The aesthetics of resistance

The Aesthetics of Resistance is the title of a three-volume, 1,000-page novel by Peter Weiss , which took ten years of work between 1971 and 1981. The work represents the attempt to bring to life and pass on the historical and social experiences and the aesthetic and political insights of the workers' movement during the years of resistance against fascism . Central is the idea of ​​unity to be achieved: between communists and social democrats as well as between artistic modernism and the workers' movement. The three volumes were published individually in 1975, 1978 and 1981 in West Germany by Suhrkamp Verlag , in 1983 they were published in a closed edition in the GDR based on preprints . A side piece to the novel are Weiss' notebooks 1971–1980 , a selection that was put together by the author himself with the intention of documenting the development process, the sources of the novel and the long work on its completion; they were also published by Suhrkamp in 1981.

Due to its special formal structure, The Aesthetics of Resistance has also been referred to as a novel essay .

Work description

To the content in general

The raft of the Medusa

The work, which was only completed shortly before the author's death, paints a comprehensive picture of the fascist epoch in Europe from the perspective of the anti-fascist resistance .

The central figure is a fictional German worker and resistance fighter who remains nameless throughout the novel, whom Weiss, as he himself noted, has provided with his own “dream biography”. This worker suffers from the fact that he, the proletarian, can only educate himself with great effort, but he needs education in order to interpret the world and to be able to adapt his behavior in the class struggle to it. In Swedish exile he met Bert Brecht , from whom he gained an insight into the work structure of an author and learned how to write effectively. He then tries his hand at being a journalist. He gets the impression that he has grown in power since he was able to describe the world in literary terms. This aspect of the novel can be described as a development novel .

The focus is also on the question of what role art and culture can play as a breeding ground for political resistance against totalitarian systems. Weiss not only describes the living conditions under which people came into contact with art. He also describes how certain art could give strength and orientation to the few people who opposed fascism, and heightened political awareness.

The representations of art movements such as Dadaism or Surrealism as well as interpretations of works of fine art and literature run like a red thread through all volumes . B. the temples of Angkor Wat , the painting The Raft of Medusa by Théodore Géricault (Louvre), Freedom Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix and especially Pablo Picasso's Guernica . Franz Kafka's novel Das Schloss is interpreted in detail in the text and compared in process and effect with Klaus Neukrantz 's book Barricades am Wedding . Right at the beginning of the novel, at a conspiratorial meeting in front of the battle depiction on the frieze of the ancient Pergamon Altar , the first-person narrator and two of his communist comrades hold a discussion about history, politics, culture, art and literature - but above all about the possibility of to use the cultural heritage of the past for the socialist and anti-fascist struggle. In the giants who are defeated by the Olympian gods on the Pergamon Altar, he recognizes the image of the proletarians who defend themselves against their oppressors. Reflections on how the experiences that these images express can be used for the current struggles run like a leitmotif through the novel.

Historical research, including about Herbert Wehner and the members of the “ Red Orchestra ” around Harro Schulze-Boysen, was incorporated into the work, as well as detailed descriptions of places, perceptions, trains of thought and the development of consciousness of the protagonist and his colleagues.

Detail of the Pergamon Altar: The earth goddess Ge emerges from the underground, a motif that has been interpreted several times in the novel

Contents of the three volumes

Volume 1 deals primarily with experiences of proletarian education , reading and seeing works of art from the worker's point of view against the background of the decaying Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism . The story begins in September 1937, dialogues open up retrospectives on the failed Bremen Soviet Republic and the failed attempts at cooperation between social democratic and communist workers in the Weimar Republic. A broad panorama emerges in the form of diverse cross-fades and montages from the narrator's perspective. A few days later, he left Berlin as a teenager and reached Spain via what was then Czechoslovakia, where he took part in the fight against Franco as a medic at Albacete and in Dénia at the side of the doctor Max Hodann for the Republicans . In Spain he experienced the sharp conflicts between the various left groups and heard of Stalin's show trials against alleged dissenters and traitors.

In the second volume, after the dissolution of the international brigades and the collapse of the Spanish Republic, the narrator first ends up in Paris, where he meets the communist cultural organizer Willi Munzenberg . Like Weiss himself, the protagonist finally emigrates to Sweden. He works in a Stockholm factory (the "Separator Factory", which has been converted to arms production - meaning Alfa Laval ) and is active in the illegal Communist Party. He learns to also in exile in Sweden in Lidingö living Bertolt Brecht know and take part in its work on a drama about Engelbrekt . In the tradition of Brecht and Munzenberg, he decided to combine socialist partiality with personal creativity and to become a critical chronicler of his epoch. The discussion of the group around Brecht with the historical figure of the medieval mining entrepreneur Engelbrekt leads the narrator to a critical reflection on the alliance policy of the Communist Party of Sweden, which was initially hampered by the Comintern's instructions, according to which a popular front can only be formed under the leadership of the communists, and then remained squeezed into the corset of Soviet war communism. Independent decisions with a view to forming a united or popular front with the Swedish Social Democrats and other forces were therefore not possible. The narrator also meets Rosalinda von Ossietzky , Carl von Ossietzky's daughter , whose fate, after her arrival in Sweden, exposes Sweden's displayed neutrality policy. This also applies to Charlotte Bischoff , who appears as a further protagonist in this volume , a communist who is commissioned by the party to secretly return to Germany from her exile in order to seek contact with the resistance.

