Peter Handke

Small Town Austria


No one had anything to say about himself; even in church, at Easter confession, when at least once a year there was an opportunity to reveal something of oneself, there was only a mumbling of catchwords out of the catechism, and the word 'I' seemed stranger to the speaker himself than a chunk out of the moon.  If in talking about himself anyone went beyond relating some droll incident, he was said to be 'peculiar.'  Personal life, if it had ever developed a character of its own, was depersonalized except for dream tatters swallowed up by the rites of religion, custom, and good manners; little remained of the human individual, and indeed, the word 'individual' was known only in pejorative combinations.



Clinical Poverty


And so the have-nots obediently bought soap with the money provided for that purpose by the progressive authorities.  As paupers, they had shocked the official mind with repulsive, but for that very reason palpable, images; now, as a reclaimed and cleansed 'poorer class,' their life became so unimaginably abstract that they could be forgotten.  Squalid misery can be described in concrete terms; poverty can only be intimated in symbols.





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