The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1

The Aesthetics of Resistance #1

by Peter Weiss, Joachim Neugroschel (Translator)

A major literary event, the publication of this masterly translation makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is the crowning achievement of Peter Weiss, the internationally renowned dramatist best known for his play Marat/Sade . The first volume, presented here, was initially published in Germany in 1975; the third and final volume appeared in 1981, just six months before Weiss’s death. Spanning the period from the late 1930s to World War II, this historical novel dramatizes antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Living in Berlin in 1937, the unnamed narrator and his peers—sixteen- and seventeen-year-old working-class students—seek ways to express their hatred for the Nazi regime. They meet in museums and galleries, and in their discussions they explore the affinity between political resistance and art, the connection at the heart of Weiss’s novel. 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 novel includes extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature. Moving from the Berlin underground to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and on to other parts of Europe, the story teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.

Genres: Fiction, Politics, Historical Fiction, Art, German Literature, Literature, Germany

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his play Marat/Sade and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Weiss' first art exhibition took place in 1936. His first produced play was Der Turm in 1950. In 1952 he joined the Swedish Experimental Film Studio, where he made films for several years. During this period, he also taught painting at Stockholm's People's University, and illustrated a Swedish edition of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Until the early 1960s, Weiss also wrote prose. His work consists of short and intense novels with Kafkaesque details and feelings, often with autobiographical background. One of the most known films made by Peter Weiss is an experimental one, The Mirage (1959) and the second one - it is very seldom mentioned - is a film Weiss directed in Paris 1960 together with Barbro Boman, titled Play Girls or The Flamboyant Sex (Schwedische Mädchen in Paris or Verlockung in German). Among the short films by Weiss, The Studio of Doctor Faust (1956) shows the extremely strong link of Weiss to a German cultural background.

Weiss' best-known work is the play Marat/Sade (1963), first performed in West Berlin in 1964, which brought him widespread international attention. The following year, legendary director Peter Brook staged a famous production in New York City. It studies the power in society through two extreme and extremely different historical persons, Jean-Paul Marat, a brutal hero of the French Revolution, and the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism was named. In Marat/Sade, Weiss uses a technique which, to quote from the play itself, speaks of the play within a play within itself: "Our play's chief aim has been to take to bits great propositions and their opposites, see how they work, and let them fight it out." The play is considered a classic, and is still performed, although less regularly.

Weiss was honored with the Charles Veillon Award, 1963; the Lessing Prize, 1965; the Heinrich Mann Prize, 1966; the Carl Albert Anderson Prize, 1967; the Thomas Dehler Prize, 1978; the Cologne Literature Prize, 1981; the Bremen Literature Prize, 1982; the De Nios Prize, 1982; the Swedish Theatre Critics Prize, 1982; and the Georg Büchner Prize, 1982.

A translation of Weiss' L'instruction (Die Ermittlung) was performed at London's Young Vic theater by a Rwandan company in November 2007. The production presented a dramatic contrast between the play's view on the Holocaust and the Rwandan actors' own experience with their nation's genocide.




http://literaturkritik.de/public/reze...

http://literaturkritik.de/public/reze...

Reviews

[Regan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good god what can't Peter Weiss do?

Aesthetics of Resistance is a three volume work, but unfortunately for the Angloworld only Volume One has been translated into English. This is a travesty for political, socio-historical, ethical and aesthetic/cultural reasons. What he offers is not only an "historical novel" centered around the aesthetic education of 3 working class students coming of age in the tumultuous and politically volatile onset of WWII, it also provides a granular view of the populist clash between Communism, Socialism and Fascism, both political and psychological. It may as well serve as a syllabus for a master class on the History of Underdog Art, with incisive aesthetic criticism/commentary of the same.

My dudes, it bowled me over. While this volume provides more content than I could chew over in a lifetime, I am seriously considering shooting Joachim Neugroschel a personal email requesting galleys of Volumes 2 and 3.

I am convinced that now, more than ever, we need a nuanced understanding of the rise of Fascism that pays especial attention to its greatest victims and most (un)likely allies--the un and underemployed laborers, i.e. the poor and disenfranchised. Peter Weiss has an enormous amount to tell us about where we are and, I suspect, where we might be if the lessons of aesthetic resistance are learned.

