Last spring, while many people were outraged over Günter Grass’s admission that he had served in Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS during World War II, Austrian author Peter Handke was attending former Bosnian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s mock state funeral. What Handke had said at the funeral is debateable, but one thing is clear: Handke was a supporter of Milosevic, saying that, during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Milosevic was “defend[ing] his country’s territory” and that “anyone in his position” would have done as he had done. But the larger, more difficult question is whether or not writers with questionable political leanings should be forgiven or, in Handke’s case, awarded.

As the 1990s began, it seemed as though Handke would soon he capping his career with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Indeed, when his compatriot [Elfriede] Jelinek won her Nobel in 2004, she said that Handke deserved it much more than she did—and she may have been right. The Swedish Academy had cited Jelinek for “her extraordinary linguistic zeal” for revealing “the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” If that was the standard the Nobel jurors sought, Handke should indeed have been their man. But by 2004, Handke had for more than a decade been involved with Slobodan Milosevic and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Those political engagements were to prove his literary undoing.

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But whatever his literary achievement, nothing can minimize the effect on Handke’s legacy of his connection with Milosevic. In commenting on Handke and the Heine Prize controversy, Günter Grass remarked: “What I dislike about the current discussion is the double standard, as if you could grant writers the right to err as a special kind of favor. I have a hard time with granting writers a kind of bonus for genius which excuses their partisanship for the worst and most dangerous nonsense.”