From their point of view, a large part of the story of the Rote Kapelle is told in Volume 3, although the first-person narrator does not meet it and therefore cannot report firsthand about it or the other people. After his parents 'flight from the Czech Republic to Alingsås in Sweden , the narrator experiences his mother's psychological decline during his visits to his parents' house, who cannot cope with the traumatic experiences during the escape. He suffers greatly from his and his father's inability to adequately respond to his mother's total withdrawal. For the first time in Volume 3, the suffering of persecution, flight and uprooting is explicitly addressed, after the persecuted and exiled people were previously described mostly as people with the remarkable ability to cope with or compensate for their fate through their political work. After his mother's death and his release from the Stockholm factory, the narrator joins the resistance struggle against Nazi Germany. Following political instructions, he himself is not involved in the illegal smuggling of underground fighters into Germany. He describes the resistance of the Red Orchestra around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Dr. Arvid Harnack in Berlin. The detailed description of the arrest and execution of the resisters in Plötzensee represents the most shocking part of the novel. Here, the previously objective tone of the depiction of persecution and imprisonment changes into a cruel passion story . The desperation and suffering of the undiscovered resistance fighters from these fates and from their own survival becomes an issue. They were unable to bring about a popular uprising and were dependent on liberation by the Allies, with which they also lost the right to self-determination.

The story ends in 1945, after fascism was overthrown in Europe, with a final reference to the frieze of the Pergamon Altar, “on which the sons and daughters of the earth rose up against the forces that tried to take away what they had fought for ".

Shape features, structure

The three volumes of the work each consist of two parts, which are headed with the Roman numerals I and II. The text is neither divided into chapters nor into paragraphs, but into paragraphless "blocks", which usually comprise about five to twenty printed pages and are separated from one another by blank lines. Peter Weiss also dispenses with quotation marks, dashes, exclamation marks and question marks; the punctuation consists only of points and commas. The latter are mainly used to structure the often long, paratactic sentences. There are also some peculiarities of Weiss in the sound and spelling that run through all volumes: in particular the regular omission of the unstressed e (“emerge”, “pulverization”) and the writing of the year in two words with capitalized initials (“nineteen hundred thirty-seven”).

Unlike in other experimental texts - such as B. with James Joyce or Gertrude Stein - however, the sentence constructions certainly correspond to grammatical and pragmatic conventions. The text blocks consist of established epic forms: narrative report, description, reflection and direct or indirect, occasionally also experienced speech . An ego who remains nameless until the end of the book tells the novel. The first-person narrator generally reports in chronological order what has been experienced, perceived, felt and thought; Jumps in the narrated time often come about because the ego is referring to the speech of other people, often with repetitive inquit formulas ("said my father"). In the second and above all in the third volume, the narrator figure increasingly recedes; increasingly longer passages are reported from the perspective of other characters (especially Charlotte Bischoff ). Nevertheless, the narrator's reporting and descriptive tone is retained.

The narrated time spans a clearly defined period from September 22, 1937 to 1945. However, through character speeches and above all reflections by the narrator and other characters in the novel, far-reaching retrospectives are brought into the plot.

“The novel gains its unmistakability from some striking structural elements such as the combination of historically authentic and fictional characters as well as the combination of narrative and reflective parts, which has led to the aptly named 'novel essay'. Another dominant feature are the extended dialogical parts, partly in direct, partly in indirect speech. They are the formal expression of a movement of thought which, in Brecht's followers, tries again and again to articulate contradicting positions (in politics, ideology, aesthetics) and to set them against each other in such a way that they lead to new insights, consequences and changes. The process of montage has a similar function, with which Weiss confronts different places, times, figures and viewpoints with one another in a quasi-cinematic way. On the other hand, the biographical narrative framework creates, at least formally, a 'unity of contradictions' ”.

Origin and publication history

initial situation

The novel project is first mentioned in Peter Weiss' notebooks in March 1972: “Since the beginning. Oct. 71 Thoughts on the Novel. ”At the time, Weiss had not published any fictional prose for at least eight years. As a playwright he had got into a crisis: Trotsky in exile was not accepted as anti-Soviet in the GDR and was devastatingly criticized in the FRG , the author himself considered extensive changes to be necessary to Holderlin , which he was busy with. The themes addressed in these pieces, the history of the socialist and communist opposition and the relationship between art and politics, took up the aesthetics of resistance in a new form.

For the choice of the novel form, as Kurt Oesterle shows, a long history should be essential. Since the early 1960s, Weiss had repeatedly dealt with the plan to create a work based on the model of Dante's Divine Comedy . At first he had the idea of ​​a dramatic cycle of works on the “world theater” of oppression, but in the summer of 1969 he decided on a prose version and was already working on it. This project had two “monstrosities”: “to represent the epoch in its totality” and “to do this through reflection in the consciousness and language of a single contemporary ...” - for which only an epic form was suitable.

Not only do the Divina Commedia project combine these enormous demands with the aesthetics of resistance - numerous echoes can also be recognized in the text of the novel. In the aesthetics of resistance, Dante's work becomes the subject of art discussions, and motifs from the Divina Commedia are subject to central passages in the novel, right down to direct quotation. Also Weiss himself has u. a. Charlotte Bischoff's illegal trip to Germany is described in Volume 3 as the "Hades Wandering". So it is at least "conceivable that Weisssche DC was absorbed in the resistance project - remainder of a dowry from earlier years."

Research

At the beginning of the specific work on the novel, Weiss carried out extensive research, which he continued throughout the creation of the work. At first he concentrated on the people in exile in Sweden, who later formed the characters in the second and third volumes. In 1972 alone, Weiss conducted interviews with Max Hodann's bereaved relatives and his doctor, several colleagues from Brechts, Rosalinde von Ossietzky , Karl Mewis , Charlotte Bischoff, Herbert Wehner , Paul Verner , Georg Henke and Herbert Warnke , as well as other contemporary witnesses and others. a. various engineers at the Alfa Laval separator works, where the narrator works part-time. There was also an intensive archive study in numerous libraries. Above all, however, Weiss attached great importance to personally inspecting the locations of the novel.

In particular, a trip to Spain in March / April 1974 served the purpose of obtaining authentic information about the places where Part 2 of Volume 1 takes place. Among other things, Weiss discovered the remains of a fresco in the former headquarters of the International Brigades in Albacete , which is described in detail in the novel. How important such impressions were to him is u. a. from the fact that he succeeded in discovering the conspiratorial apartment of the Comintern commissioner Jakob Rosner in Stockholm shortly before the house was demolished, and that at the last moment he added the latest excavation results from Engelbrekt's time in Stockholm to the already finished text of second volume incorporated.