[Rowland Pasaribu · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a museum in Berlin in 1937, three young communists — the unnamed narrator and his friends Coppi and Heilmann — contemplate the Pergamon Frieze. They walk back to Coppi's apartment, where they continue their debates about art and politics along with his parents. The narrator then returns to his own apartment and talks to his father or remembers conversations with him — about his experiences as an activist; they have taken different sides in the divide between Communists and Social Democrats. While waiting to go to Spain to fight, the narrator tries to help a retarded Jewish man being beaten by teenagers.

And that's pretty much all the foreground story in Part I of The Aesthetics of Resistance; it could be fitted into half a dozen pages. This is just a framework, however, on which Weiss hangs a panoply of artistic and political and historical debates and monologues. A stunning description of the Pergamon Frieze. A reanalysis of Heracles as a revolutionary. A discussion of the narrator's family's books and the problems facing workers trying to study and appreciate art. A study of how painting broadened its subject material to include peasants and workers, and of the extent to which bourgeois art is relevant to socialists. An account of the brief-lived socialist republic of Bremen. Debates over cooperation between Communists and Social Democrats, readiness for revolution, and the Moscow Trials. A critical analysis contrasting Kafka's The Castle and Neukrantz' Barricades in Wedding.

Part II, with the narrator in Spain, proceeds similarly, though with more in the foreground. A brief account of crossing the border into Spain is followed by an excursus on Gaudi's Sagrada Familia and travel from Barcelona to the headquarters of the International Brigades at Albacete. Because of some medical training the narrator ends up working in hospitals at Cueva and then Denia, under Max Hodann.

There are some details of hospital administration and the management of peasants and patients, and Hodann's ideas about sexual hygiene and freedom get a mention, but the story is dominated by debates over how tightly Party discipline must be enforced. Looming over this is the recent suppression of anarchists and independent Marxists (and the killing of Andrés Nin) and the existence of a United Front with socialist and bourgeois parties. There's one set piece debate at a meeting of leaders — Hodann, Ilya Ehrenburg, Willi Bredel, and Karl Mewis, among others and a chilling, understated climax when one of the narrator's too outspoken colleagues is taken away by the military police.

There's no direct account of battle. This is approached indirectly, through conversations with the journalist Nordahl Grieg and the historian Lindhoek, working on a history of the Thälmann brigade; they face the challenge of reporting and writing during an undecided struggle. Listening to the radio, in the same weeks they and the narrator follow the perilous military situation of the Republic, the trial of Bukharin in Moscow, and the German incorporation of Austria. A letter from Heilmann returns the narrator to the myth of Heracles; while the International Brigades are being disbanded he looks back to Phocaea, the ancient Greek colonies and mines in Spain, and the history of Spain down to the present. And, as the narrator prepares to leave Spain, he and a friend Ayschmann explore Picasso's Guernica and paintings by Delacroix and Géricault and Goya; he also looks back at some of the paintings his father educated him with, contrasting the work of Menzel and Koehler.

It needs some examples to give a feel for Weiss' style. Here is the famous opening sequence describing the Pergamon Altar:

"All around us the bodies rose out of the stone, crowded into groups, intertwined, or shattered into fragments, hinting at their shapes with a torso, a propped-up arm, a burst hip, a scabbed shard, always in warlike gestures, dodging, rebounding, attacking, shielding themselves, stretched high or crooked, some of them snuffed out, but with a freestanding, forward-pressing foot, a twisted back, the contour of a calf harnessed into a single common motion.

A gigantic wrestling, emerging from the gray wall, recalling a perfection, sinking back into formlessness. A hand, stretching from the rough ground, ready to clutch, attached to the shoulder across empty surface, a barked face, with yawning cracks, a wide-open mouth, blankly gaping eyes, the face surrounded by the flowing locks of the beard, the tempestuous folds of a garment, everything close to its weathered end and close to its origin. ..."

...and so on, for eight pages, in which there are just a few scattered sentences to set the scene in the museum and provide background on the three friends. (Weiss uses paragraph breaks only to divide sections, which are the only divisions within each part.)

