The Aesthetics of Resistance:

Thoughts on Peter Weiss

Posted on April 8, 2011 by sdonline

.entry-meta
#BeginEditable "main"
In his three-part novel, Die sthetik des Widerstands (The
Aesthetics of Resistance), published successively in 1975,
1978, and 1981,1 Peter Weiss accomplished for the working
class what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar did for feminist
theory in 1979 and what Edward Sad did for postcolonial
studies in 1994.2 That is, he provided a sweeping
reinterpretation of major elements of the Western cultural
canon from the point of view of a hitherto marginalized
perspective. To read this novel is to experience a reeducation; to be receptive to it is to undergo an intellectual
transformation.
The novel has long enjoyed a prominent place in the German
intellectual left. Now that the first volume is finally available
from Duke University Press in a superb English translation
by Joachim Neugroschel (with a readable and engaging
foreword by Fredric Jameson),3 Weisss work can finally
emerge into the wider public sphere where it deserves to
occupy a prominent space.
Weisss monumental novel is, first of all, a Bildungsroman, a
novel in which the inner development of the hero is
portrayed. Secondly, this is a historical novel that depicts
and discusses the history of the European left from 1918 to
1945. Weiss based his novel on extensive research, and his
portrayals of leftist activists is a work of memorialization, an
enterprise carried out against the forgetfulness of history,
and in particular against the way that written history tends
to discount the vanquished. Third, the novel is a meditation
on the way that visual art and literature can represent
dissident worldviews against hegemonic political and
cultural configurations, thereby ultimately empowering

resistance. All three levels are united by a common workingclass milieu that expresses itself in the narrative voice (the
working-class hero of the Bildungsroman), the perspective of
German communist movements or of popular liberators (in
the historical narrative), and the interrogation of art and
literature for the purpose of seeing how it depicts popular
struggle or, at the very least, represents class oppression.
First, the Bildungsroman. Here, the problems Weiss poses
are the following: By what stages can a working-class person
who chooses to define himself as an intellectual appropriate
the European cultural legacy that heretofore has been
understood as belonging to the elite? How does such a
person find a voice? For whom or against whom does he
speak? Coming to writing, as Weiss portrays his narrators
trajectory, requires a reworking of Western culture from the
point of view of class analysis, whether it be the Pergamum
friezes, surrealism, Franz Kafkas Castle, or Gricaults
painting The Raft of the Meduse. The intellectual trajectory
of the narrator (who remains nameless and is one of the only
fictional characters of the work) is also the forging of a new
pathway through familiar cultural monuments that the
reader learns to see with new eyes. What is more, these
discoveries are doubly exciting because the narrator is
personally invested in them, in seeing how our cultural past
matters for present struggles. The story of the writers
awakening is also the story of how this work could be
written. Unlike the heroes of his literary models (like the
protagonist of Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks), he has no
stable home, no originating place. Rather, he finds his home
in the international class struggle (136). Another
intertextual dimension is offered by the historical context.
For example, in Vol. II, there are fascinating glimpses into
the work habits of Bertolt Brecht, whose Swedish exile the
narrator witnesses.
The second narrative line, the history of the European left, is

threaded throughout the novel in the form of conversations

with family, friends, co-workers and comrades-in-arms, in
such a way that they become part of the work of memory
necessary for the construction of a post-fascist world that
could finally bring an end to working-class oppression. In
Vol. I, we are offered a history of the Bremen uprising of
1918 from the point of view of the narrators father, who was
a dockworker at the time. Vol. II gives us the Spanish civil
war from behind the lines, at a military hospital (created in
two successively requisitioned estate manors), and describes
the anti-fascist activities of exiles who had taken a precarious
refuge, first in Paris before the German occupation, then in
neutral (but compromised) Sweden from 1939-44. Vol. III
returns to Germany in 1942-45, and to the fate of (among
others) the narrators two friends, Coppi and Heilmann, who
were presented to us in the first pages of Vol. I. It is now five
years later, and both are conspiring against the Nazi regime.
Here the question of what can constitute German culture, of
who will be able to speak for it after the war, begins to be
discussed. Earlier, the narrator had remarked with some
bitterness that the left could only unite when faced with the
murderous opposition of Nazism; once the threat was
removed, that unity fell apart once more. Those who stayed
in Germany and actively fought the regime were decimated,
robbing Germany of those who could have given it a new face
after the war (239). On the other hand, the literature and art
produced in exile was often formalistic, an escape rather
than a confrontation with historical and political realities.
Weisss presentation of the historical past within the format
of conversations and even arguments makes history a part of
active memory that can serve the future. In the final pages
of the novel, the value of learning from the past (versus just
going forward into a new future) is thrashed out in a debate
between some of the surviving protagonists. German culture
is shown to be in disarray, and soon to be further split by the

