SOURCE: “Words and Serbs,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 1996, p. 29.

In the following review, Timms finds shortcomings in Handke's criticism of Western media coverage of the Balkan war in Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina.

Peter Handke made his name in the 1960s through a critique of received ideas, deconstructing the cliché transmitted by education and the media in dazzling disquisitions like Selbstbezichtigung (Self-Indictment) and Publikumsbeschimpfung (Insulting the Audience). In his most recent book, he returns to these themes with a vengeance, focusing on the distortions arising from media coverage of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Eine winterliche Reise is an account of a journey in Serbia at the end of 1995, especially of the way the media have falsified perceptions of the war by casting the Serbs exclusively in the role of “aggressors” and emphasizing the sufferings of the Bosnian Muslims...