[In the following review, Ziolkowski offers a negative assessment of Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise.]

Why did Peter Handke write this little book [Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise]? The controversial work to which it is a “summer supplement”—his Winterliche Reise … oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (1996; see WLT 71:1, p. 147)—had a stated purpose. It amounted to a plea for impartiality and tolerance toward the Serbs, who, Handke believed, were being treated unfairly by the international press. As an inspired travel report, it added a useful piece to the mosaic of that troubled land.

The same cannot be said of this brief new appendix. With the same two Serbian companions and six months after the first trip, Handke now ventures across the Drina River into Bosnia (into which they only gazed previously). The first third of the account is a concentrated repetition of the first trip: Handke corrects a few impressions from his November travels and gets reactions to the earlier work from several of his Serbian interlocutors.

Then they cross the river for one-day forays into Višegrad and Srebrenica. The first destination amounts to an homage to Ivo Andrić, and Handke constantly monitors his own impressions with reference to those of the Nobel Prize-winning Serbian novelist, whose fallen statue lies beside a river bridge. The Sunday visit features Handke's epiphany in a cemetery (the center of social life) and a soccer match. Then the travelers return across the Drina and drive upstream to make their second incursion into Bosnia—this time to a Srebrenica so utterly devastated that it is reduced in Handke's report simply to its initial (“S.”) and portrayed in a series of impressions to which the author attempts to give meaning by designating them as “arabesques.”

The author asks himself, near the end of his report, why he is writing this account. And one wonders. For all of Handke's virtuosity in landscape description, the book contains no revelations or even striking insights. When he talks to a Bosnian Serb accused of war crimes and asks him “Why?” the only response he gets is, “Es sei Krieg gewesen.” Elsewhere Handke stresses that the situation cannot be understood without its historical context (“Vorgeschichte”). Well, of course. But he makes no effort to provide that context.

Has Handke reached that stage in his celebrity that he now believes whatever he says is worth saying simply because he is saying it? Or was he encouraged in this effort by a publisher eager to capitalize on the success of the earlier report? In either case, Handke appears to be perplexed by his own undertaking and, symptomatically, ends with a quotation from Ivo Andrić, who did know what he was talking about.