For a volume in honor of my late colleague at Vanderbilt, Hans Schulz, I have just finished an essay on “Language as the First Casualty of War.” A few excerpts here:
. . . Like all plays, this one is made up of words and sentences and syntax and grammar. Immer noch Sturm is also about language. Repeatedly, as in the oddities of the first sentence, the play asks a reader to consider the play on two levels: to follow the characters and their interactions while thinking simultaneously about the language that is their substance. References to language like Gregor’s “Unsere Sprache, unsere Macht. Jenseits der Sprache bricht die Gewalt los,” and there are many of them, heighten this awareness. They also require interpretation. What, then, does this play say about language?
The Slovenian language spoken by a Slovenian minority in southern Austria is threatened by the occupying Germans (as previously by German-speaking Austrians) and Gregor, about to join the Slovenian partisans, tells the narrator that after the war they will be “Frei vor allem, unsere Sprache zu sprechen” (125). This hope, voiced throughout the play, is hope for a language, for the local language, for the Slovenian language. Although the play takes this specific instance as a catalyst, the Slovenian language is not the ultimate focus. Rather, as the speakers of a minority language discuss their threatened linguistic situation, each from a distinct viewpoint, the eight interlocutors play out a dialectical investigation into the possibilities of language in the contexts of war and peace.
There are several layers of discussion. The grandfather and the narrator’s mother prefer a simple, direct language that grounds them in their landscape and in their rural customs. Gregor joins them in this preference at times. Valentine argues for a cosmopolitan existence opened up by multiple languages. As partisans, Ursula and Gregor take up a politicized discourse in support of their aims. And the narrator, the teller of this tale about language, tries to be an historian but prefers the language of the stage.
. . .
All the various and sometimes competing threads of thought about language are reprised in the play’s fifth act. Gregor speaks passionately about the language and society he envisions after the war, about a utopia in which the names of the Jaunfeld are simple, in which the landscape is free and without threat, in which things are just things: “Und die Heuharfen hier werden nichts als Heuharfen sein. Und der Dachboden der Dachboden” (138-139). . . . Empty assertions of meaning, redundancies raised to prophecy, metaphors whose character as metaphors has been forgotten—this is where insistence on “Natur-Sprache” (88) leads when unchallenged by other forms of language. The metaphor-free state Gregor hopes for is impossible to uphold, and soon Gregor is speaking again about power: “Unsere Sprache, unsere Macht” (140).
The narrator follows Gregor’s hopeful, if conflicted speech with snippets of postwar history delivered in a voice meant to be that of a radio host—another attempt at speaking Klartext. Gregor comments cynically on the stuttered account of reestablished oppression: “Wehe dem Volk, nicht wahr, welches Geschichtsvolk wird. . . . Ach, Geschichte. Ah, Leben. Aus der Geschichte lernen? Ja, die Hoffnungslosigkeit” (152). The narrator is not satisfied with this historical cynicism, however, and asks a key question: “Aber kann die Geschichte nicht auch eine Form sein, und Form heißt Frieden?” Gregor finds that ridiculous: “Fehlt nur, daß du mit der Weltseele kommst.” The narrator posits another possible time and another possible place (as he did to begin the play). Gregor finds that silly: “Du und deine andere Zeit. Es ist aus mit der” (153).
The narrator of Handke’s Eine Winterliche Reise faces a similar disdainful response after arguing that for peace there is something not less important than the facts of the war: “Kommst du jetzt mit dem Poetischen?” Yes, he answers, “wenn dieses als das gerade Gegenteil verstanden wird vom Nebulösen. Oder sag statt ‘das Poetische’ besser das Verbindende, das Umfassende” (133). Immer noch Sturm is itself an example of a poetic form that connects, that includes. The play works to undermine the either/or exclusivities of the “Natur-Sprache” and of the Klartext while including them both in a dialectical multilingual conversation connected by the conjunction “und.”
During his utopian musings, Gregor begins a litany of things common to the Jaunfeld: “Motten und Blutegel. Blei und Glimmer. Wasserläufer und Kuhmist. Meßkelch und Hühnerleiter. . . .” The narrator joins in with additions of his own: “Maiandachten und Totenglocken. Waldbunker und Fliegenpilze. Blaue Arbeitshosen und rote Auferstehungsmäntel. Fastentücher und Hakenkreuze. Holzschuhe und Mausefallen. . . .” (161). Hakenkreuze? The Nazi symbol disrupts the idyllic list, but in a way it is little different from the Meßkelch or the Auferstehungsmäntel. The untroubled and sustaining things of rural life—mushrooms and work clothing—exist alongside symbols and ritual objects that structure rural life. When those symbols promise power, however, someone needs to say Hakenkreuz!. Heimat has a history and it has not always been pretty.
. . .This essay began with Thomas Assheuer’s claim that Immer noch Sturmis a work of “Sprachnationalismus.” That would be true if the play were about a pure and good Slovenian language as opposed to the evil German/Austrian language, if it were about small-town farmers who say the words “Huhn” and “Ziegenmilch” and “Lederhosen” and thus prove that they are authentic human beings. If the play is about a minority Slovene population that fights bravely in the Resistance against German-speaking Nazis, then it’s a play by someone other than Peter Handke. But if the play is about a complex and conflicted family of Slovenian speakers on the periphery of German-speaking society and thus in a position to raise some interesting questions about language, then Mr. Assheuer has proven that he cannot read.