And here's a brief interlude in the discussion of painting towards the end:

"But, asked Ayschmann, did you not always feel your disadvantage vis-à-vis the people who could pursue their studies unhindered. His words knocked me out of an equilibrium that I had claimed I possessed. My education had no solid underpinnings, it was acquired through sporadic readings. I could not produce a so-called Gymnasium degree. On the other hand, I had legitimized myself by laboring in workshops, warehouses, factories. For an instant I was hostile toward Ayschmann, who had laid claim to an academic formation entirely as a matter of course. I felt rebellious against his world, but then I was ashamed of my reaction, for his question was premised on the idea of solidarity."

Abstractions in The Aesthetics of Resistance are grounded in the specifics of the narrator's experiences or in analysis of individual artworks and books; and the narrator's limited knowledge and personal perspective are consistently maintained. Fascism is an everpresent menace, but remains in the background: uniformed figures in a museum, triumphant Nazi propaganda on the radio, Franco's armies pressing in on the Spanish Republic. Similarly with the communist hierarchy: there's only a glimpse of the International Brigades' leader André Marty, the prosecutors in the Moscow Trials, or the military police.

A fifty page introduction by Fredric Jameson sets Weiss in the context of post-war German literature, provides details of his life and background, and offers a sometimes abstruse theoretical analysis. For most novels such an introduction would be overkill, but here it seems appropriate.

Elements of The Aesthetics of Resistance are autobiographical: Weiss was of the same generation as his narrator, his parents also left Czechoslovakia for Sweden (though they were bourgeois rather than working class), and he too was mentored by Hodann. Weiss was not a communist as a youth, however — his late conversion to Marxism came in the 1960s — and he didn't fight in Spain, so his narrator is perhaps a vision of himself as he might have been. The artistic explorations also reflect a mature sophistication; they are not plausibly those of a twenty-year old, working class autodidact or not. The other characters are mostly historical figures, but fictionalised: a glossary provides some brief biographical information on the more prominent of the many that appear.

It's an extraordinary achievement, with its sustained stylistic virtuosity and integration into narrative of art criticism, politics, and history. But The Aesthetics of Resistance is not a novel which will command a wide audience. This is not because of Weiss' style, which is much easier to read than initial impressions might suggest. The problem is that the work demands an interest, preexisting or nascent, both in the politics of left wing parties and movements in pre-WWII Germany and Europe and in the relationship of socialism and art, especially pictorial art.

Those who are prepared for that, or willing to be challenged, will find plenty in The Aesthetics of Resistance. It might perhaps inspire an interest in the Spanish Civil War, or open up new perspectives on painting.

Note: This work was originally published in 1975 as volume one of Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. The other two volumes have not yet been translated into English.

[Donald]

Instantly one of my favourite books. It took me a while to finish, partly because the wall-of-text presentation, partly because I stopped to think so often. Communist Party debates of the 1930's are structured as dialogues that give orthodoxy its best arguments, which makes the tension between positions wrenching. Combines the grand sweep of history with discussions of art and politics while inviting you to join in.

[Brodolomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stendal u 23. poglavlju „Parmskog kartuzijanskog manastira” tvrdi: „Politika u jednom književnom delu, to vam je pucanj pištolja usred nekog koncerta, nešto, grubo na šta čovek, međutim, ne može da ne obrati pažnju”. Koncert u Stendalovo vreme nije isto što i koncert 1975. godine kada izlazi prvi tom „Estetike otpora”. Nakon svih avangardnih i neoavangardnih lomova i težnji u muzici, pucanj usred koncerta u Vajsovo vreme nije više dugo „nešto grubo”. Shodno tome, ni politika nije nešto nedozvoljeno u umetnosti, posebno ako se uzme da nas je dvadeseti vek prisilio da u svemu vidimo politiku, čak i proglašenje nečega nepolitičnim postaje politički čin. U „Estetici otpora” je „političko” toliko kvasno nabujalao i otvoreno da je preklilo sve ono što se tradicionalno smatra sastavnim delovima romana: radnju, likove, prostor, vreme itd. U većini romana političko je nešto što je u pozadini, nešto što se iščitava, a kod Vajsa je obrnuto – političko u formi esejiziranih monologa je ono primarno, a u pozadini se nalaze zaplet, likovi, prostor i dr. E sad, možemo reći da roman esej postoji i pre, ali sagledano iz mog čitalačkog iskustva, sva druga dela tog tipa ne računaju da se istinski može iščitati široki zaplet u pozadini, dok se kod Vajsa može nadograditi prava epopeja o levici, radničkoj klasi i otporu protiv fašizma. Svi likovi – sa izuzetkom glavnog junaka naratora i njegovih roditelja – istorijske su ličnosti i odigrale su svoju ulogu u levoj politici u dvadestom veku. Vajs ne uključuje njihove biografije, ali negde računa da čitalac zna ko je Herbert Vener, Ervin Piskator, Karl Radek, Vili Mincenberg, Hans Kopi, Horst Hajlman i na desetine drugih (u trenucima kada se ne zna, hvala Guglu i Vikipediji jer bih bio izgubljen u ovoj šumi) te, taj široki broj imena beskrajno šire osnovni zaplet o neimenovanom proleteru iz Nemačke i njegovom odlazku u Španski građanski rat. A kada se svemu tome dodaju esejistički delovi o Brojgelu, Kafkinom Zamku, Danteovom Paklu, mitologiji, Goji, sukobima između komunista i socijaldemokrata, Majakovskom, Žeriku, Mencelu i ponajviše o Pergamskom žrtveniku (lajtmotivu romana), stiče se predstava kakav intelektualni džin je psiao ovu knjigu (Vajs je bio i vrhunski slikar, filmski režiser, grafički dizajner, dramski pisac i pesnik).

