawankenfranzösin du. Guten Tag,,Großmutter, stara mati, dober dan. Guten Tag, Großvater,,stari ocˇe, dober dan, tesar, bzw. Zimmermann. Guten Tag,,Onkel und Taufpate Gregor, moj stric in moj boter, mein,Onkel und mein Pate, dober dan. Guten Tag, teta, das ist:,Tante, Ursula, keine Angst, und schon gar nicht hier, vor mir.,Cheers, Mutterbruder Valentin, Englischsprecher of our family,,Schachmeister, und auch sonst ein kleiner Meister. Guten,Tag und dober dan, stric Benjamin, Fastkind du, dem die,Erde der Tundra, gemäß dem Spruch auf dem Gedenkstein,,leicht sein sollte. Und jetzt du, Mutter: So jung wie jetzt warst,du in meinen Tag‑ wie Nachtaugen nie. Und auch eine andere,Erscheinung bist du jetzt, mit anderen Zügen, einer anderen,Stimme, einem anderen Akzent, anderen Augenfarben.,Und doch bist du dieselbe. Du bist es. Aber sag: Wo sind,wir jetzt alle zusammengekommen? Denn unsere Gegend,scheint das hier nicht zu sein, bis vielleicht auf den Apfelbaum,da. Nur schauen bei uns zuhause die Äpfel ganz anders,aus, wie eben Äpfel zum Hineinbeißen, zum Stehlen. Und,dieses Dörrzeug da verlockt einen weder zum Hineinbeißen,noch zum Obstdiebwerden, und schon gar nicht zum Sündebegehen.,(Obststehlen war in unserer Gegend ja nie eine,Sünde – oder mittlerweile doch?) Und unsere Gegend und,das Gelände hier: erst recht kein Vergleich. Was soll das-dada,eigentlich darstellen? Eine Heide? Die Steppe? Die Taiga?,,Die Tundra? Für mich: zum Davonlaufen. Nur daß das nächste,Gelände ziemlich sicher noch um eins gottverlassener ist,,und die übernächste Station ganz sicher eine Jauchenstation,,und die überübernächste todsicher ein Minenfeld, und so,fort, bis zuletzt an gar keinen Ort.« Die blutjunge Mutter hat,gleich geantwortet: »Auch ich habe dich nicht gleich erkannt.,Und bevor du ins Reden kamst, war ich – unsicher. Aber so,weiß ich, du bist es, mein Sohn. Mein Sohn, der nie zu uns,hier, zur Familie, zur Sippe gehören wird, Vaterloser du, der,du Ersatz, Halt und Licht suchst bei deinen Vorfahren. Und,jetzt zu deiner Frage, die wieder einmal keine war: Doch, das,hier ist unsere Gegend. Es ist das Jaunfeld, im Land Kärnten,,slowenisch Koroška, lepa Koroška, das schöne Kärnten. Und,da hinten irgendwo mußt oder kannst du dir unsere Saualpe,oder die Svinjska planina vorstellen, die, obwohl sie ja nach,außenhin daliegt wie eine Riesen-Sau, in Wirklichkeit nach,dem Blei, in unserer Haussprache svinec, heißt, dem Blei oder,svinec innen im Berg, von welchem die wüsten Sommergewitter,auf der Svinjska planina oder Saualpe her - -, her - -,,hilf mir, Sohn, nein, hilf mir nicht, herrühren, herstammen,,und ebenso unser Haus‑ und Familienname, erinnere dich,,nein, erinnere dich nicht, du hast seit je ein schlechtes Gedächtnis,,merk es dir, Sohn. Und merk dir: Sau haben, heißt,bei uns hier: Glück haben, und: Auf die Saualpe gehen, heißt,bei uns: glückselig gehen, ohne Bleifüße gehen.«,,Ich habe kurz ihr Spiel mitgespielt wie sie das meine zuvor:,»Und was muß ich mir dort hinten für einen Totschlägerberg,,für ein Jammertal, für eine Teufelsschlucht, für eine Drachenwand,,für ein Steinernes Meer, für eine Mammutfurzklamm,,für einen Selbstmördergrat vorstellen?«,Die Mutter hat mein Spiel nicht mehr mitgespielt: »Dort hinten,kannst du dir die Karawanken denken, und dahinter dann,Slowenien, Jugoslawien.«,Ich, in einem Versuch, weiterzuspielen: »Aber Jugoslavija,,das gibt es doch seit einer Ewigkeit nicht mehr, nicht das,königliche nach dem Ersten, und erst recht nicht das ohne,König nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Was für eine Art von,Zeit soll hier eigentlich gelten? Wann ist das, jetzt? Die,Heide-Steppenzeit, oder was? Die Sonntagsschürzenzeit?,Die Knickerbockerzeit? Die Butterfaßzeit? Die Apfelveredelungszeit?,Die Mistausfuhrzeit? Die Kukuruz‑ oder, wie war,das Wort, Türkenschleißzeit, wo ihr alle abends beim Maisschälen,im Stall gehockt seid und euch beim Geschichtenerzählen,und Liederabsingen eine andere Zeit vorgegaukelt,habt? Oder doch die Realzeit, die historische, die beschissene,,die auf ewig verlorene, von euch und auch mir verlorene,,und ihr Kümmerer, wir Kümmerer, bleischwer verloren in,ihr?«,,Darauf die Mädchenmutter: »Unbekannte Gestalt, bekannte,Sprache. An deiner Sprache erkenne ich dich, Affensohn. An,unserer Sprache sind wir alle Versammelten hier zu erkennen,,erkennen wir uns wenigstens untereinander, jeder von,uns Unsrigen den andern als einen Unsrigen. Keiner in der,Gegend hat so gesprochen wie wir. Keiner im ganzen Land,spricht so wie wir, wird so gesprochen haben wie wir. Zeigt,es ihm.«,Allgemeines Innehalten. Die Wortmeldung kommt dann von,dem Mutterbruder, den ich als »Valentin« angeredet habe.,(Als er vortritt, sehe ich, daß er tatsächlich etwas wie »Knickerbocker,« trägt.): »Ich, der einzige Sohn, der den Krieg,überlebt hat, der einzige ein bißchen reich und, na ja, mächtig,Gewordene, verdanke das vor allem dem Umstand, daß ich,mich von unserer Haus‑ und Sippensprache, der vermaledeiten,,losgesagt habe. Ja, verdammt soll sie sein, diese Sprache, die dem Benjamin und dem Gregor da, dem einen im hintersten,Rußland, dem andern gleich hier auf der vermaledeiten,verbleiten Saualpe, das Leben geraubt hat, unserer Mutter das, Herz zerbrochen hat, unserem Vater den Hut über die Augen,,die Ohren und dann auch noch den Mund gedrückt hat, mit,dem Schweißband als Selbstknebel, die Sprache, die meiner,Schwester Ursula ihren Liebsten, ihren Einzigen, ihren Bräutigam,abspenstig gemacht hat, noch bevor die Liebe spruchreif,,geschweige denn hautnah werden konnte – nur, wie sagst,,du, ›gebräutelt‹ hat der Mann, gebräutelt habt ihr beide, nicht,wahr, jahrelang, bis daß deine Sprache euch geschieden hat,,dein Bräutigam sich verzupft hat – ausgebräutelt –, und du,alleingeblieben bist, Schwester, mit deiner Sprache, deinem,Ersatzbräutigam.« (Sie hat, wenn ich recht gehört habe, eingeworfen:,»Nein, dem wahren!«) »Und verflucht soll sie sein,,unsere Sprache« – er hat sich jäh an mich gewendet – »die,,gesprochen von ihr, meiner Lieblingsschwester hier, oder,,wenn du willst, deine, na ja, warum nicht, Mutter, sie kann,ja nichts dafür, Frau ist Frau, verflucht sei sie, unsere Sprache,,die, gesprochen von meinem darling, meinem Darling,Clementine, in den Ohren nicht bloß der Dorf‑, sondern,auch sämtlicher Landmannschaften das Begehren geweckt,hat, so daß ein jeder, der hörte, wie die da, speziell sie, unsere,Sprache sprach, sie, die da, auf der Stelle haben wollte.,Seltsam übrigens, wie eine gewisse Sprache und eine gewisse,Art, sie zu sprechen, einen auf die Sprünge bringen kann,,habe ich’s nicht am eigenen Leib dann erfahren, als ich bei,dem Ausgang in Narvik die Lappländerin reden hörte, gar,nicht zu mir, weit weg, am anderen Ende der Straße, und im,selben Moment hier an meiner Rippe, daß es mich buchstäblich,überrieselt hat –, bloß daß derjenige welcher, der mein,Sweetheart dann heimgeführt bzw. geschnappt hat, dein Vater,war – mehr brauche ich dazu nicht zu sagen –, und wie,der Vater, so der Sohn, mehr ist darüber nicht zu sagen.