"I can not handle this huge work"

“Started with the book”, reported an entry in the “Notebooks” on July 9, 1972, immediately after a visit to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Initially, only one volume was planned, which should be entitled The Resistance . Yet Weiss encountered considerable difficulties, particularly in connection with the character of the first-person narrator. It started again twice, in October 1972 and April 1973. He also reflected on the title again and again: In August 1973, the “bulky” title The Aesthetics of Resistance appeared in the notebooks for the first time . A letter from Suhrkamp manager Siegfried Unseld has been received from April 1975 , in which it says: “We have also agreed that the title of the novel should be called 'The Resistance'.” It is not clear how the final title was chosen known.

A quote from the notebooks provides a vivid picture of the writing problems: “I cannot cope with this huge amount of work, with all the disturbances and irritations. The heart begins to flicker again ”(p. 246). Again and again Weiss was forced to interrupt work, and a. through a stay in hospital and his dramatization of Kafka's " Process ". The author's nervousness and sensitivity to disturbances also illustrate repeated problems with motorboat drivers on the lake at which Weiss' weekend house was, as well as a letter to Unseld, to whom he had sent the first part of the novel for examination on July 19, 1974 "with some reservations" . In this letter, he complains bitterly that he received no encouragement to continue. Nevertheless, in July 1975 he succeeded in sending the first volume to the publisher, which appeared in September in a first edition of 3,500 copies.

The decision had long since been made to add a second volume, although the first edition did not yet contain any reference to it. Weiss also had to start all over again in 1977 for this volume, the Paris chapter of which was originally intended for volume 1. The work was interrupted again, this time by various political statements (e.g. on Wolf Biermann's expatriation or the travel ban for Pavel Kohout ) as well as the award of the Thomas Dehler Prize by the Federal Ministry for Internal German Relations , which caused him considerable misgivings.

The third volume

In 1978 Weiss and Unseld made the mutual decision to publish a shorter "epilogue volume" to conclude the novel. This third volume may have cost Weiss even more trouble than the first two, since he felt it had to be “the best” of the three volumes. He immediately rejected various attempts and complained in November 1978: "The break before the epilogue volume has now been almost 5 months." On August 28, 1980, he completed the volume. Weaknesses prevented him from going through the publisher's corrections one by one. He was forced to leave them to the Suhrkamp editor, Elisabeth Borchers , and finally approved the corrections by letter in summary form. This decision weighed heavily on Weiss, as can be seen from his correspondence with Unseld. In the end, he raised no further objections, but asked for his concerns and further author corrections for subsequent editions to be taken into account. Suhrkamp Verlag initially failed to comply with Weiss' request, even after the author's death, with the exception of minor corrections from June 1981 - the first edition appeared in May - which did not change the break. It was not until the new edition from 2016 that Weiss' corrections were fully incorporated.

Sweden and the GDR

Even while working on the individual volumes, Ulrika Wallenström translated the aesthetics of resistance for the small Swedish publisher “Arbetarkultur” into Swedish. Weiss organized this translation himself and also insisted against Suhrkamp that the Swedish rights (unlike all other Scandinavian rights) be kept out of the publishing contract. The bilingual author read the Swedish proofreads himself and worked with the translator. The individual Swedish volumes were published by “Arbetarkultur” a few months after the German text.

In the GDR, however, the publication of the work turned out to be difficult. At Weiss's request, the Aufbau-Verlag received an offer for a GDR license edition immediately after the publication of the first volume, but did not respond to it for a full five months. Only when Suhrkamp asked, Aufbau stated that they wanted to wait for the second volume first. It was obviously political problems, especially the open portrayal of the struggles within the labor movement, that gave rise to this hesitant attitude. At least one chapter of the second volume was preprinted in the sense and form .

It was not until 1981 that East Berlin-based Henschelverlag , actually a theater publisher, succeeded in gaining the approval of GDR cultural politicians for the complete publication of all three volumes - subject to "huge problems that the third volume could still cause" (it had not yet appeared). Another editorial course followed with Manfred Haiduk, who has long been known to Weiss . In 1983 the entire work was finally published in the GDR in a first edition of at least 5,000 copies, which did not go to the general book trade but were specifically given to academic circles. A second edition in 1987 was exempt from such restrictions.

In addition to the Swedish translation ( Motståndets estetik , Stockholm 1976–1981), there are also transfers of all or individual volumes of the Aesthetics of Resistance into Danish ( Modstandens æstetik , Charlottenlund 1987–1988), English ( The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1 , Durham, NC 2005), French ( L'esthétique de la résistance , Paris 1989), Dutch ( De esthetica van het verzet , Groningen 2000), Norwegian ( Motstandens estetikk , Oslo 1979), Spanish ( La estâetica de la resistencia , Barcelona 1987) and Turkish ( Direnmenin Estetiği , İstanbul 2006).

Text shape

Weiss typed his texts on large-format paper. The typescripts have only small margins and already have the block-like character that characterizes the books. By rewriting and pasting over with cut-out parts of the text, the author avoided handwritten corrections directly in the text as much as possible. The typesetting templates for all three volumes are preserved in the Peter Weiss archive, as well as a large number of drafts and text snippets from volumes 2 and 3.

After initial irritations, triggered in particular by the type-scripts not being very friendly to editing, the sending of the typesetting templates was followed by fruitful and intensive editing at Suhrkamp Verlag, primarily by Elisabeth Borchers. Their concerns often related to the Scandinavianisms of the author, whose everyday language was Swedish, and grammatical errors or problems. In the course of the work on the third volume, however, the friction increased significantly. Borchers and Unseld considered the linguistic form to be clearly in need of revision, which was very depressing for Weiss. Although he acknowledged the criticism, he feared that the number of corrections was too great and that the interventions in his text were going too far:

A reader may not even notice the editing of the text, perhaps even the impression will arise that the text in this volume runs better and easier - but many idiosyncrasies, expressions, "rebellions" occur to me again and again in my manuscript, which have now been corrected are, but will testify to a “disempowerment” on my part in terms of literary history. I came to terms with it because, as I said, nothing could be changed in the situation. I say to myself: the "original text" is still there and can still be compared. The peculiar disproportion between manuscript and book still keeps me uneasy.