„Estetika otpora” je MOŽDA inspirisana Adornovim knjigama, ali ne toliko sadržajem koliko estetikom pisanja. U pitanju su čvrsti blokovi bez pasusa, sivi, intelektualni i asketski (da sam bio dizajener ovih korica, to bi bio isključivo minimalistički dizajn; naslov i ime autora na jednobojnoj pozadini). Sadržajem ovo je knjiga o pokušajima da se narativ o dominaciji i ekploataciji manjine nad većinom preobrati i preokrene, o ogorčenoj borbi protiv pasivnosti i težnji da se prigrli umetnost koja ti klasno ne pripada, a to Vajs čini tako što u glavnom toku razotkriva tajnu i skrivenu povest i istoriju umetnosti o onima koji su eksploatisani.

[W.D. Clarke]

Peter Weiss in the forthcoming NYRB:
The People’s Novel.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021...

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set amidst the rise of fascism in Germany and the Spanish Civil War, 'The Aesthetics of Resistance' follows not just the lives, the political work, and intellectual discussions of a young German communist and his militant comrades. The novel gives form to the development of the revolutionary party itself as its subject . . . by putting together a breathtaking mix of biographies of communists (both really-existing or otherwise), histories of the proletarian movements and the class struggles in Germany and Spain, powerful critiques of literary and artistic artifacts (from Heracles to Kafka to Picasso), and engaging discussions on the formation of a revolutionary aesthetics and culture.

'The Aesthetics of Resistance' does not only follows the development of a revolutionary consciousness on politics, history, art, literature, and culture as forged in the personal experiences and collective struggles of the protagonists but moreover depicts the broad sweep of history . . . the creeping sense of danger amidst the assaults of Hitler and Franco, the debates and difficulties of advancing the correct line and forging unity within the proletarian and anti-fascist fronts, as well as the persistance of solidarity, courage, and hope among the oppressed and those who struggle by their side.

Peter Weiss' magnus opus continues to be relevant not only as a testament to the high formal qualities that an overtly Marxist literary work can achieve. More importantly, the proletarian struggles amidst the dark night of the fascist onslaught in the 1930s referred to artistically by Weiss gives us hope today of the possibility of overcoming another dark period when global capitalism seems to reign unchallenged.

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional book. One may have read the histories, but The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one feel as having lived them. Weiss offers a history of Germany and the international conflict in Spain leading up to the Second World War, but also an ageless revolutionary tract from the perspective of the working class. And even the breathless efforts of the author to understand and act as reflected in the form of the novel:

"And how should writing even be possible for us, I asked myself during my father’s account. If we could grasp anything of the political reality we lived in, how might this flimsy, dwindling material, which could be obtained only in dribs and drabs, every be converted into a written page with a claim to continuity. Tranquil and persistent research and reflection were beyond our reach. The events thronging in on us forced us to gain insights that became fierce reactions. They could lead to actions, but they could not be rounded off, could not yield an overall view. They always had to remain fragmentary, had to be torn apart, wiped away by newly surfacing demands: (p.117).

[Harris]

I think the question I'm always asking of novels is "what else can a novel be?" There are plenty of books that answer that question, but Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance is, so far, one of my favorite answers to that question.