geographical split of the country. Understanding The

Aesthetics of Resistance would mean grasping how Weiss
intends his work to make possible a new departure for
German culture (as well as the culture of a reborn
international left) on the basis of working through history,
culture, and politics from a working-class perspective.
As the useful glossary by Robert Cohen at the back of the
English translation makes clear, most of the characters and
events in the novel are based on historical fact. One of
Weisss projects is to rescue from oblivion people like Horst
Heilmann (who was executed at the age of nineteen, after he
had penetrated German military security and was passing
information to the other side). The loss of those who could
have been the new face of Germany after the war demands
that the possibilities they offered be commemorated in a
book, a book that can also make people want to
act.4Aesthetics as resistance is the third, and central, topic of
Weisss novel. The narrative begins with three friends
(identified only by their last names) standing before the
Pergamum friezes housed in Berlins Museum IslandCoppi
and the narrator, both already about twenty years old and
four years out of school, and Heilmann, the self-styled
Rimbaud of the group, who is only 15. Its September 22,
1937; Hitler is in power and Coppi has already spent a year in
prison for distributing writings inimical to the State. 5 The
narrator is about to leave for Spain to fight with the
partisans. They meet for one last time though they will
remain united in spirit in the fight against fascism, which
will take a fatal turn for two of them five years later, near the
end of Vol. III. The friezes of the altar depict the mythical
battle between the Olympian gods and the race of giants,
sons of Gaia (Earth) who rebelled against Zeus. Brothers of
the Titans, they attacked Olympus because Zeus had
confined their brothers, the Titans, in Tartarus. The friezes
show several contests from the battle, during which the

giants fall in agony and defeat under the heel of the

conquering Olympians.6 The three friends draw some
surprising lessons from their museum visit, however. On the
one hand they note the blank expression of the victorious
gods in contrast to the pain and suffering expressed in the
representation of the defeated rebels. Reflecting on the
circumstance that the friezes were originally intended to
celebrate the victory of the Greeks over their rebellious Gallic
neighbors (the frieze was constructed under Eumenes II,
who reigned from 195-159 BCE), the friends detect, in the
very human representation of the vanquished, some
sympathy for the common folk who, subjected and perhaps
even enslaved, had to serve their Greek masters. Thus they
read the frieze itself as an example of the aesthetics of
resistance, imagining that the artists of the frieze were as
eager to acknowledge the suffering of the oppressed
population as to celebrate the elite who commissioned the
work. Secondly, the friends focus on the figure of Herakles,
who, according to myth, helped the gods to dispatch their
enemies on this occasion, but later descended to earth and
toiled among common mortals (the notorious twelve labors).
In Herakles the three friends see the image of the liberator
who becomes a role model for each of them as they engage
the battle against fascism. The circumstance that almost no
trace of their hero survives in the frieze (only the presence of
his lions paw on the eastern frieze indicates his position next
to Zeus) is interpreted by them as a sign that they must fill
his place themselves.
It is characteristic of Weisss narrative style to mix different
epochs and to explore parallelisms by using the device of
dialogue. Once the Pergamum frieze has been discussed, it
become a way of understanding the struggles of the present:
just as the giants had nothing but stones and clumps of earth
to fight with against gods who were heavily armed with
spears and shields, the revolutionaries of 1918 also were

unarmed against the forces that ultimately crushed them.

Out of the friends discussion the insight emerges:
Heilmann said that works like those stemming from
Pergamum had to be constantly reinterpreted until a reversal
was gained and the earth-born awoke from darkness and
slavery to show themselves in their true appearance (44).
This is to say that Weisss text manages to advance on all
three levels at once, as cultural insights are applied to the
ongoing political struggles and also feed the budding literary
vocation of the narrator. For instance the long passages
about Picassos Guernica are framed within a conversation
among several members of the demobilized international
brigade after the Republican defeat. As in the discussion
around the Pergamum friezes, individual elements of the
representation are translated into the iconography of
ideological struggle: we saw the Taurus as representing the
endurance of the Spanish people, and the narrow-eyed,
stiffly crosshatched horse as representing the hated war
inflicted by fascism (293). This technique of embedding
close pictorial analysis within conversation allows Weiss to
explore paintings in great detail, casting the reader into the
role of a viewer. The effect of Weisss visually evocative prose
is stunning, as picture after picture is conjured forth out of
the text and endowed with a fresh meaning.
The translation by Joachim Neugroschel performs the
difficult feat of preserving the integrity of Weisss style,
characterized in this book by long sentences that often mix
different historical periods and several different speakers.
Like the Portuguese Nobel-prizewinning author Jos
Saramago, Weiss prefers not to set off dialogue with
diacritical marks, a technique that results in a flowing
intermingling of present and past, of speech and narrative
observation. Thus even stylistically, the novel accomplishes
its work of memorialization by bringing memory forward
into the present of the characters, an invitation to the reader

