When two special fools tell stories

Nobel Prize in Literature Peter Handke dedicates his new book “Zwietalk” to the actors Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander

The boundary between stage text and narrative is fluid in Peter Handke’s work. His new book is called “Zwietalk” and the title already indicates the dramatic character of this prose. “Zwietalk” is dedicated to two great actors, Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz. Handke’s dialogue, performed by Ganz and Sander, can only be imagined as an outstanding stage event. But both have been dead for years.

From the outset, this gives this “dialogue” a melancholy character of transience and lost time. The two sympathetic characters who lead the dialogue remain nameless. They are reminiscent of Estragon and Wladimir in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, childish, whimsical, not quite from this world. “We are two special fools, each in his own way,” says one, and the other agrees. In Handke’s work, the jester is mostly a positive figure, humorous about life, wise in a strangely naive way. In the “dialogue” the first jester tells of his childhood memories of a visit to the theater. The play has long been forgotten, but not the decoration, “a house in the background of the stage”, tied to the child’s unfulfilled expectation that a unique person must now emerge from this house.

In the case of the first fool, this childhood experience solidified into an archetype that accompanies him throughout his life. Again and again houses attract his attention, rather inconspicuous “dwellings”, for example a field barn in which a man and a woman whisper to each other in a foreign language, or a small house in the middle of a cemetery. The second fool is fixated on the grandfather theme. It seems to him that his generation often idealized their grandfathers in order to clear their complicity in Nazi crimes. However, he has given up the plan to talk about it, especially since his own picture of his grandfather does not fit into this interpretive framework.

A masterpiece, but too short

The anger of the grandfather, who beat animals and walled hornets in their nest, was actually aimed at the “murder monster with no name” responsible for the “heroic deaths” of his sons. The form of communication used by the fools in “Zwietalk” is just as noteworthy as the content: their encouragement of the interlocutor to tell their story; their willingness to listen, to question, and to tolerate repetition. Both seem to know each other’s story so well now that they could switch roles.

If there’s one objection to Peter Handke’s little masterpiece, it’s brevity. The life themes of the two fools are simply too sketchy in this condensed form.

• Peter Handke: “Dialogue”, Suhrkamp, ​​72 pages, 18.50 euros
  OÖN rating: 5 out of 6 stars