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Another one is on the way.

Initially only in the “main area”, around the “grass-bush-wall remnants-steppe corner” in the old cemetery where he set up camp.

Then, after a short boat trip, over there, in the "other country".

It starts on a working day, but “at the same time, I saw myself step by step on a holiday”.

A “holiday route” must be covered, in compliance with certain rules: “Stay on public roads, tarred or asphalted, with car traffic;

keep away from hiking trails;

Do not use any land, let alone hiking maps, avoid nature, especially the forests and trees, as much as possible, or focus solely on them as a background and distant horizon;

walk for days on the edge of the main arteries under the open sky. "

But in the “other country” there is also someone on a writing trip: “And then once again I picked up a pencil from the side of the road that was nothing but a piece of wood and then a pencil - a thick, strong, old, half-weathered carpenter's or carpenter's pencil , and I to it: 'With a pencil in hand / you can travel across the whole country! ”With pencil in hand, years later, there is also the certainty that what has been experienced, even if it has been lived through“ without consciousness ”, actually comes Is experienced.

Let the words come

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“Without consciousness,” that is the family's version of the state of the person who remembers, for example, that he “on my zigzag path in the middle of town, suddenly mute, only moving his lips silently” on the threshold of a house had settled:

“Now, at my desk in the garden shed, I feel and know myself, decades later, sitting on that granite threshold, and I don't know that either from my sister's stories or from the others.

I know and feel it on my own, only from myself, from deep inside.

And I owe that to the fact that I finally started writing this story;

that I have let come the words that correspond to her;

that a rhythm that accentuates the words has, for the time being at least, set - or at least seems to have set. "

The writing journey on which Peter Handke sends his narrator in his second prose publication since the Nobel Prize is one out of numbness into clarity.

And one from the temporary seclusion back among the people.

This narrator practiced the profession of a fruit grower before, as his sister reports to him, one day he pitched a tent, “a very small one, outside the settlement”.

Indifferent watching

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From now on he roams around, scolding and threatening, in languages ​​that nobody understands.

At the same time he had written a book about fruit growing at a young age, “a mere brochure 'About the three ways to grow espalier trees', but of which the rumor called 'book' was circulating in the village as something foreign to our region, let alone Presumptuous if not asserting power, namely a false, a falsified power ”.

The obsessed will be brought to their senses again by the gaze of a fisherman on the shore of the lake.

“A spectator, a purely accompanying, selflessly participating, amicable… And, truly 'in no time', I got rid of him, the demon;

they drove out of me, the demons. ”When the fisherman turns out to be the sister's lover, the narrator wants to stay with him.

But his Redeemer sends him away across the water to tell his story “in the Decapolis”.

In the ruined city of Kursi (“throne”) he will share supper with strangers for the first time in a long time, meet a stranger who will become his wife and not talk about himself, but rather listen to others: “That would be the moment , would have been the hours to tell them, the strangers in the other country, as instructed to me, my story.

And instead, until midnight, they told me their stories, unasked, not interrupted by any question on my part, wholeheartedly, trustingly, seriously.

But these stories of hers are in another book, can be read, transformed, in other books - yes, you guessed it correctly, mine, no longer dedicated to espalier fruit growing, in the following years. "

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In his "Demon Story", Peter Handke quotes an episode from the Gospel of Mark: A man possessed throws himself in the dust on the shores of Lake Gerasa in front of Jesus.

The Son of God speaks to the evil spirit that torments him and wants to know his name: “My name is Legion”, so the well-known answer, “because we are many.” After Jesus let the tormentors drive into a herd of pigs, which Drowning in the lake himself, this recovered man wants to join his Savior.

But Jesus sends him away, home to the ten cities, to announce there what happened to him.

Also a reading tour

Handke's “Day in Another Land” ends with a dreamlike return home of a different kind. When he returns to his “semi-desert hideaway”, the question arises: “Are you all there?” In Handke's short text, the obsession of the narrator is an ambivalent affair, but it happened in times the "unconsciousness" always a "metamorphosis" as soon as he returned home: According to "the other one, I had hardly entered the area of ​​the former burial ground, which was otherwise hardly recognizable as such, the gentleness became personified ... What sounded was pure Opposite of the days of abuse and threats ".

With such an ambivalent assessment of privacy and publicity, as emerges here, “My Day in Another Land” joins a reflection on the public role of the author Handke, as has been observed since “A Writer's Afternoon” of 1987 and how it became the subject of bitter debates with Handke, the Yugoslavia traveler.

For Peter Handke, writing trips are almost always reading trips to his own work.

His "demon story" is also one on which one can see conciliatory variants of older motifs: The "blind window" at the station building in Mittlern that Filip Kobal interrupts the search for the fruit-gardening, missing brother in "Repetition" (1986), now opens up to the narrator, who is no longer sleepwalking, on his way through the “other country”.

And still reaching for the nettles - in the Srebrenica passage of the "Summer Addendum to a Winter Journey" from 1996, reaction to the indescribable - becomes a "fresh joy of being" and liberation in the "Land of Ten Cities".

Handke's “My Day in Another Land” is definitely a testimony to the fresh joy of being of his author.

And maybe also the testimony of a liberation.

Peter Handke:

My day in the other country.

A demon story.

Suhrkamp, ​​93 pp., € 18.