SOURCE: A review of Die Theaterstücke, in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 3, Summer, 1993, p. 604.

In the following review, Falk assesses Die Theaterstücke and Handke's literary development.

The meteoric ascent of the enfant terrible of the German literary establishment, Peter Handke, commenced in 1966. Only twenty-three years old in April of that year, he openly challenged the elite writers of Gruppe 47, then meeting at Princeton University. Their writing, he maintained, was an impotent literature of mere description; he would investigate all possibilities and types or forms of representing reality, contending that using the same form a second time would offer nothing new to the reader or audience, at best being a variation or unrealistic mannerism.

The iconoclast Handke now set off to demonstrate his revolutionary esthetic for the German theater. Not every play was totally successful, but audiences certainly took special note. Publikumsbeschimpfung was the much-debated sensation when...