The majority of the book, the analysis of various artists up to the 1930s, made me aware of how much I've missed art and museums since the pandemic began. The rest of this volume follows the narrator to Spain where he engages in the Spanish civil war and discussions about the history of various revolutions throughout civilization.

I wanna put all my favorite quotes down here, but Weiss meanders so much while he writes and each bit of the book that I found especially compelling just continued on and on tying an observation about a painting to the proletariat's place in space and time related to the painting, then to something Heracles did, and then to something Rosa Luxembourg said...or something like that.

"The struggle for our art...must simultaneously be a struggle to overcome petty Bourgeois learnings."

After an incredible reading of Kafka's The Castle:
"Breughel and Kafka had painted world landscapes, thin, transparent, yet in earth tones, their images were both shiny and dark, they seem massive, heavy on the whole, glowing, overly distinct in their minutiae. Their realism was placed in villages and regions that were instantly recognizable yet eluded anything previously seen, everything was full of the sensibility, full of the gestures, feelings, actions of everyday life, everything was typical, demonstrating important, central things, only to seem exotic, bizarre at the very same moment."

"Picasso had unequivocally expressed the impossibility of doing justice to other people's experiences, his own perceptions, his subjective association were all he relied on. His goal was not to list the number of bombs dropped, of houses destroyed, of people wounded or killed. Those figures could be read elsewhere. He waited till the clouds of smoke, of dust had lifted, till the mourning and screaming had faded. Only then, for himself, when he was all alone with the surface of the canvas, did he ask himself what Guernica was, and only when it took shape before his eyes, as an open city, as a city of defenseless inhabitants, did it become the tremendous reminder of afflictions, the kind that could still come."

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

a pretty monumental achievement. a dense and richly layered examination of revolutionary politics, thought, art, and experience. mostly follows a young german worker in 1930s who, together with his friends, teach themselves how to think and appreciate art and literature and figure out how to participate in the historical task of the working class emancipating itself from capitalism. part one in germany. part two in spain during the civil war.

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some works: 1) give you the impression that you’re reading the best book ever written while reading them 2) feel as though they weren’t so much written by a person but rather delivered from on high through some kind of mystical intervention. This one does both!

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A masterful first dozen pages, followed by another strong 70... then off a cliff into the abyss that is Communist/Marxist bullshit... and finally ending with a somewhat redeeming bit about Guernica.

Weiss is successful, effective, and original only when using art (and to a lesser extent, Ancient Greece) to thrust the narrative. While he 'painstakingly' researched the history of the narrative, Weiss evidently put little emphasis on economic understanding, all too apparent with laughable anti-Capitalist arguments. I seriously contemplated writing all of my objections in the margins but quickly realized it would've taken a month to finish the damn thing.

Pages 1-80: 4.5 stars
Pages 81-316: 2 stars

All you Marxists will eat this up. For everyone else, read the first 80 pages or so and toss it.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever had a book slap you on the ass? If not, read this book.

[draxtor · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read this insanely detailed and contextualized analysis of the rise of fascism in the 1920s/30s, from a working class perspective, the 3 part novel first published in 1975, to read pages upon fascinating pages on the role of art in class struggle, to read a richly textured account of the unnamed protagonist's time in the Spanish Civil War, the betrayal of the cause ...

... to be immersed in the recounting of centuries of destruction and exploitation of laborers so that a small powerful elite could thrive and live in splendor and then be rewarded by recognition until (as they wished) the end of time.

To read about in-fighting between leftists, distrust (warranted!!) between communists and social-democrats, marginalization of anarchists for different reasons by both of the above.

To read all this in freaking 2025 (when everyone online is discussing Paul Thomas Anderson's riff on Pynchon's "Vineland" called "One Battle After Another" - which might be a good film, when Pynchon himself comes to mind because of similar scope to Weiss and because of his pessimistic/realistic oeuvre's throughline of the powerful always winning against the proletariat) ...

To read this penultimate working class novel: I am stunned, my brain is going 200 miles per hour, I am looking at the art mentioned in the book, I am prepping for part 2 and 3 (as my 22 y/0 son says "Dad, you promised we will read Tad Williams' 'Otherland' together in November!!").

