Peter Handke and an invitation to dance and play with death

A swan song. A farewell gesture. A brief letter – a missive from this world – for a long farewell. A requiem whilst still alive. Moriturus te salutat. A superstitious, apotropaic, propitiatory gesture. A game of chess with death. To put it in check? “Or perhaps not”. In any case, a game, with its own bizarre rules. No running, only sidestepping; walking backwards to look forwards. A wild yet graceful ballet performed – and to be performed – in the falling snow. Peter Handke’s latest work, two-faced right from the title – “Schnee von gestern, Schnee von morgen”, “Schnee von gestern, Schnee von morgen” – presents itself to the reader, the listener, the spectator – “to those who care”, as a recurring dedication in many of his books put it – as an invitation: to take part, to dance, to play the game. A challenge? A provocation? Not at all. The days of “Insults to the Audience”, those of his early years, are long gone. And the elderly gentleman – who will turn 84 next December – who has never been courteous, haughty, accommodating or ceremonious, except in jest or out of a sincere and solemn love of celebration, has, with age, a tone of smiling, benevolent seriousness; of a severity tempered by indulgence; of a gravity that is absorbed (always), defenceless (often), seasoned with gentleness and ready to turn into light-heartedness. To dance, precisely.

But what is this book? A short story? A play? A monologue? A diary? A confession? A prayer? It is all these things and none of them. What else could that great breaker of genre boundaries have done, at the height of his life and career, but compose a – polyphonic, long-resonating – score? ‘It is,’ reads the subtitle – explaining everything and nothing – ‘the becoming of sound, the becoming of voice of one who wanders far and wide, heard in his moments of pause’. And what does this man, who wanders and digresses (never along a linear path), say when he halts his movement?

Let us return to the hypotheses listed above. Pray? Yes, in the spirit of ‘the layman’, ‘the fool’, of a worshipper who ‘continues to stammer’ and, invoking ‘most holy abandonment’, ‘most holy bitterness’, ‘blessed nonetheless’, or at every turn, or throughout the hour – that is, in the meantime, whilst, the divine during, whilst, in the meantime that…, he asks ‘spare me hope’. Does he confess, repent, face a day of reckoning? Yes, but when it comes to drawing conclusions, at the moment of reckoning, he falls silent, breaks the thread, fails to solve the equation: “My greatest mistake, right from the start… I can’t remember it any more”, “my greatest flaw is… yes, which one?” As for a diary – as convention and tradition would have it – it is expected to be a personal account recorded day by day by someone recounting their own affairs, events and emotions, drawing on their daily life and inner world – yet this has neither the tone nor the intention of one. It never has. “From my inner self, not to say my innermost being, there is nothing left to draw upon”, nothing to extract or bring out, declares in this singular text the author of thirty thousand pages of notebooks, the Notizbücher, an endless inventory of snapshots bearing no date (apart from their publication dates) and marking, if anything, the passing of ‘the other time’, die andere Zeit*. From those notebooks – partially digitised and accessible to anyone: a titanic undertaking by the literary archives of Marbach and Vienna – and from the notebooks of notes, "Neve" draws upon certain striking, highly original phrases.