«,,Allgemeines Innehalten wieder. Die Großeltern haben sich,danach auf die Bank in der Heidesteppe oder im »Jaunfeld«,gesetzt, mit ihrem halbwüchsigen jüngsten Sohn in der Mitte.,Und dann ist die von mir als ältere Schwester der Mutter,angeredete und »Ursula« genannte düstere, auch düster gekleidete,junge Frau zu Wort gekommen: »Alle wart ihr gegen,mich, von klein auf. Nie habe ich meinen Platz bei euch,gefunden. Bei keinem Spiel habt ihr mich mitspielen lassen.,Und wenn, dann habt ihr mich bei der ersten Gelegenheit,ausgelacht. Besonders du, Schwester: Ah, wie du mich auslachen,konntest. Alles ist mir vergangen bei deinem Auslachen,,vergangen, alles. Und wenn ich mich im Abort eingesperrt,habe, hast du vor der Tür, der mit dem Herzen, herzlos weitergelacht.,Herzlos, herzlos. So bin ich vor euch davongelaufen,in den Wald, aber der Wald, speziell unser finsterer,Fichtenwald, hat mir nie gutgetan. Genauso finster wie er bin,ich aus ihm zurückgekommen, in euren Augen die Spielverderberin.,Dabei glaubte ich lange an das Glück, gerade an,das meinige, und konnte mir nichts Schöneres vorstellen, als,mitzuspielen, mit euch, mit meiner Familie. Nur waren da,alle Rollen besetzt, und still dabeisitzen, wie unsere Mutter,,kam für mich nicht in Frage. Ich wollte mittendrin sein und,mich einmischen, einmischen, mich. Warum bloß? So war es,gedacht, ja, so gedacht war es. Folglich bin ich wohl wirklich,zu der verkümmert, als die ihr mich von klein auf gesehen,habt, zu der Person, die in unserer Gegend ›der ledige Un,wille‹ geheißen wird, eine, die die anderen spüren läßt, daß,sie nicht geliebt wird. Ja, niemand hat je mich geliebt, auch,die Mutter nicht. Ich habe ihr bloß von meiner Geburt an,erbarmt. Aber was habe ich vom Erbarmen? Ich spucke darauf.,Euer Auslachen und das Erbarmen haben mich gleich,nach der Schulzeit aus dem Haus gejagt, und ich habe bis,zum Krieg als eine, für die im Haus kein Platz war, als Magd,in der Fremde gelebt, wie das seinerzeit eben für uns Aushäusige,üblich war. Und mitten im Frieden, den ihr anderen,so himmlisch gefunden habt, nicht wahr, Gregor, du Obstbauer,,so biblisch, waren meine Gedanken schon längst im,Krieg. Im Krieg, so habe ich gedacht, werde ich endlich meinen,Platz finden. Im Krieg werde ich geliebt werden. Und so,ist es dann ja auch gekommen? Wenn ich das nur wüßte. Im,Haus waren zwar von einem Tag auf den andern drei Plätze,frei, und man hieß mich willkommen, liebevoll, wie mir vorkam,,sogar du, Schwester. Aber … aber … Früher einmal,war noch am ehesten mein Platz im Stall bei den Kühen und,Pferden gewesen, oder in deinem Obstgarten, Gregor, gelegentlich.,Aber jetzt: nirgends mehr. Vielleicht stimmt er also,doch, der andere Spruch aus der Gegend: Einen Platz findet,nur, wer ihn selber mitbringt? Habe ich vielleicht nie das,,wie soll ich sagen, Platzhaben verkörpert? Und bin vielleicht,gerade so für euch zur Spielverderberin geworden, schlimmer,,zur Unglücksstifterin? Nicht ihr habt mir also keinen,Platz gelassen, sondern ich bin schon platzlos geboren, und,,demgemäß auf Krieg aus, auf Welt‑ wie Familienkrieg? Erbarmen,,Mutter. Hast du mir nicht erzählt, daß in unserer,Sprache hier ›Mutterleib‹ und ›Erbarmen‹ dieselbe Wurzel,haben?«,Schon während dieser wohl familienüblichen Suada hat ihre,bis dahin vollkommen still neben Mann und »Benjamin« auf,der Bank in der Heide sitzende Mutter aus ihrer Feiertagstasche,,oder was das ist, das Strickzeug, Wolle und Stricknadel,,umständlich und auffällig geräuschvoll hervorgekramt,und an einem bereits begonnenen Strumpf, oder was, weiterzustricken,sich angeschickt. Ihr Mann, mein Großvater,,hat, im Gegenzug, ein kariertes Feiertagstaschentuch, ein,eng zusammengefaltetes, aus der Innentasche seines Sonntagsrocks,geholt, es ebenso umständlich aufgefaltet, bis es in,seiner Beinahgeschirrtuchgröße prangte, und hat sich hineingeschneuzt.,Dazu hat er dann uns im Kreis eine seiner familienüblichen,Kurzgeschichten erzählt: »Lang, bevor ich eure,Mutter kennengelernt habe, lang vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,,bin ich einmal von den Gendarmen für ein paar Stunden eingesperrt,worden, in den Gemeindekotter – für unsern Letzten, hier erklärt: in das Arrestloch neben der Gendarmerie,,nein, nicht wegen Widerstands gegen die Staatsgewalt, wofür,wir sonst bekannt sind – ich muß dich leider enttäuschen.,Und zwar kam das so: Ich war damals schon ausgelernt als,Zimmermann, aber mit Frauen: nichts, und wieder nichts.,,Ich habe mich an keine herangetraut, was ja ein anderer Sippenzug,ist, mit gewissen Ausnahmen, dann allerdings heftigen,,siehe zum Beispiel den Valentin da, den Deftigen, nomen,est omen, den über die Gemeindegrenzen und über das,Jaunfeld hier im gesamten Kärntner Becken bekannten –,sagt man heute noch so? – Weiberer, der – so sagte man zu,meiner Zeit noch nicht – nichts anbrennen hat lassen und,kein Bett hat kalt werden lassen, außer sein eigenes … Also:,Wie zu einer Frau kommen, ich, ich!, endlich? Damals habe,ich noch kaum deutsch gesprochen, wie fast alle vom Land,hier, Schule? gefehlt – entschuldigt, unentschuldigt. Ein bißchen,Deutsch beigebracht hat mir zuerst ein Wanderzimmermann,,aus Bremen, oder Hamburg, oder Eckernförde,,oder wie die Löcher dort im Norden halt heißen, und dem,sind unsere Mädchen nur so zugelaufen und zugefallen, nicht,wahr. Warum bloß? Die einen von uns meinten, wegen seiner,besonderen Zimmermannstracht, hinter der die girlies eben,nicht Johnny Cash oder Graham Nash vermuteten, sondern,,operettenvernarrt, wie sie waren – so war das damals,noch –, einen verkleideten Zaren, oder wenigstens einen seiner,Matrosen. Und die andern: Weil er deutsch sprach. Hat,nicht auch deiner Mutter dann so ein Deutschsprecher den,slawischen Kopf verdreht, mon petit fils, moj vnuk, mu engene,,mi nieto? Hochdeutsch sprechen hat bis weit in den,Zweiten Weltkrieg hinein in unserer Gegend nicht bloß,die Haus‑ und Hoftore geöffnet. Wer rein deutsch sprach,,,versprach, ein Herr zu sein. Deutsch, das war damals der,Magnetpol für die hiesigen Weiberleut. Aber wie es kam, daß,euer Vater als Junger damals in den Kotter gesperrt wurde?,Es war ein Mittwoch – ich weiß nicht, warum ich euch mit,dem Wochentag behellige –, es war der Markttag in Völkermarkt,,oder Bleiburg, oder wo. Und verhaftet bin ich worden,,weil ich mir dort an einem bestimmten Stand Rindsaugen,gekauft habe, einen ganzen Kübel voll, der da angeboten,wurde, zum Rindssuppekochen, so war das damals, und weil,ich mit diesen Augen, ganz schön glitschig waren die, nicht,wenige sind mir aus der Hand geglitscht, dann quer durch die, Stadt die jungen Frauen, auch einige nicht so junge, beworfen,habe – dabei habe ich die Augen nicht einmal geschmissen,,die Mädchen schon gar nicht bombardiert, sie denen eher zugeworfen,– zugedacht, zart, fast wie Rosen, na ja, noch dazu,wie Rosen ohne Dornen, unschuldig. Und unschuldig war ich,ja wirklich. Denn was hatte mir der deutsche Zimmermann,in meiner Frauennot geraten? –«,Hier hat den Erzähler endlich die düstere seiner zwei Töchter,unterbrochen: »Vater, die Geschichte hast du uns schon tausendundeinmal,erzählt, nur daß der Augenwerfer immer ein,anderer war, der Dorftrottel, der Hausstock des Nachbarn,oder sonstwer. Vater, warum willst du seit jeher ablenken?,Warum kannst du nicht einmal ernst sein? Sind wir nicht letzten,Endes fast alle verlorengegangen, nicht nur wir, sondern...

