Wunschloses Unglück

Peter Handke was born on December 6, 1942, in Griffen (Carinthia). His maternal family belongs to the Slovenian minority in Austria; his father, a German, came to Carinthia as a result of World War II. Between 1954 and 1959, he attended high school in Tanzenberg and the associated boarding school. After graduating in 1961, he studied law in Graz. In March 1966, after Peter Handke dropped out of his studies before the final exam, his first novel "The Hornets" was published. In the same year, his now legendary play "Offending the Audience" was staged in Frankfurt under the direction of Claus Peymann. Since then, he has written more than thirty stories and prose works, including "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" (1969), "The Short Letter for the Long Goodbye" (1971), "The Left-Handed Woman" (1976), "Slow Homecoming" (1979), "The Lesson of Sainet-Victoire" (1981), "The Chinese of Pain" (1983), "The Repetition" (1986), "My Year in No Man's Bay" (2004), "The Loss of Image" (2002), and "The Moravian Night" (2008). Following "Offending the Audience," "Kaspar" was also premiered in Frankfurt in 1967. From there, the span extends to "The Ride Across Lake Constance" (1970), "The Unreasonable Are Dying Out" (1973), "The Game of Questions or The Journey to the Sonorous Land" (1988), "The Hour When We Knew Nothing of Each Other" (1991), "Underworld Blues" (2002), and "Until the Day Separates You" (2008), culminating in the grand epic "Still Storm," which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in August 2011 and won the Mülheim Dramatist Prize in 2012, as well as the summer dialogue "The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez" (2012). Additionally, Peter Handke has written many prose works.