Photo: Massimo Mastrorillo/LUZphoto/Redux

What does it mean to spend a night at the Vilina Vlas hotel? The answer to this seemingly odd question reveals the moral and intellectual collapse of the Swedish Academy, which last month bestowed on Peter Handke the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. Handke is an Austrian-born writer who in his early years produced some remarkable works of fiction and memoir, but since the mid-1990s has promulgated, in a series of thin books, a fringe position on the Bosnia war that amounts to genocide denial. This story is set on the outskirts of Visegrad, in a forest where the Vilina Vlas is located. The hotel has a spa, and ordinarily it would be a tranquil place to stay except for one fact. In 1992, which feels like yesterday to anyone familiar with this story, the Vilina Vlas was turned into a rape camp by Serbs who were cleansing Visegrad of its Muslims and brought girls and women there to violate. The Vilina Vlas is an agonizing landmark. Its horrors were detailed in newspaper articles during the 1990s conflict, followed by war crimes trials in which survivors described the rapes in ghastly testimonies. Rape was a consistent feature of what the Serbs did across Bosnia, and that led to a series of pioneering verdicts on sexual violence from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Although Visegrad’s majority population was Muslim before the war, the Serb project of ethnic cleansing was successful: Muslims were murdered, tortured, raped, and removed from the land where for centuries they had lived. But cleansing does not consist just of getting rid of people — that is only the beginning of the process. It is incomplete at this stage. Another step is the obliteration of meaningful objects: The town’s mosques were dynamited and the rubble carted away. There must be no visual reminders of the people who are gone. There is another step too: the obliteration of memory. After the war, the Serbs who controlled Visegrad reopened the Vilina Vlas as the spa hotel it used to be. Foreign visitors were encouraged to stay, and some did. I do not know how many of those visitors knew what had happened during the war or had heard of it but disbelieved. Many Serbs and their supporters continue to deny the mass atrocities committed during the war. But the visitors came, and, in 1998, one of them was Peter Handke.

It has not been previously reported that Handke stayed at the Vilina Vlas. I came across an elliptical reference to his visit in an obscure monograph written by his American translator, Scott Abbott. Handke often traveled with a small entourage of translators and friends, including Abbott. Near the end of May 1998, according to Abbott’s book, Handke and his companions stayed at “a large resort hotel tucked back into the forested hills above the town.” Abbott did not give the hotel’s name but described it as “a cavernous home to men convalescing from the war.” I have been to Visegrad twice, once during the war and once after. On my second visit, I went to the Vilina Vlas because during the conflict, I had written about a girl who was raped there. Her younger sister was also raped there and was never seen again (she was presumably killed after the Serbs were done with her). I wanted to see the place. And there it was, set amid a forest, a large hotel that was being used for not just the occasional foreign visitor but also, as Abbott noted in his book, for Serbs convalescing from the war. Visegrad has few hotels and none of the others match the description provided by Abbott. When I contacted Abbott, he said he could not remember the name. I found a person who happened to be staying at the Vilina Vlas at the same time as Abbott and Handke, and though this person could not remember the hotel’s name, I sent pictures of three hotels and this person identified the Vilina Vlas as closely resembling the one where they stayed. (Handke did not reply to emails sent to his representatives.) At the time of his visit in 1998, Handke was a famous writer beloved by Serbs. In 1996, he published two books endorsing the discredited Serb ultranationalist view that atrocities committed by their fighters had been exaggerated by the media. In “Summer Addendum to a Winter’s Journey,” Handke expressed skepticism and scorn for news reports about Serbs going on a rampage against Visegrad’s Muslims. Handke had visited Visegrad in 1996, and when he returned with his travel companions in 1998, he was a hero to the Serbs there. Abbott’s book even recounts how the mayor, Aleksandar Savic, was their ever-present host. (Savic was among the wartime Serb leadership in the town, and though he was not charged with war crimes, he was banned from holding public office in 2004 after international monitors determined that he was obstructing the effort to find war criminals.)