to do the same for his/her own present when reading this

account of 1918-45. This first volume also contains insights
on modernist painting (dada, surrealism, and
expressionism), Millet, and socialist realism, as well as the
architect Gaud; the authors discussed include Cervantes,
Dante, Kafka (The Castle), Mayakovski, Heine, Hlderlin,
Thomas Mann, and Brecht. But, until the next two volumes
are translated, the reader will miss the equally fascinating
discussions of Van Gogh, Eugne Sue, Restif de la Bretonne,
Bruegel, Meisonnier, and Rimbaud, as well as the lengthy
sections of Vol. II that give an insight into the Swedish exile
of Brecht. Finally, the descriptions of the sculpture and
architecture of Angkor Wat in Vol. III provide a kind of
bookend to the conversations about the Pergamum
sculptures that begin the novel.
As W.G. Sebald has noted in his essay on Weiss (published in
English in the collection On the Natural History of
Destruction), the art works that figure most prominently in
The Aesthetics of Resistance are works that show humans in
the extreme situation of war and/or impending death. Sebald
argues that the novel, which Weiss intends as a work of
memorialization, is actually a work of self-destruction. In
support of this argument Sebald notes the narrators account
of a painting of shipwreck by Gricault, Raft of the Meduse,
in which a fragile raft of working-class survivors is about to
be cut loose from the lifeboat peopled by the bourgeois class
of passengers. Sebald quotes the narrators thought, as he
stands before the painting at the Louvre in Paris, that
Gricault was motivated to paint by a sense of the
unendurability of life. Yet at the end of Vol. I, within the
context of the partisans conversations, the raft is first
explored as an allegory of their collective struggle: the
shipwrecked had formed a unity supported by each persons
hand, collectively they would now perish or collectively
survive, and the fact that the waving man, the strongest

among them, was an African, perhaps loaded on the Mduse

to be sold as a slave, hinted at the thought of the liberation of
all underdogs (303). Sebald claims that the narrator
transfers himself into Gricaults pessimism, yet later in
the same passage from Vol. II we can read: and yet it had
never been so clear to me, how in art values can be created
which can overcome entrapment and the sense of being lost,
how with the fashioning of visions, art tried to overcome
melancholia.7 Instead, Sebald wants to see the novel as a
kind of intellectual suicide, in which Peter Weiss wrecked
what he knew was the little life remaining to him (Weiss
died in 1982 shortly after completing the third part of his
novel).8 This is, in my view, to ignore the legacy of Weisss
novel, which is an attempt to provide the foundation for a
new cultural departure not only for Germany but for the
aspirations of the international working-class.
With the departure of Brecht from Sweden at the end of Vol.
II, Weisss narrator has completed his artistic
apprenticeship. Major parts of Vol. III are no longer told in
the first person, as we follow the fates of anti-fascist fighters
who either have remained in Germany (like Coppi and
Heilmann) or return there in order to join the underground
(Lotte Bischoff). The lesson of Swedish exile is that mere
survival in the face of the fascist threat is, literally, a dead
end: the narrators mother, having made it to Sweden after
witnessing many Nazi atrocities, withdraws into a silence
that amounts to a self-imposed death sentence, while others
commit suicide. Only a commitment to the struggle can
assure psychic survival. This is, finally, the contemporary
lesson Volker Braun draws from The Aesthetics of
Resistance; in consequence he must be seen as the true heir
to Weisss project of providing a new foundation for a culture
of the left. Writing in the East German newspaper Neues
Deutschland on the night of November 11, 1989, Braun
speaks of the popular revolt in the German Democratic

Republic as the greatest democratic movement in Germany

since 1918.9 Despite the all-too-rapid assimilation of East
Germany into the West, the possible future opened up in that
moment remains a source of inspiration: It was a moment
of the becoming possible, the experience of active historymakingdefeated as we are, we have tasted our own power,
the power of the masses, we made a State disappear, we
opened up the institutions. For one moment we remembered
the future, it existed.10 For the German people to once
more emerge from the defeat represented by the false hope
of so-called capitalist democracy Braun proposes an
aesthetics of contradiction (Widerspruch), a reformulation
of Weisss Widerstand (resistance). Weisss novel, he says,
constitutes a quarry, an immense amount of material
liberated for other generations.11 Braun also remarks that a
few days before his death Weiss wrote a letter in which he
envisioned a fourth world of nonconformity, of existence
outside of anything fixed, of institutions. For Braun, the
Zapatista struggle embodies the ideal of such a world, the
struggle not for power but for the space within which every
person can develop freely.12Like Weiss, Braun talks of art as
a strategy for survival and like him also, he embraces the
idea that art must be constructed out of contradictions and
oppositions: instead of integration, the dichotomy of text
and body, emotion and action.13 Its no accident that Weisss
narrator praises the montage aesthetics of Sergei Eisenstein
and Dziga Vertov, whose concept of editing stressed the
conflict between successive images. This is the lesson that
the narrator-as-writer learns from Brecht, monteur par
excellence who is represented sitting passively in his studio,
taking in the world around him, collating the information,
drafts, and ideas contributed by visitors, lovers, and
researchers into works which he then signs with his own
name. More than 15 years before the revelations of Brechts
collaborative writing style by John Fuegi,14 Weiss gives us a