The GDR edition offered Weiss an opportunity to change this “peculiar disparity”. Weiss and Haiduk took over a large part of the Suhrkamp corrections, but reversed some deletions and replacements and made further author and publisher corrections, much against the will of Unseld and Borchers. This particularly affected the third volume, but also some passages of the first volume that Weiss had noticed during a reading. Weiss expressly agreed to the final version as a final edition .

There were now no fewer than three published versions approved by the author, two in German and one in Swedish. This could not be hidden in the long run, especially since there had already been rumors of disputes between the author and the publisher. A systematic comparison of the versions has not yet been made, but the history of the text and individual problems have been examined in various essays. For example, in 1993 Jens-Fietje Dwars compared the letter “Heilmann an Unbekannt”, one of the last text blocks in Volume 3, in the Urtext, Suhrkamp and Henschel versions. It turns out that there is no question of political influence in either of the two book editions. But the Suhrkamp edition shows a number of smoothings that were withdrawn in the Henschel edition. For example, a passage describing physical experiences of disgust was clearly defused in Suhrkamp and used again in its full drastic form in Henschel:

... the world of excrement, foul-smelling acids, blood, nerve twitching, I was filled with it, there I lay ... (Suhrkamp version)

... the world of the feces, the entrails, the stinking acids, the hoses pumped through with blood, the twitching nerve fibers, I was filled with it, there I lay in the slime, in the mud ... (Henschel version)

Due to such discrepancies, Jürgen Schutte , the editor of the digital edition of Weiss'sche Notebooks , urged the creation of a critical edition of the Aesthetics of Resistance in 2008 , which is based on the GDR version and should at least list the text variants of the published versions and the typesetting. This is still pending. After all, on October 29, 2016 Suhrkamp published a new edition that Schutte had provided for, which not only takes into account the published versions, but also Weiss' handwritten corrections to these as well as the author's corrections sent by letter, in order to create a reading edition that, as far as possible, reflects the "creative will of the author ”follows. It contains a short "editorial epilogue" of rubble that lists the text witnesses used .

Artists and works of art in the novel

→ Main article : Works of art in the "Aesthetics of Resistance"

→ Main article : Artists in the "Aesthetics of Resistance"

The multitude of artists and works of art that Peter Weiss has included in the novel form a kind of musée imaginaire (imaginary museum), mainly of the visual arts and literature , but also the performing arts and music . They are considered to be the securing of cultural evidence , with which an arc is drawn from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance , through works of Romanticism and Realism to the art of Expressionism and the avant-garde with their expression in Dadaism , Surrealism and Cubism . The various iconographic references are set in relation to the narrative of the history of the labor movement and the resistance against fascism in Europe in the middle of the 20th century. The art-historical digressions reflect the inadequacy of proletarian education and the mechanisms of securing power through the cultural incapacitation of the proletariat .

Eugène Delacroix: The Dante Bark . One of over 100 mentioned works of art and at the same time a symbol for the influence of Dante's Divina Commedia

Some of the works discussed, such as Dante's tale of the Divina Commedia or Picasso's painting Guernica , and sketched personalities, such as the painter Théodore Géricault with his main work The Raft of Medusa , occupy a central space in the course of the plot. Others stand as examples of the first-person narrator's thought processes or as enumerations in contexts of meaning, still others arise from the context . The novel is both an appreciation of the resistance against National Socialism and a plea for art as a vital necessity : “It's about the resistance to mechanisms of oppression, as they are expressed in their most brutal, fascist form, and about the attempt to overcome a class-related lockout of the aesthetic goods. "

Divina Commedia

The aesthetics of the resistance are largely influenced by Dante's early 14th-century verse narration of the Divina Commedia . As a work, it is introduced in the first part of the novel, with the protagonists reading and debating it together perceiving it as unsettling and rebellious. With the Commedia , Dante, as the narrator, describes his journey through the three realms of the hereafter , which takes him through the inferno (hell) with nine circles of hell , the purgatorio (the purification area or purgatory) with seven penitential districts and finally to Paradiso (paradise ) with nine celestial spheres and its highest level, empyrean .

“What happened here, we wondered since the summer of this year, when we had set out into the strange, upside-down dome sunk into the earth, with its circles that led ever deeper and the length of a life wanted to take advantage of it, while after the passage they still promised ascent, also in rings, up to heights that were beyond the imaginable. "

- Peter Weiss : The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I, page 79

In numerous motifs, allusions and mythical derivations, Peter Weiss repeatedly establishes the connection in the further course of the action. The relationship to the journey through the realms of the hereafter can also be seen in the aesthetic organization, the structure of the novel. This, in turn, is a cognitive process: "We learned what corresponded in us with Dante's poetry, learned why the origin of all art is memory."

Central works of art

In addition to the Divina Commedia , Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica , created in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, at the end of the first volume and Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, completed in 1819 in the first and the beginning of the second volume, occupy the central space in the discussions. Both images are placed in connection with the respective creative processes of the artists, their personal motifs, the political backgrounds, with correspondences from mythology, with derivations from earlier works and influences on subsequent works. In particular, however, they are subjected to the question “What has it to do with us” .

