The meteoric ascent of the enfant terrible of the German literary establishment, Peter Handke, commenced in 1966. Only twenty-three years old in April of that year, he openly challenged the elite writers of Gruppe 47, then meeting at Princeton University. Their writing, he maintained, was an impotent literature of mere description; he would investigate all possibilities and types or forms of representing reality, contending that using the same form a second time would offer nothing new to the reader or audience, at best being a variation or unrealistic mannerism.

The iconoclast Handke now set off to demonstrate his revolutionary esthetic for the German theater. Not every play was totally successful, but audiences certainly took special note. Publikumsbeschimpfung was the much-debated sensation when it opened as the centerpiece of the “Experimenta 66” drama festival at Frankfurt’s Theater am Turm in June 1966. In subsequent years it seemed to be included in the repertory of most theater groups; the Forum Theater in Berlin, for example, performed it several thousand times in the next two decades.

In the fall of 1966 the Sprechstücke (speech plays) Weissagung and Selbstbezichtigung premiered at the Oberhausen Theater Festival. Here Handke created a “theater of immediacy” which concentrated on the theatrical event itself rather than offering a “theater of mediation” with a story, plot, or ideological message. Other Sprechstücke followed in rapid succession: Hilferufe at Oberhausen in 1967, Kaspar in 1968 and Das Mündel will Vormund sein in 1969, both at Frankfurt’s TAT, and Quodlibet in January 1970 at the Komödie in Basel.

Handke's initial investigation of the possibilities of the theatrical event was concluded with the highly successful and distinguished 1971 premier production of Der Ritt über den Bodensee, directed by Claus Peymann at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. Thus, in less than five years, the opponent of the naturalist theater tradition and Brecht’s epic theater demonstrated how language can actually establish law and order on spontaneity and illustrated how the theatrical event can make audiences “more attentive, keen on hearing, and wide awake.”

Having completed his linguistic and dramaturgic experiments in the early 1970s, Handke turned his attention in prose writing to an investigation of the conceivability of achieving self-realization in a society that is dominated by repression, habit, and a privation of true feelings. Die Unvernünftigen sterben aus premiered in 1974 in Zürich and concentrated on the mode of existence in an industrial society. Über die Dörfer, which was first performed at the Salzburg Festival in 1982 and directed by the filmmaker Wim Wenders, is a long “dramatic poem,” a mystery play with virtually no action. However, as compared to Strindberg’s Dream Play and Handke's prose works of that time, this drama is a document of a piety which attempts to survive and advance from a personal experience to a prophecy, “a moment of true feeling.”

The last two plays, Das Spiel vom Fragen oder Die Reise zum Sonoren Land (1990) and Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wuβten (1992), premiered at Vienna’s distinguished Burgtheater with considerable acclaim. Handke seems to be returning to his earlier experiments in the theater, but now on a much more complex philosophical and sophisticated level worthy of a distinguished member of the German literary establishment. Readers and theatergoers can only anticipate further plays with great expectations from this “Ivory Tower Dweller.”