Travelogue, Peter Handke and the Image of the Balkan Region

Authors:

Pages: 235-244
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/ESCY7384

Abstract:

A travelogue, also called a travel journal, is a record of the traveller’s experiences written his/her journey and later edited for publication. It is a literary-scientific genre that includes subjective notions, comments and thoughts of the traveler. The Austrian author Peter Handke is very skillful in this genre and describes Serbia and the Balkan region from a different angle, which is contrary to the Western view and the stereotypes of Balkan people. Handke’s work is confronted with newspaper articles that report in a distorted way the events in former Yugoslavia, which makes the author a media target. He devotes an entire opus of his work to Serbia and the Balkan region, which includes eight books, of which four belong to the travel genre. This paper analyzes Handke’s four major travelogues as one large travel narrative of the former Yugoslav realm. Analyzing these travelogues, particular attention is paid to Handke’s description of landscapes, his observations of war and his portrayal of the media. He presents a different picture of the Balkan region and in his travelogue provides a harmonious picture of this area. This motif of harmony and search for peace can be found in all of his travelogues, so he can rightly be given the title, which in an ironic way was attributed to him by the Western media, the author of peace.

Keywords:

travelogues, Balkanism, Western media, Yugoslavia, otherness

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