More detail discussed paintings are Eugène Delacroix 'after the July Revolution of 1830 Resulting Liberty Leading the People , that of Francisco de Goya created in 1814 The shooting of the insurgents and Adolph Menzel representation The iron mill from the year 1875th

Getting into the action happens to a wordy description of the Pergamon Altar in Berlin's Pergamon Museum , which also takes a look ahead to the content:

“We heard the blows of the clubs, the shrill whistles, the moans, the splashing of blood. We looked back in time, and for a moment the perspective of what was to come was filled with a massacre that the thought of liberation could not penetrate. "

- Peter Weiss : The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I, Page 14

The motif is finally taken up at the end of the novel, so that it frames the story as it were.

Buildings described in detail are also the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona in the first volume and the temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia in the third volume. Another literary work is Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Das Schloss , published in 1922, discussed in detail in the first volume and presented in the significant discussion about the realistic and the avant-garde concept of art.

Questions

The complexity of the relationship between resistance and aesthetics is already evident in the double message of the title of the novel . The novel contains both narrative strands, it is to be read both under the aspect of "art as a form-giving resistance function", i.e. the resistance of art ( genitivus objectivus ), and with a view to the "role of aesthetics for resistance" (genitivus subjectivus ). The art receptions within the plot are seen as a broad, partisan processing of the history of art , which is at the same time questioned by its own limited accessibility:

“To want to talk about art without hearing the slurp with which we put one foot in front of the other would have been presumptuous. Every meter towards the picture, the book, was a skirmish, we crawled, pushed ourselves forward, our eyelids blinked, sometimes we burst into laughter at this wink that made us forget where we were going. "

- Peter Weiss : The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I, page 59

The symbol of this process is the central motif of Heracles . The hero from Greek mythology stands for his strength with which he copes with the tasks imposed on him. At the same time he achieved immortality because he fought on the side of the gods. In the novel, he is symbolized as a controversial figure that identifies the working class. Beginning with the question of why his image is missing in the frieze of the Pergamon Altar, the search for the real Heracles continues throughout the novel and ends in the last scene. Using its myth, however, the relationship of the working class to art is illustrated:

"But Heracles pulled Linos , the teacher, who wanted to convince his pupil that the only freedom there was, was the freedom of art, put his hat so hard over his eyes that his nose broke, and when the master continued to claim, art is to be enjoyed at all times regardless of the respective confusion, he put it upside down in the cesspool and drowned it, to prove that unarmed aestheticism cannot withstand the simplest violence. "

- Peter Weiss : The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I, Page 20

The fundamental question, however, that arises both in terms of content and in the execution of the aesthetics of resistance as a work of art itself is that of the representability of historical atrocities and horrors with artistic and literary means. Peter Weiss answers them by referring back to the works of art.

reception

Ambivalent reactions in the cultural scene

The “Aesthetics of Resistance” received a lot of attention in the feature sections from the start. All three volumes of the work were discussed by prominent reviewers shortly after their appearance in the German-language daily and weekly newspapers. The response, however, was very mixed, with the first volume in particular being the most negative. In some cases, the writers referred to a formulation that Peter Weiss had used in a preliminary interview with ZEIT editor Rolf Michaelis : "It is an autobiography of your choice." Reinhard Baumgart accused the Süddeutsche Zeitung Weiss, " a red dreamed life ”(so the title of the review) as a novel. Other authors, too, aimed more at Weiss's widely published political commitment than at the form of the novel itself, such as Moritz Menzel and Hans Christoph Buch in Spiegel . While the first volume was only rated very positively by Alfred Andersch in the Frankfurter Rundschau (he coined the term "roman d'essai" or essay novel, which was often used later), the following volumes received more positive reviews, for example from Wolfram Schütte in the Frankfurter Rundschau and by Joachim Kaiser and Heinrich Vormweg in the Süddeutsche Zeitung . At least Andersch, Schütte and Vormweg also rated the memorial-political project of the work more strongly than its formal realization, as Martin Rector shows in his overview.

Anders Fritz J. Raddatz , one of the sharpest critics of the work of all three volumes in TIME slating: He ruled that the aesthetics of resistance was as novel an aberration, since it merely abstract, presenting sensuous, unpsychological figures and list will now be mentioned ( “Fascism as a crossword puzzle”, “Bubbles from the flood of words”, “Not a fresco, but a flickerl carpet”). Hanjo Kesting argued exactly the opposite in the Spiegel : It is precisely the break with the traditions of the genre that defines the value of the work; Incidentally, all interpretations that equate the aesthetics of resistance with the positions represented in it fall short, because the real theme of the novel is the self-discovery of the narrator as an artist. Günter Platzdasch tried in a Eurocommunist magazine at the beginning of 1977 to feed the work of the left "for critical self-understanding" (according to the literary scholar Klaus R. Scherpe ).

Reading circles

What was more remarkable, however, was a collective reception of the novel in a large number of reading circles that can be attributed to the political left. A kind of initial spark for this form of reception was the Berliner Volks-Uni in 1981. A whole series of reading groups came together there, partly from students and lecturers, but partly from non-university, especially left-wing trade union circles. They received the work together and talked about it at regular meetings. How many such readership there were has not been researched, but there are numerous references to them. For example, the Bremen literary professor Thomas Metscher reported on regular camps for nature lovers in the Allgäu, during which the aesthetics of resistance was read, and Martin Rector cites a protocol from such a group of readers. a. Educators, masseurs, typesetters and booksellers took part, from literature specifically 6 (1981/82): In a group we have been reading Peter Weiss' Aesthetics of Resistance for a year. ... So the majority of non-academics and employees, people whose story the Aesthetics of Resistance is about, albeit in a way that we have not yet been familiar with.

There were also numerous groups around German language and literature lecturers at different universities who had similar collective reading experiences - Rector, who himself was one of them, lists no fewer than seven universities. Such groups are also documented in the GDR, where the work was difficult to obtain and where it was partly copied from borrowed copies, especially at the Berlin Humboldt University and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. An interdisciplinary lecture series on this work took place in Berlin in 1984/85, which was then documented in an anthology. Such anthologies were published in large numbers by university reading groups in the 1980s.