A NOTE ON LOTHAR STRUCK'S REVIEW OF

FOREVER STORM

THAT DERIVES FROM A BLOG ENTRY ON STRUCK'S

PIECES ABOUT HANDKE FOR THE

REVISTA-OF-REVIEWS BLOG

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/03/handke-revista-of-reviews.html

I came into contact with Lothar Struck who conducts the "begleitschreiben" blog http://www.begleitschreiben.net/ the successor to

http://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/ quite some years ago now when he contacted me on seeing a comment I had left at at something about Handke in Die Zeit and we then did on on-line interview about Handke's engagement in matters Yugoslav defense of the Serbs being made entirely culpable for the crimes committed during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a matter that I had given considerable thought to. This interview has not made the transfer of Struck's blog from two day net to his newest electronic incarnation. Initially, it was a pleasure to be in touch with someone who knew Handke's work and who appreciated it, otherwise I would not write this post mortem to a relationship that foundered because Struck ultimately is an adoring fan who a lacks the element of critique in is appreciation, among other failures of discernment. In other words, Struck, who has even assumed the pseudonym Gregor Keuschnig Handke's own humorous self-appellation as of A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING and also the protagonist of MY ONE YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S BAY, is such a one to whom the "real" Keuschnig says in NO-MAN'S BAY, when he comes adoring, "I am not the one." As such, this adoration in someone who is not devoid of critical judgment at other times does no real harm, although it can be said that such adoration then fails to foster understanding. And I am not talking about fine points here. Nor is Struck all that sensitive or stellar a reader. To start with a few current posting of his, both at Glanz & Elend, where Struck writes both under the pseudonym and under his own name:

http://search.freefind.com/find.html?si=38697730&pid=r&_charset_=&bcd=%C3%B7&t=s&query=keuschnig

http://search.freefind.com/find.html?si=38697730&pid=r&_charset_=&bcd=%C3%B7&t=s&query=struck

and

http://www.begleitschreiben.net/peter-handke-immer-noch-sturm/

Let me give a few instances. Lothar does a deceptively nice job, more thorough an useful than any of the paid reviewers who may earn a few Euros but are not allowed the space to do a proper job, and thus become quite Slick - Weinzierl, Pilz, et al - in describing the opening scene of IMMER NOCH STURM Here

Ein Ich-Erzähler sitzt auf einer Bank auf einer Wiese, in der Heide, im Jaunfeld. Ein Apfelbäumchen behängt mit etwa 99 Äpfeln gibt ihm Schutz und er kommt ins Phantasieren, ins Heraufbeschwören. Aufmarsch der Vorfahren. Sie erscheinen ihm - oder er lässt sie erscheinen? Er ist der einzige, der sie noch träumt: Nicht ich lasse euch nicht in Ruhe. Es läßt mich nicht in Ruhe, nicht ruhen. Ihr laßt mich nicht in Ruhe. Im Laufe der Erzählung (oder ist ein Drama?) frischt der Wind auf, kommt von vorne, von hinten und von oben, wird zum Sturm (zum Erinnerungssturm sowieso). Und die Landschaft, die Kindsheimat, nein: die Bleibe, dieses wiedergeholte Kärnten verändert sich im Laufe dieser Ahnen-Epiphanien. Das ist mehr als nur die Suche nach den eigenen Wurzeln. Vielleicht ist "Immer noch Sturm" das wirkliche Nachtbuch Peter Handkes (und das vor wenigen Wochen erschienene ist nur ein Präludium).

Whereupon Struck makes the kind of supposition that he cannot tell the difference between Handke’s nighttime burps [which would be interested if he had written down the dreams, not to mention attempt analyses] and a throughly composed major work in five act. Being generous to such a fanzine statement - hear hear! = we will let it pass until we come on Struck’s statement:

Fiktionalisierungen des Autobiographischen

Gewiss - der Ich-Erzähler, der dem-Wind-Ausgesetzte und Sturm-Erzeugende, ist Peter Handke.

... a claim one can only make if one knows who Peter Handke is, who himself has said that the “I”, the “ich” in STURM is a fictional “I.” If we understand the difference between the fictional “I”, here, I suggest we will ACTUALLY have a major clue as to the other fictional personae Handke has been adopting since forever, a matter in which he has become better and stronger and more sophisticated over these many years. Now if Struck had said “the entire play is Peter Handke’s self, the Peter Handke of the permanent autistic position, who loves himself more than anyone in the world, including Handke who loves to lie and invent and to manicure his image and exhibit himself and suppress certain unpleasant featues and matters and is a coy jongleur” - with that I would not argue, that would be, is a beginning.. The “I” here is first of all the puppet in the hands of our puppeteer from Chaville - if Handke had merely wanted to celebrate his ancestors, he might have written them a long letter.

As Struck a while later admits:

Bis auf die Tatsache, dass die junge Mutter mit ihrem Vaterlosen Kärnten verlassen hatte, entfernt sich Handke von der realen Geschichte seiner Familie immer mehr.

at which latest point it might have occurred to Struck that what matters most to Handke, and as it ought to, and did, is the form, the composition, the play. Struck also misses the lie that Handke introduces by having a woman who is married to Bruno Handke, leave the Carinthian precincts to find the father of a child now two years old. Both Scott Abbbott and I address and speculate on the problematics that also enter the form and “life" of the play at that point in extenso at:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

Struck also errs, significantly, when he writes

“Die historischen Begebenheiten erläutert Handke nicht. for what are the passages written in “Klartext” but oddly distorted glosses of the history of Austria and Carinthia since 1936 to the present. Struck is also some degrees off when he writes: Wer eine Art Verklärung oder gar Heroisierung des Kärntner Widerstands erwartet hatte, geht fehl. Kein Superlativ. Kein Heldentum; das brechtsche Pathos ist Handke zuwider, auch wenn es für eine "gute Sache" wäre. Und dennoch: Fast immer reden, deklamieren, handeln die Figuren dialektisch, zweifelnd, schwankend. Diese Widerständler waren gespalten ob ihres Tuns und auch sie waren vom Krieg und dessen merkwürdiger Regeln geprägt, ja: verdorben. Sie sahen ihren Widerstand als schiere Notwendigkeit.

I would disagree, Act IV, the Partisanen Section, struck both Scott Abbott and me as stylized Agit-Prop, the air went out of the piece and I speculate about the reasons for that at length at:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

Handke used to be pathos-ridden, during his Slow Homecoming period, especially in Nova’s epic speech at the end of Walk about the Villages, so pathos drenched there’s scarcely a drop of oxygen left in her lungs. What is pathos: the unattainability of the ideal. Parzifal keeps seeking and we admire him for it, he might be a Prussian about it, and his steel might glint but that is all. A bit more pathos - a la Brecht’s Die Massnahme - ,I hold, might actually have served the Partisan Gregor/ Jonatan well when he becomes an executioner! Nor is there any need to play Handke and Brecht off against each other, from whom Handke has learned and taken quite a bit over the years.

I would also question Struck’s estimate that STURM is a piece of WELT THEATER [World Theater], perhaps it is just the greatest Heimats Stueck ever written. To be World Theater STURM would need to have the dimensions of KING LEAR or END GAME - that is, it would have to be taken in the direction it itself point to at the end with its mention of the Alaskan Indians. Otherwise, with its basic notion that our “imagoes” constitute our self, could not be sounder.

Nonetheless, Struck’s review is one of the few that deserve to be read twice.

A COLLECTION OF ALL GERMAN REVIEWS

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-

Still Storm: Introductory Thoughts on the Basis of Michael's Introduction

2011-08-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

THERE ARE ALSO THE FOLLOWING LINKED SITES TO THIS DISCUSSION:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

THE MAIN DISCUSSION SITE

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/background-material-for-still-storm.html

https://picasaweb.google.com/106505819654688893791/IMMERNOCHSTURMPHOTOSFOREVERSTORM

======================================================

"The first casualty of war is language," Peter once said.

If I were to state the theme of this new play, I would add that the first casualty of war, as also the first casualty of peace, is language.

Michael has laid out the plot in an admirably straightforward way. The plot / Handlung / what happens is exactly as he writes, from act 1 through act 5 (they read like chapters rather than acts in the book of the play).

My response is to point to another structure or set of structures at the heart (or spleen) of the play.

Language is the topic that dominates the play. From the first musings of the character named "ich" (and the quotation marks point out that even he is a creation of language) to the last line of the play, language is the question:

"Eine Heide, eine Steppe, eine Heidesteppe, oder wo." / A heath, a steppe, a heathensteppe, or where. (. . . a heathsteppe . . . A moor, a steppe, a moorsteppe. . .)

The first sentence, then, is a question without a question mark. It includes a probing neologism. In short, it draws attention to itself as language.

The final scene of the play has the Slovene speaking characters separated and then pushed to the back of the stage by other figures. They remain "erkenntlich höchstens an den Handzeichen, mit denen wir einander noch zuwinken" / recognizable only by the handgestures with which we still signal to one another.

The main character, on this line of thinking, is the Slovene language spoken by a Slovene minority in southern Austria.

It could be any language spoken by any minority (Athabaskan, for instance, in Alaska, as the penultimate scene of the play points out).

But it is Austria, a Carinthian village, and so the language is Slovene.

The enemy in this play about Austro-Slovene partisans is the dominant German-speaking culture that oppresses the Slovene language. What will be won, ostensibly, when the war is over, is the right to speak Slovene.

It's a battle, of course, that was fought before the Germans ever came to town; and it's a battle that must be fought after they are sent packing.

Thus the title: Still Storm / Immer noch Sturm. It's a Shakespearean stage direction (Still Storm) that in the German, especially with the middle "noch" not capitalized, reads as "always . . . storm."

The first casualty of war, as of peace, is language.

