Kako se kroji(o) Bakan?

Abstract

Handke summed up in his Balkan opus, in a book of essays titled History Behind the Narrative – Essays on Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Prometheus, 2020), which is the subject of analysis as part of this work, concluded that the image of the Balkan, that is being passed on to the world, was already pre-designed by the great Western political powers, starting with group publications on the Yugoslav war, through publications on the 1999 war and the bombing of Serbia, to the depiction of life in Kosovo at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The aim of this work was to find those elements in Handke’s political travel books that confirm the thesis that the presentation of the Balkans in western media was a preconceived concept with the aim of shaping the Balkan (and Serbia) as Other in relation to the West.