In the detective novel Weg vom Fenster by Barbara Krohn (1999), the murder victim - a literature professor - is shot in a reading group during a reading from The Aesthetics of Resistance .

Intermedial reception

Filmmaker Harun Farocki held a conversation with Peter Weiss on June 17, 1979 in Stockholm about the process of creating the third volume of the Aesthetics of Resistance , which formed the basis of the film documentary Zur view: Peter Weiss . Farocki's film was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 1980 and published in 2012 as volume 30 of “filmedition suhrkamp” ( Peter Weiss. Films ). In December 1984 the exhibition “Traces of the Aesthetics of Resistance” was shown at the West Berlin University of the Arts , which dealt with Weiss' work, among other things; in later years there were other exhibitions showing artistic work on Weiss' novel and its central topos. Several visual artists such as Fritz Cremer , Hubertus Giebe or Rainer Wölzl and composers such as the Finnish Blacher student Kalevi Aho , the Villa Massimo scholarship holder Helmut Oehring or the Dessau student Friedrich Schenker drew on motifs from the aesthetics of resistance in their works . In 2007, a 630-minute radio play version was released with Robert Stadlober and Peter Fricke as speakers, which was voted Audio Book of the Year 2007 . Karl Bruckmaier was responsible for directing and editing the radio play . The editors were shared for the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation Herbert Kapfer and for the West German Broadcasting Corporation Wolfgang Schiffer .

The aesthetics of resistance. An exhibition project based on the novel by Peter Weiss. Galerie im Turm Berlin, 2014

The band Rome released an extensive concept album in 2011 entitled The Aesthetics of Freedom of Rule . The album includes works by Bertolt Brecht , Friedrich Nietzsche , Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and others. a. especially motifs from the aesthetics of resistance . The album To Drink From The Night Itself (2018) by the Swedish melodic death metallers At the Gates is also primarily inspired by Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance .

A stage version of the aesthetics of resistance , which the dramaturge Tilman Neuffer had developed together with director Thomas Krupa, premiered on May 24, 2012 at the Schauspiel Essen . The editors reduced the voluminous novel to approximately 50 scenes. The three and a half hour game version, which was implemented with eleven actors, focused on the first and third volumes of Weiss' novel and emphasized the elements of the original, which were designed in a surreal dream language. While some critics appreciated a theatrical, easily assembled and painfully closely observed game against oblivion, others saw in the project, in view of the abundance of material, excessive demands on the theater, missing approaches to updating or criticized an incongruity between Weiss' experimental narrative technique and the limitation of the editing classic stage dialogues. The creation of the Essen stage version is the subject of the documentary premiere: From Book to Stage by the production company Siegersbusch, which premiered in Essen in April 2013.

Projects based on text sequences from the aesthetics of resistance also emerged in the independent film and theater scene , including the theater project Passage. Three pieces from “The Aesthetics of Resistance” by the Gegenruck theater , which premiered on September 30, 2012 in Bochum. The approximately one and a half hour film VidaExtra by the independent Galician filmmaker Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, which premiered in Buenos Aires in April 2013 , links excerpts from the aesthetics of the resistance with the events of the euro crisis .

expenditure

First editions

• The aesthetics of resistance . Volume 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ​​1975, ISBN 3-518-04416-8
  • Revised new edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ​​1976, ISBN 3-518-04417-6
• Volume 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ​​1978, ISBN 3-518-04418-4
• Volume 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ​​1981, ISBN 3-518-04420-6

First edition GDR

• The aesthetics of resistance . Volume 1-3. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1983

First edition Sweden

• Motståndets estetik . Volume 1. Translation: Ulrika Wallenström. Stockholm: Arbetarkultur, 1976, ISBN 91-7014-056-1
• Motståndets estetik . Volume 2. Translation: Ulrika Wallenström. Stockholm: Arbetarkultur, 1979, ISBN 91-7014-100-2
• Motståndets estetik . Volume 3. Translation: Ulrika Wallenström. Stockholm: Arbetarkultur, 1981, ISBN 91-7014-136-3

First edition of the corrected version

• The aesthetics of resistance . Edited with an editorial afterword by Jürgen Schutte. Berlin: Suhrkamp, ​​2016, ISBN 978-3-518-42551-0

Notebooks

• Peter Weiss: Notebooks 1971–1980 . Two volumes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ​​1981. (= edition suhrkamp, ​​new series, volume 67)
• Peter Weiss: The notebooks. Critical Complete Edition , ed. v. Jürgen Schutte in collaboration with Wiebke Amthor and Jenny Willner. Berlin: Digital Library, 2006 (CD-ROM), ISBN 978-3-89853-549-6

Radio play version

The Aesthetics of Resistance , radio play in 12 parts. With Robert Stadlober , Peter Fricke , Helga Fellerer, Ulrich Frank, Paul Herwig , Rüdiger Vogler , Michael Troger, Helmut Stange, Christian Friedel, Stephan Zinner, Katharina Schubert, Sabine Kastius, Susanne-Marie Wrage , Hanns Zischler , Jochen Striebeck , Wolfgang Hinze , Jule Ronstedt / composition: David Grubbs / adaptation and direction: Karl Bruckmaier . BR / WDR 2007. CD edition: Der Hörverlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-86717-014-7 . As a podcast all 12 parts in the BR radio play pool.

Film documentation and scoring

Documentary film

• To view: Peter Weiss . Director: Harun Farocki . Berlin: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion 1979 (44-minute presentation of the work on the third volume of the Aesthetics of Resistance ).