Much more to come. I'll end this first post with a section of a book by my friend Alex Caldiero. The book is called "Sonosuono" and is a meditation on the Sicilian language and culture that gave birth to Alex and nurtured him until he was reborn, for better and worse, at the age of 9 in his new land of Brooklyn:

SONOSOPHY

My contribution to the conference is a sonosophy performance,followed by a Q &amp; A session. My friend and colleague, M, introduces me.

The performance is in four languages: Sicilian, Italian,American English, and a fourth language (if you can call it a language) thatweaves in and out and between the other three. This fourth language has noformal name, and is variously designated depending on the time and locality. Inthe Medieval period, throughout Europe and the Middle East it was called “thelanguage of the birds.” I call it Sonosophy.

Whenever this language of the birds is practiced, it adaptsand interplays with the culture and language of the nation wherein it ispracticed. For instance, it can interact with the national tongue, or with thelanguage of painting, dance, or even science, or any combination of these. Inthis way sonosophy surges forth as a guiding impulse springing from the depths inwhich sound and meaning are indistinguishable. In Hindu linguistics, it isdesignated by the Sanskrit term, sphota:the ground sound. From the sphota sproutsthe perennial wisdom of manifesting sound mind: sonosophy.

It’s the most natural thing that for this conference Ishould speak in the language of the birds. The center piece of my sonosophical performanceis a language act:

I begin by taking items out of a green pouch and puttingeach one into my mouth…I hardly get to say a few words (“it is always…sad…),the accumulation of objects obstructs and renders the rest of what I sayunintelligible. One after another, I carefully place the objects in my mouth: apen, a feather, an eraser, a wrist watch, a twig, a piece of cloth, foldedpaper, a stone. I can hardly breathe, all the while continuing to utter wordsthat are but noises and sounds as I nearly gag putting in the last of theobjects. All these objects protrude from my mouth. Then, one by one, just as theywere put in they are taken out. Graduallymy words become recognizable, until, with the last of the objects removed, Iclearly utter:

“It is

always

sad

when

the last

living speaker

of a language

dies.”

…and after a short pause, I add:

“In memory of Chief ThunderCloud, last living speaker of the Ottawa language who die in xxxxxx”

This piece on the last living speaker of the Ottawa languagehits home with the situation and fate of the Sicilian language.

I proceed with the rest of the sonosophy performance and endwith a poem in the Sicilian language, in Sicilian:

‘A LINGUA SICILIANA

Nun parrati

U sicilianu.

Parrati l’inglisi

u cinisi, o puru

l’italianu,

ma nun parrati

u sicilianu.

Nun è mancu

lingua

u sicilianu,

parrata di bricanti.

Scurdativilli

li palori,

scurdativilli.

I signuri

ca sunnu educati

nun la pàrranu;

I parrini

quannu fannu pridicati

nun la pàrranu;

I scritturi e sculari

nun s’azzardanu a parrari

sti palori

ca stèsiru vulgari.

Nun parrati

u sicilianu.

U silenziu

macari avi ‘a vuci:

vuci di terra muta

comu quannu

nun è siminata.

Ma quannu

muta staçiuni

sta terra spicca

cu çiuri e virdura;

E tannu dda vuci

arripigghia

l’antica parrata.

THE SICILIAN LANGUAGE

Don’t speak

Sicilian.

Speak English,

Chinese, or else

Italian,

but don’t speak

Sicilian.

It’s not even

a language

Sicilian,

the speech of gangsters.

Forget

the words,

forget them.

Educated

gentlemen

don’t speak it;

Priests

in their pulpits

don’t speak it;

Writers and scholars

don’t dare to speak

these words

that remained vulgar.

Don’t speak

Sicilian.

Silence

also has a voice,

voice of a mute land

as when

nothing is planted.

But when

the season changes

this land leaps forth

with flowers and greenery;

And then that voice

will take up again

the ancient speech.

HANDKE: IMMMER NOCH STURM/ STILL STORM -STORMY DISCUSSION

2011-08-07T13:20:00.001-07:00

THE DISCUSSION OF immer noch sturm/ still storm WILL START

HAS STARTED

FIRST OF ALL A KIND OF SUMMARY NOTE THAT I, MICHAEL ROLOFF, WROTE AT THE END OF AUGUST 2011

IMMER NOCH STURM/ FOREVER STORM is both a play and a novel in five acts, with one set, and 7 major characters. It is Handke's 10th major play*. The author, first, creates a fictional "I", the puppet master creates a puppet that, to put it simply, half resembles the actual author, Peter Handke, through the ages of his timeless life on an even more timeless heath - the place, forever the place, perhaps the main character, the last dramas the dramas of places, the stage. Thereupon, the puppet master author has the "I's" significant, his imagoes, appear, externalized out of his memory as it were, and his relationship to them, his ancestors.

The problems, artistically, are representational: how to honestly reduce these imagoes, make them speak, on stage - just imagine the endless associations you have to the persons you were closest to in your youth. How to get the essentials down.

In VOYAGE BY DUGOUT [1994] the presenters are two film directors. In TRACES OF THE LOST [2005] the "author" enters proceedings very similar to the fabulating THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER [1991]. The "place" has been the main character, perhaps since Handke's first major play, PUBLIC INSULT; certainly since THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER. The, or "an" author becoming part of the proceedings is a very honest way of doing so - unless he pulls some serious punches, as I think Handke does here in once instance.

STURM is an ancestor play. Handke's attachment to these ancestors, his mother, his uncle Gregor Sivec, and his grandparents, is grounded in him early on and in a place, Carinthia. The book his uncle Gregor wrote as an apple horticulturalist has been significant to him since his earliest days as a reader, and the letters that the two brothers, Gregor and Hans, wrote from the front as WW II as conscripted soldiers in the German Army, are a family heirloom. Yet STORM links up most directly to certain sections of Handke's WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES that also treat of the appearance of ancestors out of their graves into his conscious life, as more real than the living. STURM also harks back to Handke's first novel DIE HORNISSEN, Los Hormigas, it is also in French and Italian, and I suspect in a few other languages [THE HORNETS, bombers of WW II vintage] where a missing uncle features, and of course the bucolic surround.

Wanting just to celebrate his Carinthian Slovenian folk, Handke might have rewritten Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN with emphasis on the Slovenian minority if that is merely what he wanted to do - the actual Peter Handke is, ethnically, half Slovenian and half German, had four years of a Catholic Seminary education, prior to entering a regular Gymnasium and then dropped out of Graz law school on completion of his first novel, in 1964; only his passport is Austrian, as he was born in Austria, in December 1942; his mother ethnically a minority Slovene, his father a German soldier stationed in Carinthia, his name giving stepfather, his actual father's companion from the same German outfit. Since about the time that Handke became famous at age 24, in 1966, he has not lived in Austria, except from 1979 to 1986 for his first daughter, who had been going to school in Paris, to acquire an Austrian high school education [1979-86], in Salzburg. He first lived in Germany until moving to Paris from 1972 to 1979 and again outside Paris since 1989, one year was spent traveling all around the world. GESTERN UNTERWEGS [Jung & Jung, 1999, Handke's Austrian publisher, as compared to his main German, Suhrkamp Verlag, gives a wonderful account of that year in diary form.]. Handke's relationship to Austria is, to put it mildly, equivocal. With his 1987 narrative THE REPETITION, the re-writing of SORROW BEYOND DREAMS [1972], his account of the thwarted happiness of his mother's life, Handke starts to assume a Carinthian Slovenian identity by means of installing both his uncle Gregor and his grandfather, the "Ote", as the missing father figures, he makes a Slovenian/German dictionary of his own, since, till then, he had only tenuous knowledge of Slovenian. Handke is a kind of half illegitimate child of a German soldier stationed in Griffen in 1942, [he makes a lot of fun of his being a "wunderkind" bastard child in STORM] a Herr Schoeneherr, who however would not marry Maria Sivec since he already had a wife and children in Germany. His mother Maria Sivec, subsequently, so as to have a husband, and - so I assume - acquire legitimacy for herself and the child, certainly not out of the same kind of love she felt for the actual father or her love child, married Herr Schoeneherr's fellow soldier, the name-giving Bruno Handke, who also had the hots for her, a chap from Berlin. While both father and stepfather survived the war, Bruno being wounded around 1944 and then working on the Berlin tramways, two of the Sivec sons, Gregor and Hans, did not. Only the third Sivec son, Jure, did, and turned Austrian nationalist! Handke met his actual father about the time of his graduation from Gymnasium, his Matura, at age 22, that is a beehive of a novel, and not what Handke wrote here.

All the characters in FOREVER STURM have major qualites of Handke's foisted on them - Gregor is given Handke's mono-maniacalness, first as a horticultuaralist, later, as PARTISAN fighter, of being a fighter in chief; of Gregor's two younger brothers Valentin is given Handke's once Don Juan who merely has to lie back and the hussies climb into his lair; Benjamin is outfitted with Handke's extreme nausea at so much that is nauseating in this world; the "I's" mother turns from country girl sassy city wise, but is outfitted with Maria Sivec's unthwartable optimistic side; not her depression. The grandfather is the same obstinate old cuss as which I have come to know him via Handke many notes and comments; the grandmother is the peacemaker: but there is also an older sister, a complete invention for the sake of the drama, who is a misfit - as Handke has felt to be from early on, Ursula, who however, finds her calling as a Partisan, and there receives a new name Senececa, Snowchick, a worthy companion to the Bear Skin Woman of VOYAGE BY DUG OUT. They are all Carinthian Slovenes, a badly treated minority before, during and again shortly after WW II. Handke did not just want to celebrate his Slovenian/ Slavic identity, but also the heroism of the Carinthian Slovenes who became PARTISANS towards the end of the short lived Third Reich. In that the play diverges radically from the biography of his own family, none of whom were PARTISANEN, and on closer inspection look to be on the way to assimilation. A lot of history enters the play/ novel, and it is odd for certain aspects, such as the 1938ANSCHLUSS and Austria's claim to have been a victim of Nazism, to go unmentioned in those sections where the "I" narrator fantasizer speaks what are alleged to be historically incontrovertible data.