To read this dense text in an age of dis/mis/over-information, of AI, of entertaining ourselves to death, of INFINITE JEST = I am so glad that this novel came to me and said "READ ME NOW, YOUR SON CAN WAIT A FEW DAYS, THE NEW PYNCHON CAN WAIT A FEW WEEKS, READ ME NOW!!"

[Matt T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Working Class Masons

‘Just as my father had always laid claim to accessing the cultural goods, so too he had insisted that he owned the things surrounding him at work. Art and literature were means of production, just as the tools and machines were. His life was one long straining to get beyond the demarcation line that had been drawn. At the factory, colleagues could sometimes poke fun at him, even call him an eager beaver, when they found him taking excessive care of the machine, when he thought about technological improvements. The fact that we were abused, he said, should not make us view our labour purely as constraint and drudgery so that we were led by reluctance and recalcitrance. Just as we would be lost if we did not appropriate the contents of books and pictures, so too we would perish if we did not already regard every piece of equipment in the plant, every object we produced as our assets. If someone then said that my father was deluding himself since our labour benefitted others and not us, he would pull himself up, first mutely turn his broad, bony face towards the speaker, and then, with his restrained persuasiveness, he would reply that all he saw around him was that we were preparing to seize power.’ (308)

One of those works which makes you wish you’d read it sooner, Peter Weiss’s ‘The Aesthetics of Resistance’ is an unabashedly partisan intervention into epic history told from the perspective of the working classes, beginning with an extended ekphrasis on the Pergamon frieze and concluding with the fall of the Spanish Republic to the fascists, who would continue to hold onto power for a further thirty years in exchange for ‘remaining neutral’ during WWII. The novel is philosophically propelled through a pursuit of the dialectic between artistic liberation and the sadistic cruelty of 'arbeit macht frie'; somehow, the progressive emancipation of the labour-force is both necessary subject and form for revolutionary art, even if such a claim may have been more plausible when the avant-garde was of a piece with the political vanguards of the left, futurism and socialist realism notwithstanding.

If, upon learning that Weiss himself was the bourgeois son of a businessman, we can see how the protestant work ethic (viz spirit of capitalism) is transformed into the devout puritanical struggle of the young communist ciphers, then better this idealisation than the usual melodrama of swaggering brutes and vulgar passions and drunkenness and virile displays of cruelty. While not an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense, Weiss is convincing in his understanding of the deprivations and everyday violence of being in a physically threatening and destructive work milieu, where machines which expel metal dust can rip off an arm or a scalp, whose regimen slowly strangles the worker, and where the loss of such work would mean total destitution, and so explicit resistance is rarely an option. Besides, one must use the opportunities available. Such skills will be needed in the coming takeover.

Like Rancière’s ‘Proletarian Nights’, we also get a vivid sense of the exhaustion and yet immense drive and dignity of those committed workers who stole the nights to study, certain that they must conquer culture so much as arms if they wanted to win. But Weiss would have us believe these workers were in some senses better off than their bourgeois peers when it came to study: the average middle class works in only one register, and, given the condescensions of poverty tourism and NGOpia, only the worker supposedly has the capacity for both practical action and theoretical reflection.

If all of this sounds somewhat unconvincing and draws on antiquated leftist registers, then that is a testament to Weiss’s ability to bring the reader directly into the problems and dilemmas of young communists of the 1930s as if they were still alive. In the process, he provides a strident rationale for commitment whilst simultaneously exposing the myriad of compromises and complicities activists had to endure daily for the cause they will die for. We have the narrator’s father who supports the German Social Democratic Party even after their role in the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, we have the communist betrayal of the anarchists in the Spanish International Brigades, and the defence of the Soviet Union, which, in Frederic Jameson’s phrase, was ‘both unavoidable and impossible’ after the Moscow show-trials and the subsequent executions of some Lenin’s closest comrades. If nothing else, Weiss brings to light how the struggle for revolutionary consciousness involved a certain kind of faith in that grand narrative of worker’s liberation, a faith which was as much built on hermeneutic interpretation of media, landscape, gesture and expression as belief in Marxism as a rational empirical science of what could be.