Like the authoritative pronouncement of the eleventh commandments to be carved – numbering them all with the same odd number exceeding the Decalogue – on a previously unseen tablet of the law: “Here is another eleventh commandment: never bat an eyelid, ever again”, “And yet another eleventh commandment: be an unwitting participant”, and then yet another: “let yourself be swept along in silent amusement through the spaces of the world”. Or like the beautiful redundancy with which one invokes an ideal, overlooked and neglected simply because no one had ever thought of it: ‘the murmur of a people in the voice of a single individual: the ideal’ or, a sublime communal and social aspiration, ‘hospitality, the warmth of welcoming others: my first ideal of community, and the last one I have left’, or the heavenly giggles of children, the way they skip along: ‘ideal’… And like those two or three fleeting glimpses in which one catches, on the fly, the exact moment when the day becomes day: “when the other becomes my other”, “when benevolence comes into play”, “when daylight becomes substance, becomes ripe for the story…” The day: an incalculable unit of measurement, non-chronological, yet dense, concrete, decisive, vital for the author of the “Essay on the Successful Day”, the Hesiodic “The Days and the Works”, or the motto which, by turning Pliny the Elder and Apelles on their heads just as Hesiod was turned on his head, becomes for Handke “nulla linea sine die”. And then there is the surprising play – for it holds a surprise every time – with comparatives, intensifiers and climaxes, with the logical structure of the sentence (cases, complements), and with the slightest variations (a comma, a capital letter, an adverb) that overturn the meaning of the statement: a transformed echo of the young ‘formalist’ Handke who, for example in "The Inner World of the Outside of the Inside", played with grammar and revealed its secret poetry. And then there are the quotations: they come thick and fast, a real delight, from Goethe, Hölderlin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Anton Chekhov and Dimitri Analis, from von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Kaspar Hauser, from Homer and Rousseau, from the Bible and the Gospel, from children’s songs and nursery rhymes, from 1950s pop hits… ‘For the sake of time, for the sake of time, no one has time for love any more.’ Hidden quotations, as always, cryptic, to be recognised, to be unearthing or—never mind—what does it matter to discover them? Let those with ears understand, and for the rest, let the rhythm, the sequence, the flow, the wit suffice; that there is a wink is evident; what matters is to catch the glance. ‘To quote is already to rewrite,’ said the masters, from Wittgenstein to Barthes, and that is precisely what the Nobel laureate does. Even with horoscopes, whether invented from scratch or translated from the pages of Le Parisien – which the Austrian, the hermit of Chaville, in the suburbs of Paris, reads in the Hauts-de-Seine departmental edition – : cheap predictions which, when quoted and woven into the fabric of his own narratives, become advice sent from the heavens, messages arriving directly from the stars: “Today you’ve lost your way on the moon, but try to bear in mind what really matters”, “Infuse your actions with a drop of imagination”, “Your demons are returning…”, “Don’t give in to the temptation to throw everything into disarray”…

This eternal refrain of commandments, ideals, astrological prophecies, authoritative pronouncements for the use of the delphini; these expressions, phrases, highly stylised stylistic features, headings and subheadings that give rhythm to the narrative and are, in a way, the digital fingerprint, the heartbeat of Handke’s latest writing, do not serve to define a structure amidst the swirling snowfall of his latest work. If anything, they mark its pace, signalling the moments—numerous and relentless—in which the wayfarer in question, the one who proceeds in a zigzag, as the heading forewarned, stops and raises his voice.

So is it a monologue, then? Not at all. As in other recent works by Handke written from the heart – “Zwiegespräch” (“Dialogue”) and “Innere Dialoge an den Rändern” (“Inner Dialogues on the Margins”) – there is someone who challenges him and responds. A doppelgänger, a counterpoint, a sidekick, an alter ego: a Jiminy Cricket and a devil’s advocate, someone who knows more than the devil himself and, both an accomplice and a nuisance, interrupts him, contradicts him, and pins him down on his obsessions. “The only thing missing is for you to say…” “You’re not the only one!” “And isn’t that what you’ve always done…” “Just wait and see!”… So it’s clear: there’s a scene, the lines of two characters; it’s a one-act play, the script for a theatrical drama. Wrong, again. There’s no rough draft or script, no assigned lines; we don’t know who the characters are and, please, “this isn’t the time to make a drama out of it here”, the author warns, “the drama—that’s already here; it’s been going on for a while, step by step, right from the start”.

Someone, however, gave it a go – and succeeded brilliantly. In defiance of the author’s recommendations – no drama, there is nothing but the ‘endless sentimental melodrama of life’, let’s play down the song of the end – they brought ‘Neve di ieri, neve di domani’ to the theatre. At the world premiere, at the end of July, against the backdrop of the Salzburger Festspiele, the Salzburg Theatre Festival, the audience, at the end of the performance, greeted Handke – who was present in the auditorium – with over a quarter of an hour of ovations and applause, whilst he, bewildered and moved, took off his Borsalino hat and waved his walking stick at the audience. A threat? some suggested. Nonsense – he had both hands full, and that’s his gruff yet good-natured way of showing affection. The subsequent performances were also sold out, just as the Berlin premiere, scheduled for late August at the Berliner Ensemble, has been sold out for some time now. The director, Jossi Wieler, handled it brilliantly, even responding with striking simplicity to the journalistic curiosity of those who, quite understandably, asked, ‘What’s it about?’ ‘The fleeting nature of time, saying goodbye, a private and alienated view of the world, the ironic, self-deprecating acrobatics of a juggler with thoughts’.