Although a lot of Handke's self and autobiography can be said to have entered STORM, it would be inadvisable to address Handke's biography with an invention such as STORM as your starting point! Handke is also having a lot of fun, our worthy successor to Nestroy and Raimund and Grillparzer with some strong shots of Shakespeare, Goethe and Euripides in him. Handke regards himself and so do I in the succession of that great company. And Freud, who could not imagine Shakespeare as being a commoner genius with a good education, might have second thoughts when regarding the career of our once piss pot poor Peter Handke, who did not become one of the "cheese wheels" that keep on trundling downhill [WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES.]

EINEN JUX WILL ER SICH MACHEN - perhaps the biggest kick Handke got out of the proceedings at the play's premiere in Salzburg this past August was to have a bunch of Slovenian hillbillies speaking the most marvelous High German before that well heeled festival crowd!

STORM is also a play that can be read as a novel. Knowing that the chances of frequent performances of his text is unlikely, Handke has been writing what are called Lese Dramen as of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES. With STORM he has perfected the meshing of direction with action and speechifying. It takes a bit of effort read and imagine plays and screenplays, here it is made as easy as can be.

The question that might face a poet, in blunt terms, a poet who - although he now also writes in French [La Cuisine, TILL THE DAY DO US PART was written first in French, Jusqu'la que le jour vous separe ou Une question de lumiere] and also writes in Slovene judging by a fair amount of in Slovene in STURM [Slovene first started cropping up in WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES in 1981] - is: I want so show how intimate how close I am, how someone, and I can be to my ancestors, how they possess me, I want to find a poetic equivalent to what has preoccupied me off and on for decades, I want to exhibit that and write a delight that will make others think about their ancestors. I am going to turn my insides out, exhibit my self, and what a very big self I have! On stage this requires a tremendous simplifying down, sharp distinct strokes, allocating of major qualities of mine that I share with my ancestors; qualities that I understand in some fashion, or at least as well as a Singer Sowing machine does - to get that wonderfully silly joke you will have to read the play!

Let me briefly indicate a dyadic intimacy that is the diametric opposite of what Handke achieves in STURM, a kind of intimacy which might be at most hinted on stage, the dyadic intimacy between analyst and patient, or even closer: between two analysts who are married, who understand each others dreams as soon as one of them uttered one or two words in their recounting, something much closer than merger.

I once wrote up an example of that kind of experience as TRAPPING THE TRAPPER. http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ and I see why Freud tended to believe in ESP with the kind of experiences you have with analysands over the years. How do you put the relationships that exists inside you, in your psyche, to those imagoes to the people you are closest to because they exist inside you, on to a stage? Our inner-of-the-outerworld-innerworld presenter exhibitor keeps finding ever new and creative ways of doing so.
How can you even create a sense of such intimacy on stage without
resorting to the kind of cliches that are not cliches when spoken between two people who know each other intimately?
Handke also wants to do something for "his" people, the Carinthian
Slovenians, and he doesn't want to write an editorial, or get on a soap
box, he is convinced that an artistic communication, an aesthetically
pleasing and gripping engaging, thoroughly composed work of art, will be superior, and he has all the reason in the world to believe that he has the artistic means to do so. And a by and large well woven well planned work it turns into. Had I the time, I would diagram how the threads are woven on very strong five act carpet backing with each act having some major movement shifts itself. You can follow the craft. It is that of a major composer, how the threads are woven, how he exhilirates in verbal acrobatics. Some of the matters that trouble me, to which I have reservations are listed in the to and fro of my and Scott Abbott's, fellow Handke translator's comments, in a nutshell: Handke writes out, whites out the fact that his mother married a German soldier. That man Bruno Handke, turned out to be fairly monstrous, eventually. As an autobiographic detail it is not necessary, but dramatically, within the tensions of the play, between the imagoes on stage, this becomes a gaping hole by ACT IV.

* PUBLIC INSULT 1966, KASPAR 1968, RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE
1970, WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES 1981, THE ART OF ASKING 1989, THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT EACH OTHER 1991, PREPARATIONS FOR IMMORTALITY 1995 , VOYAGE BY DUGOUT, 1994,

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-storm.html

PHOTOS FROM THE PREMIERE

at a separate album just for STURM PHOTOS

https://picasaweb.google.com/106505819654688893791/IMMERNOCHSTURMPHOTOSFOREVERSTORM

Background material, and it is useful, can be found at:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/background-material-for-still-storm.html

[YOU WILL ALSO FIND A TEXT EXCERPT THERE, THE FIRST FIVE PAGES]

Reviews of the book and of the premiere of Gottcheff's stage version at the Salzburg Festival have been collected at:

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html
and there are quite a few useful ones among them

e.g. Lothar Struck and Gerhard Stadelmair
Hear! Hear! In the F.A.Z who writes:

AND ANOTHER SIDE DISCUSSION HAS OPENED UP AT:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

"Ein schöner, berührender, in jeder Zeile glaubhafter, weil herzblutbeglaubigter Text."

NOW FOLLOWS:
[A] A DESCRIPTION OF THE PLAY, its five acts.
[B] A CRITIQUE OF

OF CERTAIN OF ITS FEATURES
[C]ISSUES THAT THE PLAY RAISES
DRAMATICALLY, WITHIN HANDKE'S OEUVRE, about Handke

The Chief Discussants are Scott Abbott, the
translator of Handke's JUSTICE FOR SERBIA, the play VOYAGE BY DUGOUT: THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR, and of ONCE MORE FOR THUCYDIDES, a professor at Utah Valley University, Ph.D. Princeton
and Sagebrush Universities!
&
Michael Roloff
translator of Handke's early plays up onto and including WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES has written extensively about Handke's dramas.

It would be wonderful that, e.g. some of Michael'a 1000 Austrian Facebook Friends who
have read or seen the play or know Handke's work commented.

Remember that Scott is on Rocky Mountain Daylight Time,
Michael Roloff @ Pacific Daylight Time
and that the publication of comments can therefore be delayed.
Scroll down to the bottom of

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-storm.html

To the COMMENT BUTTON>>>

[A] THE DESCRIPTION

FOREVER STORM is a text of appr. 160 pages @ 300 words per page which is
divided into five parts. It is a play with eight characters and its language is as evocative as Shakespeare's in bringing to life worlds.

[1]
"I" the narrator, dreamer, puppeteer
director of the proceedings who is the grandchild of the
grandparents and bastard son of their daughter Maria.
"Eine Heide, eine Steppe, eine Heidesteppe, oder wo. Jetzt, im Mittelalter, oder wann",

[2 + 3]
His Grandparents, a cussed grand dad,
and a peace maker grandmother.

[4]
Gregor/ Jonatan, who is described as being
a myops, "one eyed", which as behavior he only
exhibits once he becomes a Partisan towards the end; he
is the oldest of the parents five children. A horticulturalist
who acquires the name of his favorite apple, Jonatan,
as nom de guerre as a Slovenian Partisan fighter.

[5]
Valentin their second son, a Valentine for every
girl in the neighborhood, keeps all beds but his own warm. He is killed on the front during WW II.

[6]
Maria, the narrator's mother, who for large stretches
is described as being in Germany, looking to hook back up
with the narrator's father. She reappears wonderfully in Part V
and sets the narrator straight by confronting
him with his childhood selves. Maria appears imbued with
joi de vivre, as she was as a young woman, what
German made her lose the joi is not addressed in the play.
That kind of horror is/ was not typical.

[7]
Ursula, the "dark sister", who does not fit in until she becomes
Senezeca/ The Snow Woman Partisan fighter. She is killed
by her German captors.

"Vielleicht stimmt er ja doch, der Spruch aus der Gegend: Einen Platz findet nur, wer ihn selber mitbringt? Habe ich vielleicht nie das, wie soll ich sagen, Platzhaben verkörpert? Nicht ihr habt mir also keinen Platz gelassen, sondern ich bin schon platzlos geboren, und demgemäß auf Krieg aus, auf Welt- wie Familienkrieg? Erbarmen, Mutter. Hast du mir nicht erzählt, dass in unserer Sprache hier "Mutterleib" und "Erbarmen" dieselbe Wurzel haben?"

[8]
Benjamin, the youngest son, who is also killed
on the front is one big bundle of nausea which bundle seizes the
narrator in Part V.

