ABSTRACT
At the entrance to the hall where a number of important, ‘successful’ contemporary theatre authors have been gathered and arranged in pairs stands the solitary figure of Peter Handke. An older brother from another time, admired for the resoluteness with which he holds on to his idiosyncratic writing and his lifestyle far removed from the theatre industry. As particularly the German theatre of the last few decades often appears loud, indecent, and deliberately rough, and rather wants to destroy a contemplative attitude, we could ask even more helplessly: where is there any space in this theatre for a hesitating consciousness, for Handke’s unsettling way of writing that constantly questions the self and the surrounding world it encounters? Handke’s writing is emphatically and specifically modern in that every word, every sentence, every text begins, time and again, with the probing doubt whether a linguistic ‘form’ could be possible that does justice to the experience of the world.
