In a new letter, the Swedish Academy, trying to justify its choice of Peter Handke for the Nobel Prize for Literature, endorses a 24-page memo from his publisher. But the memo is filled with deceptions about Handke's books on the Bosnia war. Here’s the academy letter – 
The letter, to Kosovo's ministry of foreign affairs, provides a hyperlink to the memo from @Suhrkamp Verlag. Two weeks ago, I wrote about Suhrkamp's deceptive memo. Here's a copy of it that I posted to DocumentCloud-- documentcloud.org/documents/6543…
My story for @theintercept is linked below but I honestly don't want you to click it right now. What I hope to do in the coming tweets is quickly deconstruct the key falsehoods that the @NobelPrize organization is hoping everyone will fall for. theintercept.com/2019/11/09/pet…
Suhrkamp's memo says "Handke has not denied that crimes against humanity were committed in Visegrad." It quotes a line of his: "according to eyewitnesses many of the victims ... were pushed off the bridge over there, and all on the orders of a young Serbian militia leader."
But when Handke uses the word "eyewitness," it is to question the account's veracity. The full passage, which Suhrkamp does not reproduce, *derides* eyewitnesses, saying they were "exclusively Muslim," wondering why, if they saw atrocities, they were allowed to escape Visegrad.
Here's the full passage in English, with Suhrkamp's selected line in italics. It's worth taking the time to read closely because it shows the bad faith of the organizations that awarded the Nobel Prize to Peter Handke and are trying now to protect him and their awful decision.
The memo portrays Handke as confirming the atrocities when he writes the victims were killed "all on the orders of a young Serbian militia leader." But in the full passage, Handke questions whether a single young militia leader could have committed so many atrocities on his own.
Here's how my story explained this deception from Suhrkamp:
Suhrkamp, now backed by the Swedish Academy, quotes a single line in which it seems, without context, that Handke is confirming atrocities. But within the context of the full passage that's *not* reproduced, Handke is doing the exact opposite, throwing doubt on the atrocities.
This is stunning. The organization that selects the Nobel Prize for Literature is giving its explicit support to an obvious distortion that seeks to cover up Handke's persistent downplaying and denial of mass atrocities in Bosnia. And there's even worse in the Suhrkamp memo.
The memo states that Handke has not denied that prison camps existed. But that's never been the question about his disturbing views on the camps in Bosnia. Here's what Suhrkamp says in its memo:
In his books, Handke performs a trick – he says of course there were camps, all sides had them. But that misses, intentionally, the most important fact: the Serb camps were monstrously larger, often lethal, and clearly systemic (as war crimes trials proved). From my story:
Suhrkamp’s memo criticizes stories I’ve written on Handke (I covered the war in Bosnia back in the 1990s, so I’m interested in efforts to deny its nature). Am I misreading its memo? German news outlets have criticized it, too.
Der Tagesspiegel wrote, “In its entirety, it is a problematic endeavor. Many of the Handke quotes are torn from their context.” Frankfurter Allgemeine asked whether the memo “will enter literary history as an act of heroism or an act of villainy.”
With this new letter, it’s no longer a matter of Handke’s publisher trying to deceive us about what he has written. The Swedish Academy has now endorsed these falsehoods. It’s genocide denial in real time from the Nobel Prize organization.
A final note: this is the fourth letter to emerge from the Swedish Academy to groups in Bosnia and Kosovo. I did not find this letter, by the way – it was first posted by @abithoxha (kudos to him, please). Here’s my thread about the three other letters –
@abithoxha If anyone from the Swedish Academy, @NobelPrize, @Suhrkamp -- or elsewhere -- wishes to contact me, my DMs are open, my email is peter.maass@theintercept.com, and for securer contact via SecureDrop or Signal, here’s @TheIntercept’s guide -- theintercept.com/source/