If you have become aware that as of Handke's WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES in the early 80s he has been writing what are called LESE DRAMEN in German - plays that are meant as much to be read as performed - e.g. THE ART OF ASKING, PREPARATIONS FOR IMMORTALITY - you will note that Handke has now integrated the stage directions into the text, easily done with an "I" as director narrator, dreamer. You can trust that narrator, he will not let you down. He himself is verbally as gifted as Shakespeare and he makes his dramatis personae equally articulate, immediately in

PART ONE [P. 7-41]

in evoking, recounting one spectacular year in the 1930s. We receive a marvelously powerfully evocation of a very rural basic, some would say archaic, bucolic existence, which, however, is drawn in such chiaroscuro that only the willful will mistake this existence for an idyll [except perhaps in the sense of "we were all together" of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES], fractious, ample destitution of every kind. There is a long text excerpt at the background site:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/background-material-for-still-storm.html

The convention of having an "I" as narrator, dreamer presenter

is an outgrowth, in Handke's instance, of having twin narrators, the two directors in the film play VOYAGE BY DUGOUT present their discussion of the play in the form of sections of a screenplay. In Handke's TRACES OF THE LOST, a single narrator becomes part of the action. It is both a playful and honest way of proceeding, I/we find.

Poetically, as a dramatic poem, but formally, too, STILL STORM bears a relationship to certain VILLAGES features, especially to the there re-introduced - from Greek drama and Goethe - "alternating discourse" which, meanwhile, is no longer simply manifest in, be it, long or brief speeches set off against each other, but integrated into the text, ingeniously modulated the manner in which the speeches are handed off. In very brief exchanges between the "I" and his uncle Gregor in Part V, which verbal back and forth itself is very reminiscent, also in its joyously grim tone, of the end of VILLAGES. In Part V we have a brief reprieve, just a few sentences, of the to and fro at the end of Villages, leading, here, into the derisive POLKA. Also, there is a reprieve, in Part IV, at its dreamiest, of a section of fabled beings from THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER. A very effective highpoint indeed!

Handke creates "types" here as he has as far back as the 1973 THEY ARE DYING OUT, if not earlier, and also very much in WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES. These "types" are outfitted with striking qualities, "one-eyed" [single-minded, a quality that Handke's ex-lover Marie Colbin once ascribed to Handke himself] Gregor; another of the mother's brother's, Benjamin is said to wretch with nausea - again an ineluctable quality of which Handke himself may still be possessed. Valentin is what we call a conejo in Mexican, and as both Handke and one of his translators were before le neige d'antan set their hair in that direction, although like "Ote" Sivec [Handke's Slovenian grandfather] we will reach under a skirt even at the moment we croak. Typecasting in this manner makes for great distinctness on stage, or on the stage which is the page; broad, sharp, dramatic strokes. Subtlety there is in other matters.

The READER, even half awake, will realize that we are in an ancestor play... and if the READER is familiar with Handke's work, as both Scott and I are, the READER will realize that FOREVER STORM arises as it were out of one sentence in WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES where its chief narrator, the prodigal returning poet, once again called GREGOR, states: "My dead I talk to you... you are with me" [and that Handke as a now self-confessed "Psycho-Physiker" is very much a Kleinian, Object Relationist, internalized significant objects, ah science and its language!] and that STORM relates, within Handke's work, most immediately to WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, also to those sections that treat of contentiousness, there, between Gregor's siblings and relatives.

Part I

Sets the mise en scene: a heath field with a bench and an apple tree with 99 apples on it [as the play proceeds the bench sinking into the ground, a detail, more subtle than the forever more receding horizon in THE ART OF ASKING]. On it sits the narrator "I" and the wind of memory is upon him as he starts to fantasize his ancestors as they walk into his mind. "It's not that I won't let them rest, they will not let me rest. You don't leave me in peace." During the course of the dramatic narrative the wind wafts across the stage, from behind from the side from inside him, it becomes stormy, at one point there is even a FALL WIND! [ catabatic wind,air current, current of air, wind - air moving (sometimes with considerable force) from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure; "trees bent under the fierce winds"] There appears his family: two grandparents and their five children; that is, his over-optimistic mother [Handke emphasizes that feature of his mother when she was a young woman] and her dark sister, who is the opposite [but does not exist within Handke's actual family constellation, is an invention for the sake of the drama], and three brothers: Gregor whose chief feature is being "one-eyed" [single-minded, a horticulturalist who is crazed about apples as his brother Valentin is about women and the kid brother Benjamin whom Handke has outfitted with his own once [?] proneness to be nauseated by no end of ugly matters in this world.

This extremely rural family, set in the Slovenian section of the Austrian province Carinthia, and an ancient province it is indeed where numerous languages have been spoken back at least to Illyrian days, stands in for all such rural families around the world, in its rurality - which is scarcely idyllicized in its rough-hewn ways. The village described in VILLAGES resembles the village here but that the past is really brought to life in the DIRECTOR/I's staging of the what has been, in the liveliest earthiest and most playful linguistically spectacular manner in Part One. Oh what fun the author has in using language to bring that world to life. A Shakespearean talent as I have known for about 30 years now.

1. Akt „Eine Heide, eine Steppe, eine Heidesteppe, oder wo. Jetzt, im Mittelalter, oder wann. Was ist da zu sehen? Eine Sitzbank, eine eher zeitlose, im Mittelgrund, und daneben oder dahinter oder sonst wo ein Apfelbaum, behängt mit etwa 99 Äpfeln.“ So beginnt das Stück. „Ich“ wird von seinen Vorfahren heimgesucht, ein Fremdling im „Interkontinentalanzug“ unter feiertäglich Gewandeten. Valentin erklärt, wie er es zu etwas brachte: Weil er sich „von unserer Haus- und Sippensprache, der vermaledeiten, losgesagt“ hat. „Wer rein deutsch sprach, versprach, ein Herr zu sein“, heißt es. 1936, sechs Jahre vor Handkes Geburt
Gregor, der Älteste, hat in Maribor Landwirtschaft studiert, ist als stolzer Slowene ins Land der Peiniger zurückgekehrt und führt als Begründer einer Obstzucht die Familie aus der Paria-Existenz. Die Gestalt des Onkels ist präzise bis in die Details gezeichnet. Wieder und wieder findet sich der Name Gregor in Handkes Werk, ein weiteres Mal noch in der idealen Existenz des Widerstandskämpfers. Die Gestalten tanzen ab, nur die Mutter kommt noch einmal zurück: „Weißt du denn nicht, dass wir bei dir bleiben bis ans Ende deiner Tage, und vielleicht noch darüber hinaus, du Erztrottel?“2. Akt, 1939
Alle drei Söhne sind im Krieg. Die Mutter ist „auf dem Sprung zum Feindwerden“. Drei Jahre später sieht man Ursula, die ältere Schwester, „im Aufzug fast einer Schweinemagd“, über „die wie weltstädtisch Gekleidete“ her-fallen. „Das dafür, daß du dir einen von einem Anderweitigen gehst. Während ich im Stroh hinter dem Ziegenstall übernachte, kugelst du mit dem reichsdeutschen Ziegenbock durchs Doppelbett des Hotels ,Tigerwirt‘.“ Die Mutter knöpft den Mantel auf. Sie ist schwanger von einem deutschen Soldaten. Für das „Ich“ beginnt der Film des Lebens zu laufen. Benjamin, der Jüngste, fällt. Der Großvater verflucht Deutschland. „Und verflucht sei der deutsche Liebeswurm in deinem Liebesbauch. Verflucht sei die Frucht deines Leibes. Der Herr hat’s gegeben, der Herr hat’s genommen, verflucht sei der Name des Herrn in Ewigkeit.“ Ursula schließt sich den Partisanen an.

I looked very carefully over ACT ONE once more and find it one of the most beautiful sequences Handke has written for the theater. In the theater he has a social sense, otherwise so lacking
in these prose self manifestations. What Stadelmaier in the FAZ wrote, that it [S. doesnt differentiate between the various acts, i.e. does not address the problematic THIRD ACT PARTISANEN AGIT-PROP] is written with Handke heart-blood is the case. Deep fondness underlies ALL of them.... the villagers of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGERS have come to life, rounded even with having typical qualities that identify them: Ursula's out of-placeness, Valentin's eroticism, Benjamin's nausea and so on.
Now this is a work that is worthy of the Nobel Prize in every sense in which that prize is given. Boy, is this tough to bring off without falling into all the usual sentimental traps.

I noticed also that the "I" narrator introduces the PARTISANEN business as having occurred in the past - a kind of plus-quam-perfect treatment, even while moving forward to the eventual telling demonstration of it in ACT III. Time present, time past, time future are very Eliottisk here, and the PLACE ! Places are the last dramas. So that needs to be made very distinct, memorably so. Just a bare stage with leaves trickling down as in the Salzburg production??? I will now carefully re-read Act II. Eventually, in a few days I will re-read from back to front! That is always a test also of one's own memory.

Part II

Whereas Part One singles out one year, 1936, Part II homes in on the relationship of the narrator to his mother and we have dialogue which occasionally becomes a bit wordy. First the mother appears a young country girl, then as a young gussied-up city girl and her dark sister, Ursula, berates her for the affair she is having with a German soldier stationed in Carinthia in 1942 [that is, appr. 7 years have passed between the 1936 focus of Part I and Part II p.51-70.] It is noticeable that the ANSCHLUSS is not mentioned, perhaps the author takes if for granted that his Austrian audience knows?

