Handke, Peter. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia. (Viking, 1997).
A s the only means of disseminating information beyond primary observers, the media has the ability to ingrain views into a whole populace, especially views about societies that are unfamiliar to its audience. Such a capability, when supported by common acceptance, can systematically lend to the persecution of dissenting opinions. In the West, the media's influence has already led to persecution of dissent and to a partial compromise of democracy.
And yet the threat posed by the media cannot be deconstructed as easily as the previous Western menace of fascism. The "consensus" for global justice among Western nation-states and the recent advent of a homogenized and contrived political correctness have facilitated and concealed the media's subtle impositions. Nonetheless, in pushing a small group of "proper" values and conventions, the media has maimed the Western popular consciousness and damaged the notion of individual thought and questioning. Its biases are difficult to notice because, in many instances, they have fully penetrated the Western consciousness.
What to call this phenomenon? "Soft totalitarianism" is one of many terms recently coined by a few French and German critics who oppose the media's hegemony. Among these critics ranks Peter Handke, a popular and influential post-War German intellectual currently living in France. Provocative in his critiques, Handke was recently labeled a "terrorist" and "reactionary romanticist" for his "revolting insinuations" by both left and right in Europe. His latest work, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, completed in December 1995 and published in a variety of European languages last year, has recently appeared in the United States--yet another testing ground for a title and a book which, assuredly, provoke its readers.
To most Westerners, the word "Serbia" most likely suggests bloody massacre, inhumanity, the land of a people who are evil incarnate. This is the impression spread by much of the European (and American) media, and Handke argues that it became predominant because the media--the "Fourth Reich"--hold a firm and seemingly perpetual grasp on society's language. They define our language, and prevent people from developing rational, educated, debated opinions. Handke wants, in A Journey to the Rivers, to instill the importance of questioning into a blind and narrow-minded populace, and to move toward an understanding of the superficial differences which separate human beings from each other and result in ill-informed antagonisms.
To do so, Handke sets out for Serbia to offer an opposing view of the circumstances there, to redress the media's assessment of the underlying circumstances. Ironically, (or perhaps expectedly, exemplifying the phenomenon) his book has been "misread" by many European critics as an apology for the Balkan bloodshed, rather than as a work which aims precisely to denounce "misreading." According to Handke, the predominant preconceptions of the Balkan atrocities implicated an entire people--the Serbs--and vindicated another whole people. This generalized conception ignored the intricacies of war and ethnic confrontation and quelled skepticism, yet it fed a Western mass culture hungry for judgmental criticism.
Handke's journey to Serbia therefore aimed to examine the conditions and the people. He was guided by two Serbian-born friends, and by two ideas. The resulting travelogue is written in light of these ideas, repeated often throughout his work: "What does a stranger know?" and, "I thought and I think." Armed with these mantras, he details a journey to a Serbian countryside replete with suffering, a search to find a way to communicate the need for mutual respect and the understanding of mutual experience. Handke sees himself not as a foreigner, but as a tourist. As a foreigner, he would have entered the land with a set of rigid preconceptions about the Serbs. And although he does go to Serbia with preconceptions, they are of a different sort: he recognizes that the European media rarely print photos of Serbian victims; he goes to Serbia in order to question such biases. Handke emerges with a view of a ravished and sad land, of a people reduced to hopelessness. The Serbs, he reminds us, also fought a war.
His compassionate words do not, however, absolve anyone from the brutal massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Handke never refers to the Serbian government, and his account in no way seeks to offer a new explanation for the Balkan war; war is too intricate for monocausal explanations. His narrative is an account of a people, a Volk. And in it, he denounces an ignorant one-sidedness which has affected our common perceptions of all events which deviate from normal, Western standards--the same one-sidedness that leads Americans to see Peruvian guerrillas as simply terrorists, or hip-hop culture as corrupting and criminal. He points out that debate set around inter-cultural issues is thoroughly silenced: when, if ever, does the mainstream media question the humanity, let alone the accuracy, of our conceptions of other cultures?
A Journey to the Rivers can stand alone as a flowing narrative of a trip into a misunderstood land. Its tone, at once poetic and conversational, presents the reader with a vivid description of the Serbian countryside and a peek into the evolution of unprejudiced assessments--it shows how, through skepticism, conversation, and sympathetic observation, we should learn to resist the truisms of the media and develop our own views.
For Handke, this process leads to an indictment of the Western--especially German and French--media which he has referred to in interviews as a "Fourth Reich." This is the paradox which has received such negative reception in Europe, and which is at the core of Handke's argument: the common critique of Bosnia is inverted, and the media, rather than the Serbian populace, becomes fascist.
Handke studies Serbs for a trace of what motives could have led them to war. The people of Serbia, Handke discovers, are human beings like any others; granted, one should not impose generalizations based on a few observations, but one should also recognize the stupidity in indicting a whole people without evidence, without understanding the roots of the problem, without knowing anything about the Yugoslavian situation except for cold numbers and cold economic considerations.
He emphasizes early on that his view is neither "Yugophile" nor "pro-Serbia." Instead, it is one of constant reflection, of "raising doubts" in order to dispel unjust assessments. Handke writes that he "hadn't seen Serbia as a land of paranoiacs: rather it seemed the huge room of an orphaned, yes, of an orphaned abandoned child." He mentions a Serbian man who, in a moment of passion, railed against the suffering and injustice his "leaders" had foisted on his people, sparing mention of any other governments.
And towards the end of the 83-page narrative, he dismisses any hopes he might have had (but didn't) of acquitting any participant in the war. "How can one comment when one is but a stranger to a foreign land?" he asks. This question provides Handke's argument with the necessary synthesis: he seeks something beyond blame, a way to return to innocence and peace, to work "for reconciliation of individuals, for the second, the common childhood." The "common childhood" is that which we can all share, the basis of the human condition which transcends borders. And although it sounds like a utopian vision of peace, the "common childhood" also suggests something more practical, not only to former Yugoslavs but to Western civilization as a whole: the need to transcend simplistic, one-sided debate, the need to conquer the ubiquitous tendency to blame.
Handke ultimately wants to offer the Serbian people amnesty from the injustices of the Western media, which have fallen into cliché and gross misrepresentation. "Who will someday write this history differently, even if only the nuances--which could do much to liberate the peoples from their mutual inflexible images?" he pleads.
But his is an uphill battle. "What does one know," writes Handke in his introduction, "who, in the place of the thing, sees only its picture, or, as in TV news, an abbreviation of a picture, or, as in the on-line world, an abbreviation of an abbreviation?" In relying on our media's accounts, we often find ourselves acquiescing to all forms of distortion. And to achieve even the most rudimentary understanding, these distortions must be replaced by a thorough skepticism and a relentless willingness to question.