picture of Brecht as a composite author, a writers

laboratory rather than a single individual. Weisss narrator
also embraces this montage aesthetic, breaking apart the
narrative with the essayistic disquisitions of his protagonists,
and breaking into the protagonists speeches with remarks
about the landscape through which they are walking, or
about whats happening outside the frame of the
conversation.
Perhaps the most famous of all the passages in Weisss novel
is Heilmanns letter to his friend (the narrator) in the last
hours before his execution. Sebald sees this as Weisss
movement toward self-destruction: It records an
accumulated sense of the fear and pain of death, and must
almost have exhausted its author; that account is the place
from which Weiss, as a writer, does not return.15 I dont
disagree that Weiss may have put himself in Heilmanns
placebut once again it is possible to read the letter as a
legacy statement that looks toward the future rather than
as evidence of defeat and exhaustion. Heilmann writes that
in remaining open to those who have gone before us, we
honor those who come after.16In his insightful foreword to
the English translation, Fredric Jameson notes that in the
aftermath of German reunification and the end of the Cold
War, the novel has an important role to play, not just for the
constitution of a revised historical memory for Germany that
would incorporate the experience of the German Democratic
Republic, but also for the reconstruction of a worldwide left
vision of its vocation and its possibilities in a seemingly postrevolutionary world situation in which capitalism and the
ever-expanding penetration of the free market are commonly
felt to be henceforth unchallenged.17 If Weisss testament
work is to reach the broader audience of the international
left, it is crucial that the project of translation be continued.
The third and final volume may be even more important
than the second, in that it records the relatively unknown

story of the resistance fighters inside Germany during the

war. Though the topic of The Aesthetics of Resistance is the
defeat of popular movements, it nevertheless offers, as
Volker Braun suggests, the broken pieces of a past that we
can begin to put together in the fashioning of a future that
will embody a popular, and therefore socialist, democracy.
Notes
1. Peter Weiss, Die sthetik des Widerstands, 3 vols. bound
as 1 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).
2. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979), and Edward Sad, Culture and Imperialsim (New
York: Knopf, 1994).
3. Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2005). Pagenumbers within the above text refer to this edition.
4. Die sthetik des Widerstands, Vol. III, 239 and 236 (my
translation).
5. The glossary by Robert Cohen identifies Hans Coppi
(1916-42) as a German worker who was imprisoned for a
year for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets; in 1941, he became a
radio operator for the resistance group led by Harro SchulzeBoysen. He was arrested in Berlin and executed on
December 22, 1942. Executed on the same day, Horst
Heilmann (1923-42) had joined the resistance group in 1941.
He was a volunteer for the German army, deciphering allied
documents and secretly passing them on to Schulze-Boysen.
6. A useful diagram of the friezes as well as several good
photographs are supplied in Max Kunze, Der grosse
Marmoraltar von Pergamon: seine Wiederentdeckung,
Geschichte und Rekonstruktion (Berlin: Staatliche Museum
zu Berlin Antikensammlung, 1988). The books front matter
includes a quotation from Weiss.
7. Die sthetik des Widerstands, Vol. II, 33 (my translation).

8. W.G. Sebald, The Remorse of the Heart: On Memory and

Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss, in On the Natural
History of Destruction (New York: Modern Library, 2004),
180 (my translation in this and subsequent citations of this
work).
9. Volker Braun, Die Erfahrung der Freiheit, in Wir
befinden uns soweit wohl, wir sind erst einmal am Ende:
usserungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 18 (my
translation in this and subsequent citations of this work).
10. Braun, Wir befinden uns soweit wohl, wir sind erst
einmal am Ende, in Wir befinden uns, 100.
11. Braun, Ein Ort fr Peter Weiss, in Wir befinden uns,
168.
12. Ibid., 170-71.
13. Braun, Leipziger Vorlesung, in Wir befinden uns, 36.
14. See John Fuegi, Brecht & Co.: Sex, Politics, and the
Making of the Modern Drama (New York: Grove Press,
1994).
15. Sebald, 191.
16. Weiss, III, 206 (my translation).
17. Fredric Jameson, Foreword: A Monument to Radical
Instants, in Weiss, Aesthetics of Resistance,vii-viii.