Part III

The grandparents appear, the grandfather curses royally and far more marvelously I expect than he did so famously in reality with the spectacular cussing Handke puts into his mouth, of the Germans, also called their Roman appelation "Swabians," one at seeing his daughter pregnant and, when his wife opens a second letter that announces the death of son Valentin at the front. The grandmother seeks to soothe matters between the daughters and the grumpy grandfather as they walk home. There is a weird moment when the "I" caresses the pregnant stomach of his mother [an apparition after all!] with himself inside as a fetus!

ADDITION MADE ON SUNDAY AUGUST 28

I re-read ACT III this afternoon, and then went
for a walk through my "prarie"
http://crosscut.com/blog/crosscut/20410/A-private-bower-of-wildness-in-Seattle/
and the following thoughts occurred with regard to Part III. As a director, I think I saw one very short section one might want to cut. The dialogue between the brothers and between the sisters, and between the sisters and brothers
are all very short, Handke's stylized dialogue, who refuses to write naturalistic dialogue. And all that is fine, and I really like that Gregor-Jonatan instead of following Ursula-Snowqueen into the maquis decides to take one more long roundabout to think his decision over, or whatever. Gregor pushed the pram, baby cart back and forth, Handke's wishes for father,
his uncle, the horticulturalist who receives the nom der guerre of an apple. Valentin the Westerner even suggest American apple names! The act contains a lot of lovely sequences.
It takes place in the year 1944, although it hearks back to 1942, the year of Handke's conception and birth. There is a lot of berating of the bastard child's mother for having slept with a German soldier. At the end she
goes off to Germany to look for the father, as Maria Sivec did to rejoin her husband, Handke's stepfather.

Something that has puzzled me for some years is the extent to which illegitimate children were frowned on among Carinthian Slovenian country folk. Perhaps Fabian will be able to answer that, or one or the other of my Carinthian
friends, also on face book. In some rural communities an illegitimate pregnancy is welcomed, because it signifies that the woman is fertile, marriageable, able to provide
not only successors but field laborers. Judging by the the problem the mother's illegitimate pregnancy is for this clan, perhaps that is not the case among the Slovene country folk. However, her going off to Germany to search
for him, and two years after the birth of the child: why have it in the play, t'would not be typical, not two years after. Why not put in: he was married, he has other children [a matter I don't recall Malte dwelling on in his MEISTER DER DAEMMERUNG, although he did great work in unearthing the correspondence between Herr Schoeneherr and his son Peter Handke.]

The attempt to make the play hoe
a parallel to Handke's life, and then diverge from it at crucial moments, creates some dramatic problematics here. It may very well have been the case that Maria Sivec married Bruno Handke because she needed a husband for her baby,
he appears to have been quite good looking, and he can't have been [?] the horror he turned out to be when she rejoined him in Berlin in 1944, a wounded soldier, back from the front,
alcoholic, already living with another woman.

Upon rereading this Act III I am less troubled by Valentin's extolling of the "open West" than I was on the first go around. Will I be less troubled by the Agit-Prop of Act IV the second
go around?
michael roloff 7:15 PDT,

PART IV

p.100-133

Ever so fortunately, our poet-narrator becomes quite concrete in his descriptions of the kind of life that his aunt Ursula/Snowbird is leading as a partisan in the mountains and in which he she is then joined by her brother Gregor [as Jonatan who leaves his troop, burns his uniform and who used to be unable to hurt a fly then turns killer, and so it becomes sufficiently poetically convincing also in concrete detail. The theme of Slovenian irrendentism first cropped up in Handke's work as one of Filip Kobal's ancestors is said to have been in the 1986 THE REPETITION.

I now feel easier with the stylization in act IV of the Fasanen/ Partisanen biz. The Slovene who uses the word "Fasanen" here does not appear to know that that was the appellation for over-decorated Nazi Bigwigs. However, I have more problems than before with what is called "Klartext" at the beginning of Act IV, which is anything but. Why does Handke suppress the Anschluss and not at least mention Austrian enthusiasm for it? Not to mention the theft of Jewish property, especially in Vienna. Calling it "forced" here at the beginning of Act IV. Does the now "staatstragende" wonder-poet not want to offend the Obrigkeiten? Also, Austria's giving itself the airs after WW II of being a "victim" goes entirely unmentioned. Some "Klartext"! No wonder the "ich" claims that speaking in those terms makes him tired.

Yes I think, Ursula/Snowchick's and Gregor/Appleboy Jonathan stylized presentation of their "Fasanen" life is as evocative as stylization can make it. So much for that for now.

What, however, also bothers me more than ever is the mother going off to Germany to look for the father of her love child, and leaving the love child behind! The falsification of Handke's own origins would/ could have been avoided by picking an entirely typical family - however, Handke - the way he works I think - would not have felt intimately to the proceedings as he needs to for his art! for him to breathe self into it! So he ends in a quandary. The mother might have had a day job with the "svabi", as the Romans already called the Germans in a Region larger then Schwaben a couple of thousand years ago. Why does she need to be away at all? What dramatic purpose does that serve, except possibly to emphasize her love for the German? But here she is leaving two years after giving birth, and in the middle of a war! If she stayed, Gregor can still push that pram! The grandparents would not have had reason to feel quite as bereft, true. But the mother might have had reason not to join the "Fasanen" because she needs to take care of her "love child" , she might, however, have been presented, with a German lover, as being interestingly torn?? Between helping her sister Ursula and favorite brother... and ...?
Handke does not really indicate that this German was a member of the Army.

A FURTHER ADDITION TO PART IV AUGUST 30

Alas, one more long long note about Act IV of Handke's STURM.
What is the flaw that ruins this piece for me? With such great first
two acts, and a fine 3rd Act. At this point I have even made
my peace with the stylization of the first two thirds of Act IV. If one were to introduce the photographs
and filmic elements that the piece refers to this would be a wonderful section to do that.Old grainy WW II stuff, too. However, it is by page 124 when Gregor/Jonatan starts
up with his "we have won speech"
I feel embarrassed, this really is the crudest of AGIT PROP.
You might say, to put it simply: by ACT IV it is clear that there is no Hamlet in this piece, or rather: no HAMLETINA. Is there a Lear left at the end, the end of ACT V?

And how easily there might have been if Handke's character had
not come into play. Old Ezra pointed out that artists ultimately
live and die by their character. Our great virtuoso genius Peter
Handke - we have come to praise Caesar, for all his gifts
for PUBLIC INSULT, KASPAR,
for RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE,
the ultimate inversion of a boulevard play

especially for WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES which has ALL OF HANDKE IN IT ALSO HIS VERY DARK SIDES,
for the sheer genius of THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER
for VOYAGE BY DUGOUT: THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR
for a nearly endless supply of of lessons in how to write
for SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWELL, LEFT-HANDED WOMAN, THE ESSAY ABOUT THE JUKEBOX, MY ONE YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S BAY, especially for the ending of CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS for what Peter Strasser called Handke'sFREUDENSTOFF
for the latest novel DER GROSSE FALL. but also to point out
some deep flaws, which he is old enough to face. There is all that "ich muss mich stellen", "sie soll sich ihm stellen" in the Saltworks novel KALI and in Morawische Nacht.
He is such a jongleur, even coy.
But he doesn't actually ever "face", he avoids,
perhaps it is because the "Singer Naehmachine" refuses to answer,
however the PsychoPhysiker does answer and he answers now.

You will recall that wonderful scene where the "wonder child"
the "little bastard" is admired in his crib in ACT III...
like the CHRIST CHILD.
THAT is IN the play!
[is there any need for it aside self admiration of course now made in the now time worn form of humor, humor as defense!]

It really is no wonder that Handke had that hugely swollen head,
that was so in love with itself,
what with that oversupply of narcissistic goodies as of intra-uterine. He actually writes about some of these matters
as though he had been analyzed, not that one needs to be to have
those memories of lying under a loving heart. But also a depressed
heart that that had been abandoned by the love of its life.
Thus Handke's anlehnende/ analclytic depression.
That the mother merely hints at, an audience would
never notice her equivocation.

The "mother's signature", Dr. Bernard Bail's very major
contribution to the armature of the Psycho-Physikers!

http://www.holisticpsychoanalysis.com/

Maria Sivec his mother provided herself with a husband for the
the little bastard, who never was a bastard child. That husband was
the name-giving Bruno Handke, a very good looking fellow when
young. Maria had all that love in her, the love of her life would not
leave his wife and children for her. She married a surrogate....
who turned out to be a monster, perhaps the war and being wounded
turned him into a monster, brought out the monstrousness in him.
No one in Griffen it appears seems to have heard of divorce,
of separation. As we now know she killed herself at the prospect of his return, in 1971, from a sanatorium.

http://www.holisticpsychoanalysis.com/

Not only the mother's but that of all significant figures to whom we are exposed, e.g. Bruno Handke, the man Maria Sivec

married, as a surrogate, another German soldier, neither he

nor Maria's marriage appear in the play. There is the flaw, the avoidance. Maria, married to a German soldier would be Hamletina, wouldn't she? Torn! And, does the "ich" change as it creates this mis en scene ad- but also inadvertently?

I could tell you stories about myself, but this is not the place and time.

