[In the following review, Grimm dissects Handke's Die Fahrt im Einbaum Oder Das Stuck zum Film vom Krieg plot line and character development, giving the play a negative review.]

Peter Handke's faible for the Balkans, and for Serbia in particular, is well known. In his new book, Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg's (The Voyage in the Dugout or The Piece about the Film on the War), this penchant comes to the fore again, in however veiled or masqueraded a manner.

Handke's “piece” (i.e., play, or alleged play) is equipped with no fewer than three mottoes—from Ivo Andrić, Goethe, and the fourteenth-century laws of King Dušan—all of which are meant to justify his apologetic endeavors. The dramatic action, if indeed that is the proper term, takes place in the lobby of a hotel named “Acapulco,” a legendary building situated in a small provincial town right in the midst of the innermost gorges and mountains of the Balkan peninsula. It is there that two moviemakers, the American John O'Hara and the Spaniard Luis Machado, have met in order to hold tryouts for a film they plan jointly to shoot on the (civil) war that raged in this area—probably Bosnia—a decade ago. One after another, or sometimes together, the prospective actors and (noticeably fewer) actresses for this international film project appear, describing and explaining their respective views of the bloody, murderous, atrocious events they then experienced.

These would-be characters comprise, among others, a guide, a chronicler, a historian, a threesome of “mountainbikers” who are journalists from abroad, but likewise truly indigenous witnesses such as the “Waldläufer,” an exconvict and kind of wild man roaming the woods, or the fabulous beauty queen called “Fellfrau” or “Fellmantelfrau” (since she wears a fur coat). As might be expected, their various testimonies turn out to be highly subjective and conflicting, even plainly contradictory, whether regarding the descriptions they give of those events or the mutual verdicts of guilt they pronounce. In the end, the filmmakers realize that their ambitious project is doomed to founder. Machado states as curtly as explicitly, “Wir werden den Film zum Krieg nicht machen.” Then he adds: “Hier, jetzt aber ist die Zeit aller Schuldigen. Es ist das Land, oder Europa, oder die Welt der Allerschuldigen [!]—nur daß die einen Schuldigen zu Gericht sitzen über die andern.” Hence, not just the Serbs are guilty, according to Handke, but all other nations too, and the latter perhaps even more so, especially through their abuse of the media and because they have the effrontery to sit in judgment upon the former. The author thus arrives at Hobbes's bleak insight, Homo homini lupus, “Der Mensch ist dem Menschen Wolf.” However, he continues: “Das Volk ist dem Volke Wolf.” Which is to say, in Handke's opinion, that either no one or everyone is to be exculpated.

Structurally speaking, Handke doubtless claims that his text forms a drama, or at least a play. It does neither. Die Fahrt im Einbaum lacks both a dramatic plot and convincing character portrayals and could at best be labeled, to vary a definition of Émile Zola's, as a series of monologues raisonnés, albeit by far not so lucid. And as for said “dugout” in the title, it only serves to produce a turbulent and rather ridiculous spectacle toward the end of the “piece,” though having been present and visible onstage from the outset. Supposedly, it is endowed with a mythical, indeed magical quality, for this “Einbaum,” the author assures us, “kann überall fahren, gleitet durchs Geröll, übers Gebirge, schafft im Fahren selber die Tunnels, Paßhöhen, Furten.”

Handke's text, to repeat, is but a series or, more correctly, a conglomerate of statements, pronouncements, and vague proclamations. Furthermore, it is not even wholly original either; it unmistakably betrays certain borrowings from Bertolt Brecht as well as from Thornton Wilder. For instance, the Handkean “reitender Bote” (messenger on horseback) clearly stems from the Three-Penny Opera. More important yet, his Ansager (announcer), who occupies a central position throughout the text, bears a striking resemblance to the stage manager in Our Town. And what of Handke's liberal admixture of foreign words and phrases that sometimes amount to veritable macaronic sentences? Here, for example, is what he has to say about the defenders of a village and their ruthless aggressors: “Die Dorfverteidigung … vastly outnumbered, bald outcounted. Nur noch Tote und Verwundete …, und die Angreifer: hineingefired in die bodies, die Messer hineingeplunged, die Schädel smashed,” and so on.

In short, Die Fahrt im Einbaum constitutes—barely—a lightweight effort within Handke's rich and variegated oeuvre. I seriously wonder if, for his own sake, it should have been published.