Notebooks and Children’s Drawings, or the Inter-Authorship of Peter Handke’s Kindergeschichte

Abstract

In 1981 Peter Handke published the semi-autobiographical text Kindergeschichte, containing reflections on the early years of life with his daughter Amina. During these years, Amina frequently wrote and drew in her father’s notebooks. This article considers Amina not only as the subject of her father’s work but also as a kind of co-author, by grounding the narrative thematization of the interaction between child and adult in the concrete interaction of their writing and drawing practices in Handke’s notebooks. The observation of his child’s entry into the material-semiotic systems of writing, I suggest, heightened Handke’s awareness of the visuality and materiality of his own compositional practice. Much like the “lessons” he learned from the painter Paul Cézanne in composing Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, Amina’s emergent drawing and writing practice, her concrete “Suche nach Formen” on the pages of her father’s notebooks, was intertwined in the ongoing evolution of her father’s project of writing as it took shape in Kindergeschichte.