How does all this enter this play and Act IV:
it enters it in the following fashion
Handke has his mother appear, there are these exchanges, first with her
as a young country girl, then as a jazzed up city girl -
Handke is writing drama,
half-autobiographical recourse he takes,
in sharp strong strokes, he gets the basics down, he knows his craft,
The ground for the turn into the a PARTISANEN STUECK is also well
though more subtly laid in the first three acts:after all, the "ich" is looking back, he has these time capsule views 1936, then 1942-44 - Handke regards his life in installments of seven year stretches - vide WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, the opening, also if you regard his entire oeuvre,
it transpires in 7 year periodicities -

and then all tension goes poof! The play becomes flat!

http://www.holisticpsychoanalysis.com/

Another go around with ACT V and then perhaps I/ we
will be done.

Part V
p. 134-165

Itself consists of five parts and illustrate Handke's mastery as your ultimate weaver bird, the way he segues and makes fittings, both small and large, what a master carpenter he is and how he wraps everything together, times past and present, major qualities, a sad waltz into a weltschmerz polka, in defiance of the ever increasing weight of history. First Gregor and his nephew "I" discourse about the end of WW II, the 8th of May 1945, and Gregor waxes rhapsodic about the beauty of Carinthia now that he is a civilian again, and a liberator; but a short-lived liberation it was to be courtesy of supra-national and then national Austrian geopolitical monstrosities, and soon enough Gregor curses and for a while I thought, on first reading of Section V, that
I was locked in a rant, however, it subsides, there is an extraordinary scene where the mother appears and confronts the narrator "I" with his youthful selves and appears to show him his limits [certainly not his linguistic limits, which appear boundless], there is the derisive polka and a beautiful quiet fade out. Words fail us on thinking on how unlikely it is that this piece will ever be put on the English language stage.

Notes & Comments & Critique

1] Since FOREVER STORM is also a historical drama, set within a very specific historical context that has its consequences in the now of the existence of the Slovenian population of Carinthia, and since Handke in several ways sketches and nails down the historical context - as a kind of mish-mash, which I adore!, but also as what he calls KLARTEXT - objective reporting, narrative as you might encounter it in a history book - I miss mention of two hugely important features: [a] the l938 Anschluss which was greeted so jubilantly by the now again large Austria, part of Grossdeutschland; and [b] any mention during post WW II of Austria's claim to have been as much of a victim of Hitler and Nazism as the rest of Europe. Perhaps these matters are self-understood or evident to an Austrian or German audience, they certainly would not be to the rest of the world; and an English language edition would do well with an appendix for these two major and some minor matters. At any event, Handke's going into the nitty-gritty of the how and why the Slovenian minority got shafted after WW II despite its having been the only actual only partisan opposition within the greater Reich may pass the reader and listener by and may need to be telescoped, or have another minority substituted for an English and probably other foreign language productions. The WELT THEATER becomes very parochial theater here, and perhaps the play ought to have premiered in Klagenfurt instead of at the Salzburg Festival. It turns out that the Klagenfurt theater has no relationship to Handke texts. Its art director talks about plays as "products."

1] Locating the family in the borderland between Austria and Slovenia and introducing a fair amount of Slovenian, then translated, might seem problematic from the standpoint of putting the play on in English, an adaptation into Mexican for the family and the language would drive the thematics of acculturation more powerfully home???

2] Other autobiographical and autobiographical rewritings of Handke's come to mind going back as far as his first novel DIE HORNISSEN and SORROW BEYOND DREAMS and especially its rewriting THE REPETITION; DEL GREDOS, too, has a lot about a Slavic [Sorbian] family and it haunting the heroine. However, what you realize, especially with that kind of familiarity, is the difference between the autobiographical Peter Handke and the "I" that of his narrator director voice in the dream-play FOREVER STORM, especially so if you have written but will need to complete a kind of biography of Handke as I did with DEM HANDKE AUF DIE SCHLICHE

http://www.van.at/see/mike/index.htm 

where Lothar Struck did yeoman's work in grooming some dogs that have slipped into my German. The distinction is very clear and finely drawn, but Handke saying that the "I" in the play is fictional so far has not kept reviewers and commentators from making Handke a descendant of Partisan Belgrad and mashing things up into myth.

3] Yet, even though Handke, correctly, absolutely so, describes the narrator presenter jongleur dreamer "I" of STORM as a "fictional" "I", and since he takes recourse to family history to make his story intimate, and perhaps needs to for the sake of inspiration, closeness, the voyeuristic will - and perhaps are even meant to - draw no amount of silly inferences from drawing parallels between the actual Handke family and the fictional in the best sense here. Handke's family in no way was involved in Partisan activity, by naming one of their sons Hans and with the daughter Maria involved with various German soldiers, the third surviving son, Jure, a right wing Austrian after the war, may even have been on the way to acculturation and assimilation, as has happened in that forever someone's province in no end of directions over thousands of years.

Inwiefern dieses Stueck Einblicke in Handke's Familie erlaubt ist zu bezweifeln da es sich um eine dichterisch fantasierte Familie in dem Stueck handelt. Da ist ungeheurlich viel ausgelassen, verdreht und neu reingeschriben. Dieses wahrlich 75% wirklich grosse Stueck erlaubt grosse Einsicht in die DICHTERISCHE PHANTSIE von Peter Handke.

Handke's stepfather, Bruno Handke whom Maria Sivec married when pregnant with the German soldier Schoeneherr's child is never mentioned. Nor does his real father make an appearance. Handke's grandparents only had one daughter. The play needs to be understood within its own terms, not by reference to Handke's biography, no matter that he uses the latter more or less deeply, and tenderly. Although Handke had no "aunt Ursula", a "dark sister", e.g., was demanded by the laws of form, the requirements of the drama. Gregor was killed on the Russian front in 1943. The one surviving brother, Jure, became a right wing Austrian nationalist. The insinuation that the play presents Handke's family might have been avoided, if that is what Handke had really wanted, if he had simply picked a typical Slovenian Carinthian family that really was involved in Partisan activity, as there were no end of them, and the memories appear to be raw, he could still have attributed those of his own chief qualities - grand cursing of existence and of history, a rhapsodic relationship to nature, conejo Valentin, horticulturalist Gregor, Benjamin's nausea which at the end of the play visits the "I" to these characters. However, the play would then not have been the occasion for so much self-celebration on the part of our Genius [and I mean that, I've known that Handke was the real thing since about 1966]. Handke once before installed a wished for father figure, his grandfather, the "Ote", in THE REPETITION within his internal family constellation, but he wishfulfills something more complex here in the form of a dream. And understanding this piece, this dramatic poem, is nearly as complicated as the unraveling of a dream. In this instance, however, we know where the "dream's navel" leads: into Peter Handke - whence it issued and whence he wants us to follow, and I gladly follow, no matter that I wouldn't think of taking Handke with me into the maquis, but leave him behind to run the ministry of propaganda and, as Valentin, to service all the secretaries that each others' hearts desire; whereas entering the maquis of language...he could lead, leads... and he would still get all the girls! For a complete display of each and every quality of Handke, WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES is still the work to read: http://www.ariadnebooks.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=1572410000

One other question that arises is whether this is "Welt Theater" as Lothar Struck has it in a very sympathetic review that you can find towards the end of the assembled reviews at:
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html
is or whether it is the greatest Heimatsstueck ever written by an Austrian, division Kaernten.

Sincerely, Scott Abbott & Michael Roloff,

Legionaires in defense and propagation,

and occasional spanking of Peter Handke.

http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://www.handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/index.html/

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/

http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HandkeDrama?authkey=Gv1sRgCOTfj7uY3emmMw#

lhttps://picasaweb.google.com/106505819654688893791/IMMERNOCHSTURMPHOTOSFOREVERSTORM

A NOTE ON LOTHAR STRUCK'S REVIEW OF

FOREVER STORM

THAT DERIVES FROM A BLOG ENTRY ON STRUCK'S

PIECES ABOUT HANDKE FOR THE

REVISTA-OF-REVIEWS BLOG

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/03/handke-revista-of-reviews.html

I came into contact with Lothar Struck who conducts the "begleitschreiben" blog http://www.begleitschreiben.net/ the successor to

http://search.freefind.com/find.html?si=38697730&pid=r&_charset_=&bcd=%C3%B7&t=s&query=keuschnig

http://search.freefind.com/find.html?si=38697730&pid=r&_charset_=&bcd=%C3%B7&t=s&query=struck

and

http://www.begleitschreiben.net/peter-handke-immer-noch-sturm/

Fiktionalisierungen des Autobiographischen

Gewiss - der Ich-Erzähler, der dem-Wind-Ausgesetzte und Sturm-Erzeugende, ist Peter Handke.

As Struck a while later admits:

Bis auf die Tatsache, dass die junge Mutter mit ihrem Vaterlosen Kärnten verlassen hatte, entfernt sich Handke von der realen Geschichte seiner Familie immer mehr.

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

Struck also errs, significantly, when he writes

I would disagree, Act IV, the Partisanen Section, struck both Scott Abbott and me as stylized Agit-Prop, the air went out of the piece and I speculate about the reasons for that at length at:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

Nonetheless, Struck’s review is one of the few that deserve to be read twice.

A COLLECTION OF ALL GERMAN REVIEWS

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/immer-noch-sturm-still-storm-stormy.html