Settings

• Kalevi Aho : Pergamon. Cantata for 4 orchestral groups, 4 reciters and organ . World premiere: Helsinki, September 1, 1990. Commissioned work for the University of Helsinki for the 350th anniversary of the university; the text comes mainly from the beginning of The Aesthetics of Resistance . The four reciters read the three text excerpts simultaneously in four languages: German, Finnish, Swedish and ancient Greek.
• Nikolaus Brass : Fallacies of Hope - German Requiem (2006). Music for 32 voices in 4 groups with text projection (ad libitum) from The Aesthetics of Resistance
• Helmut Oehring : Quixote or The Porcelain Lance (based on motifs from the first volume of the Aesthetics of Resistance ). World premiere: Festspielhaus Hellerau , November 27, 2008
• Rome : The aesthetics of freedom of domination (chanson noir / concept album based on motifs from the aesthetics of resistance, etc.), published by Trisol Music Group GmbH , 2012
• Friedrich Schenker : Aesthetics of Resistance I for bass clarinet and ensemble (string quartet, flute, trombone, piano, drums). World premiere: Gewandhaus (Leipzig) , January 16, 2013, commissioned by the Gewandhaus in Leipzig
• Gerhard Stäbler , Sergej Maingardt: The Raft - Das Floss . World premiere: Ballhaus Düsseldorf, January 24, 2016

literature

• Nana Badenberg: The "Aesthetics" and their works of art. An inventory. In: Alexander Honold, Ulrich Schreiber (ed.): The world of images of Peter Weiss . Argument-Verlag, Hamburg / Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-88619-227-X , pp. 114-162.
• Arnd Beise, Jens Birkmeyer, Michael Hofmann (eds.): “This trembling, tough, bold hope”. 25 years of Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance . Röhrig, Sankt Ingbert 2008, ISBN 978-3-86110-438-4 .
• Jennifer Clare: Protexts. Interactions between literary writing processes and political opposition around 1968 . transcript, Bielefeld 2016; ISBN 978-3-8376-3283-5 .
• Robert Cohen : Bio-Bibliographical Handbook on Peter Weiss' "Aesthetics of Resistance" . Argument-Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-88619-771-9 .
• Robert Cohen: “Nonrational Discourse in a Work of Reason. Peter Weiss' novel 'The Aesthetics of Resistance'. ”In: Protest, Opposition, Resistance. The Ambivalence of Modernity, Vol. IV . Edited by Hanns-Werner Heister. Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag, pp. 131–42.
• Jens-Fietje Dwars, Dieter Strützel, Matias Mieth (eds.): Perceiving resistance. Documents of a dialogue with Peter Weiss. GNN, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-926922-16-8 .
• Karl-Heinz Götze, Klaus R. Scherpe (Eds.): Read “Aesthetics of Resistance”. Argument-Verlag, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-88619-026-9 . (= Argument special volume 75)
• Steffen Groscurth: Vanishing points of resistant aesthetics. On the emergence of Peter Weiss' aesthetic theory. De Gruyter-Verlag, Boston / Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-034554-4 .
• Michael Hofmann: Aesthetic Experience in the Historical Crisis. An investigation into the understanding of art and literature in Peter Weiss' novel "The Aesthetics of Resistance" . Bonn 1990.
• Alexander Honold: World landscape at the kitchen table. The Aesthetics of Resistance as an Encyclopedic Narration . In: Waltraud Wiethölter, Frauke Berndt, Stephan Kammer (eds.): From the world book to the world wide web - encyclopaedic literatures . Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-8253-1582-7 , pp. 265–286.
• Martin Lüdke, Delf Schmidt (Hrsg.): Resistance of Aesthetics? Following Peter Weiss. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-498-03867-2 . (= Rowohlt LiteraturMagazin 27).
• Genia Schulz: "The Aesthetics of Resistance". Versions of the indirect in Peter Weiss' novel. Metzler-Verlag, Stuttgart 1986.
• Jürgen Schutte : Register for the Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss . Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-957-32341-5 .
• Alexander Stephan (Ed.): The Aesthetics of Resistance . 3rd edition Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-38532-1 .
• Jenny Willner: “Building fantasies and language fantasies. The Aesthetics of Resistance, read with Kafka ”. In: Dies .: Word violence. Peter Weiss and the German language. Konstanz University Press, Paderborn 2014, pp. 251-363, ISBN 978-3-86253-040-3 .
• Norbert Krenzlin (Ed.): Aesthetics of Resistance - Experiences with the novel by Peter Weiss . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 978-3-05-000428-0 .

Web links

• Domination and resistance . Investigations into the genesis and character of the cultural-philosophical discourse in the novel "The Aesthetics of Resistance" by Peter Weiss. Dissertation by Bernd Rump , Berlin 1993 (PDF file; 1.7 MB)
• The political aesthetic of the description . An investigation into the literary description in Peter Weiss' novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Dissertation by Duk-Hyun Nam, Berlin 2003.
• The wound remains open. The Peter-Weiß-Kreís in Jena . Detailedchapteron the reception of the aesthetics of resistance in the GDR from: Erhard Crome, Lutz Kirschner, Rainer Land: Final report on the DFG project CR 93 / 1-1 The SED reform discourse of the eighties . Berlin, Society for Social Science Research and Publication mbH, 1999, pp. 9–17. (PDF file; 387 kB)
• "Peter Weiss always assessed the GDR very critically." About the importance of the "aesthetics of resistance", corrections to the text and its reception history. Interview by Matthias Reichelt with Jürgen Schutte, editor of Peter Weiss' notebooks . In: Junge Welt , October 22, 2016, online .
• Review note for the new edition 2016 at perlentaucher.de
• www.peterweiss100.de Documentation and interviews on the relay reading of the aesthetics of resistance on the occasion of Peter Weiss' 100th birthday in Rostock 2016