And the two acrobats – delicate street performers and jugglers – the actors, Jens Harzer and Marina Galic, gave that voice to be read – an endophasic, introspective voice – the precise resonance that the text, with its key instructions – "to become a voice", "to become sound", "Lautwerden" – called for. He, a youthful version of Bruno Ganz or a posthumous one of Massimo Troisi, evoking in the former the power to shape, to give plastic depth to words, and in the latter the gentleness and melancholic humour. She is an elf, a sprite, an androgynous spirit or the female counterpart of Handke’s soul – an ineffable Pierrette with, instead of a bonnet, a mop of blonde hair styled in a short garçonne cut, and, on her face, a line of mischievous little moustaches drawn in place of a tear. They are perfectly in tune with one another (the two are husband and wife) and deeply attuned to Handke’s text; since, as has been said, there is no division of lines, they have both learnt it by heart: the Suhrkamp edition published in January 2025 is only 74 pages long, it is true, but amplified beyond belief by the reverberations of a thousand echoes and evocations. They also both possess the physical agility required to interpret the text as if dancing. “A pas de deux”: a duet, a ballet to be performed as a pair, as Handke himself emphasises, once again holding it up as an ideal – the ideal ticking of time, his own, the time he still has, the time that still is. He distinguishes between “I have time”, “there is time” and “I have time left”, he writes, formulating three different variations – or modulating the idea into three different keys – an idea that resonates like a basso continuo from one end of the text to the other. It is the low note which – audible yet unheard – accompanies the dancer in his final virtuoso performance. He twirls, circles round her, barely mentions her. To call her by her name brings bad luck. So he lingers, postpones, procrastinates: ‘how I wander, however, in this role – for heaven’s sake, not in the finale, but in an interlude, the one right now’. With the requisite incantations, he lets her sense it, like a whiff, an omen, a fear – never, if anything, a doubt, a question – which is why – perhaps – he has taken a dance partner, and why he speaks aloud to his own reflection even when there is no mirror hanging on the wall. “It’s time. Or is it not? Not yet! No longer? Never again? Or perhaps yes? Better not to know,” sings the ostinato. “Is my dear assassin perhaps lying in wait behind me?” But an ambush, an attack from behind, becomes, for the juggler, an embrace, a presence behind to watch over one’s back. And if you lag behind, it is to give me a push.

There is a crisp, serene, cheerful atmosphere (the same word in German: ‘heiter’) in this farewell scene which the reader, with the luxury of holding the book in their hands, reads through in one go before retracing it more slowly, rereading it more than once: this is a book that will not be put back on the shelf any time soon. There is a mild climate, a clear sky over the snow-covered landscape painted by a Handke who is instantly recognisable yet entirely new. ‘The gamble of a successful life is one you can only lose, man. Yes, lose it with joy.’ There is an invigorating, stimulating, life-giving atmosphere. ‘And what is the point of your endless physical training? To endure the rigours of paradise.’ ‘Joy, where is your sting? You mean your spur… Death, where is your sting?’

Has anyone ever seen anything like this? A writer who, dancing with his pen, leads himself off the stage. Then he watches his character disappear – ‘disappear in style’ – and transforms himself into his own chronicler and narrator. It’s a first. ‘Never again a first!’, thunders Handke. But he immediately changes his mind: ‘Or perhaps yes, another first…’. From that contrarian, who sets the rhythm of his thoughts to the tune of ‘or perhaps not’, ‘the other way round and round again’, all that remains is to expect – or hope for – repeating one of his mantras: once more, one last time, yet another last time, yet once more.