The Aesthetics of Resistance

A major literary event, the publication of Peter Weiss’s monumental three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The crowning achievement of Peter Weiss-the internationally renowned writer best known for his play Marat/Sade-The Aesthetics of Resistance spans the period from the late 1930s to the end of World War II, dramatizing antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe.

Published between 1975 and 1981, the trilogy follows an unnamed narrator and his peers-sixteen- and seventeen-year-old working-class students-as they explore the affinity between political resistance and art while fighting fascist regimes in Germany and Spain. In 1937 they begin meeting in Berlin’s museums and galleries, where they engage in extended meditations on the political meanings of paintings, sculpture, and literature. Moving from the Berlin underground to the Spanish Civil War to Paris, the narrator later finds himself in Stockholm, gets a job in a factory, joins the Communist Party, and meets Bertolt Brecht. The novel teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. By August 1942, many of the narrator’s friends, acquaintances, and fellow members of the anti-Nazi resistance in Berlin are arrested by the Gestapo and executed.

Throughout this epic work, Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great examples of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.