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the subject of (political) writing and the self- image of the narrator as a writer and chronicler, see Jennifer Clare: Protexte. Interactions between literary writing processes and political opposition around 1968. transcript, Bielefeld 2016, v. a. Pp. 151-176.
2. ↑ Cf. Jochen Vogt: The Aesthetics of Resistance. In: Joachim Kaiser (Ed.): Harenberg - The book of 1000 books . Harenberg, Dortmund 2002, ISBN 3-518-39277-8 and Peter Weiss: The aesthetics of resistance. Novel . Frankfurt am Main 1991 (Peter Weiss: Works in six volumes. Third volume). Vol. III, p. 267.
3. ↑ Jochen Vogt: The Aesthetics of Resistance. In: Joachim Kaiser (Ed.): Harenberg - The book of 1000 books. Dortmund: Harenberg, 2002, ISBN 3-518-39277-8
4. ↑ Notebooks 1971–1980 , p. 41.
5. ↑ Kurt Oesterle: Dante and the mega-self. Literary forms of political and aesthetic subjectivity in Peter Weiss. In: Lüdke / Schmidt 1991, pp. 45–72, here: p. 55.
6. ↑ Kurt Oesterle: Dante and the mega-self. Literary forms of political and aesthetic subjectivity in Peter Weiss. In: Lüdke / Schmidt 1991, pp. 45–72, here: p. 65.
7. ^ Rainer Gerlach: Siegfried Unseld - Peter Weiss. The correspondence. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ​​2007, ISBN 978-3-518-41845-1 . Unseld's letter to Weiss of April 28, 1975, p. 911.
8. ^ Letter to Unseld, October 15, 1974, p. 888.
9. ↑ For example, in a letter to Siegfried Unseld of 23 February 1980: "... just for the last volume, which is effectively the best his needs " (emphasis in original).
10. ↑ Notebooks 1971–1980 , pp. 756–757.
11. ↑ Telephone note from Elisabeth Borchers from February 18, 1981, printed in Rainer Gerlach (Ed.): Briefwechsel, p. 1071
12. ↑ Jens-Fietje Dwars: And yet hope. Peter Weiss - A biography . Berlin: Aufbau, 2007, p. 254; s. also telephone note from Elisabeth Borchers of February 18, 1981, printed in: Gerlach: Briefwechsel , p. 1071.
13. ^ Letter to Unseld of January 31, 1981, printed in Gerlach, pp. 1063f. The peculiar punctuation is taken from Gerlach's book edition.
14. ↑ Jens-Fietje Dwars: The "other" censorship. On the difference in the wording of the "Aesthetics of Resistance" in the Suhrkamp and Henschel publishers . In: Dwars u. a. 1993, pp. 256-285. The quoted passage can be found in Suhrkamp on p. 205, in Henschel on p. 212 of the third volume.
15. ↑ Jürgen Schutte: For a critical edition of the aesthetics of resistance . In: Beise u. a. 2008, pp. 49-75.
16. ↑ Jürgen Schutte: Editorial afterword . In: Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance . Novel. Edited by Jürgen Schutte. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2016, pp. 1197–1199, here: p. 1199.
17. ↑ "Peter Weiss has always been very critical of the GDR." About the importance of the "aesthetics of resistance", corrections to the text and its reception history. Interview by Matthias Reichelt with Jürgen Schutte, editor of Peter Weiss' notebooks . In: Junge Welt , October 22, 2016, online .
18. ↑ Nana Badenberg: The "Aesthetics" and their works of art. An inventory ; in: Alexander Honold, Ulrich Schreiber (eds.): The world of images of Peter Weiss , Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-88619-227-X , p. 115
19. ↑ Jens Birkmeyer: Pictures of Terror. Dante's footsteps and the reception of myths in Peter Weiss' novel “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, dissertation, University of Frankfurt (Main), 1992, p. 96
20. ↑ Peter Weiss: Notebooks 1971–1980, Frankfurt (Main), 1981, p. 419
21. ↑ Peter Weiss: Notebooks 1971–1989, Frankfurt (Main), 1981, p. 223
22. ↑ Jens Birkmeyer: Pictures of Terror. Dante's footsteps and the reception of myths in Peter Weiss' novel “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, dissertation, University of Frankfurt (Main), 1992, p. 8
23. ↑ It's a dream autobiography. Peter Weiss in conversation with Rolf Michaelis about his political novel. In: Die Zeit , 42/1975, online
24. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: A life dreamed in red . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 26, 1975.
25. ^ Moritz Menzel: Headstand with art . In: Der Spiegel , 48/1975, online . Hans Christoph Buch: His speech is: yes yes, no no . In: Der Spiegel , 47/1978, online
26. ↑ Alfred Andersch: How to Resist. Richness and depth from Peter Weiss . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , September 20, 1975.
27. ↑ Joachim Kaiser: The soul and the party . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 28, 1975. Heinrich Vormweg: A great draft against the zeitgeist . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 19, 1981.
28. ↑ Martin Rector: Twenty-five Years The Aesthetics of Resistance. Prolegomena to a research report. In: Beise u. a. 2008, pp. 13-47.
29. ↑ Fritz J. Raddatz: Fascism as a crossword puzzle . In: Die Zeit , 42/1975. Bubbles from the word flood . In: Die Zeit , November 17, 1978. Farewell to your sons? Not a fresco, but a patchwork carpet . In: Die Zeit , 20/1981.
30. ↑ Hanjo Kesting: The Ruins of an Age . In: Der Spiegel , 24/1981, online
31. ^ Günter Platzdasch: November days: Peter Weiss and Donald Trump. In: Medium. November 9, 2016, accessed November 10, 2016 . 
32. ↑ [1] , accessed on November 24, 2017
33. ↑ Klaus Wannemacher: But what does it mean when Heracles is not the great liberator of mankind? Trends in novel adaptation in the post-dramatic theater field using the example of the Essen stage version of the aesthetics of resistance . In: Peter Weiss Yearbook, Volume 21. Edited by Arnd Beise and Michael Hofmann. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 2012, pp. 63–92, here pp. 83–85
34. ↑ Klaus Wannemacher: But what does it mean when Heracles is not the great liberator of mankind? In: Peter Weiss Yearbook, Volume 21. Edited by Arnd Beise and Michael Hofmann. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 2012, pp. 63–92 (for criticism: pp. 83–92)
35. ↑ BR radio play Pool - Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance (until January 6, 2017)
36. ↑ CD supplement BIS-CD-646 1994, pp. 22-26