In form, ‘The Aesthetics of Resistance’ is written in dense un-paragraphed blocks which serve as a visual analogue for the necessity to maintain focus and discipline on the barricades before dissipation sets in and the struggle begins anew. Such ‘blocks’ of concatenated historically researched prose have likely filtered through to the anti-enjambment ‘blocks’ of contemporary poetry in the works of Sean Bonney, Verity Spott and Danny Hayward, about which Keston Sutherland effectively theorised in his lecture on ‘Blocks since the Crash’. If, at times, the novel reads like a literary equivalent of a Straub-Huillet film, then what’s most unique is its thoroughgoing employment of the rhetorics of ekphrasis and parrhesia to argue in practice for what is to be done. After reading, you will be left with a paranoiac’s intensity in your attempts to decipher encrypted media hieroglyphs for class struggle, while knowing interpretation is not enough, no matter how sincere.

[Annie Schmitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Particularly enjoyed Weiss' interpretation of the Castle

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely on track to be becoming one of the key texts of my life. Weiss published this just as U.S./E.U. neoliberalism was becoming hip around the world (he finished Part 1 in 1975, a mere two years after the tragedy in Chile that we can mythologize as Year One of the brutal new world order), and so Weiss couldn’t have possibly predicted our current era of unfettered capitalist horror and greed, the capitalist modernism that creates political religious fundamentalisms. Surely, of course, he knew of it — capitalism and fascism, as the book proves, make comfortable bedfellows. Given the current outsourcing of human intelligence and the soul via artificial intelligence, this book’s deep consideration of the power and beauty of art as a means of resisting total annihilation makes it, as the movie posters say, “bigger, better, and bolder than ever before.”

If you want the vulgar advertising copy, this is basically a left-wing IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. Not that Proust’s book wasn’t political or on the side of reaction, but that Weiss’s stealth sequel (“15 years later” could’ve been the title card tacked on to bridge the RECHERCHE and the AESTHETICS) takes a necessarily wider sweep of the history of memory, of time, of the class struggle (based primarily within Europe, but nods to Asia, Africa, Latin America are presented within the novel; Weiss is not pretending completion, and so he wisely sticks to what he knows: Europe; I would not ask anything more from him, he’s already doing a fuckton lol), and of the 20th century than poor Marcel ever could, since the sickly bastard had to go and conk out on us, Hitler and Stalin a gleam in his eye. Yet like Proust, Weiss knows the real history of the world is not written by/through the big men, it’s not written by psychoanlayzing and fetishizing Napoleonic figures; history is written by the workers, the artists, the students, the common people trying to find dignity and hope for their beloveds — and, by extension, the human race.

Your patience will obviously be tested by this book, and you will be asked to soak in ekphrastic analyses of works of art for pages at a time (get ready to Google paintings by Géricault, Picasso, Munch, and Delacroix!), you will be tasked to read about a forgotten and unsung history of the anti-Stalinist left in the early half of the 20th century (particularly the fight for Spain’s soul — spoiler alert, the Fascists won the first battle, though not yet the war), you will be expected to read extremely long sentences in which the humble comma will be asked to do the work of God, there are hundreds of characters names who teach each other about history and life and fight the Fascists on the battlefield and all of them are real people thoroughly researched by Weiss except the working-class narrator who is a fictional creation of the middle-class Weiss, and there are no paragraph breaks for huge portions of the Novel to make you feel as if the world scales from small to big in the space of a breath. Phew. Big ask, innit!! This isn’t some hoity-toity modernist caprice (though it’s certainly a work worthy of the most expansive modernisms, of Duras and the Coltranes and Sembène and Cézanne and Woolf). This is to see how this book functions radically as an metaphorical unconscious of the 20th century. So much information hits you like tides in a choppy ocean, threatening to drown you, and your attention (in the TikTok regime of 2025) will be asked to brave that ocean sweep, and to, ultimately, come out with the ability to forge a narrative, not only to understand yourself, but to understand the world and the relationships forged by all the other people who died before you and made you who you are, and whom the fascistic powers-that-be would like you to pretend never existed.

In short: I’m only a third of the way through the novel (this is Volume 1 of 3, and the English translation of the last volume only came out in 2025), but I feel the surging joy I felt at the end of SWANN’S WAY. Now I’ve learned a text whose style and whose very manner of reading it is distressingly out of fashion, despite being of the utmost significance to our lives today. Needless to say, I’m ready for more. Thank you Holly for introducing me to this vast masterpiece.

[Roland Hassel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ganska makalös, i sin ambition, i sitt omfång, och känner en stor och varm sympati till vad Weiss vill göra, men framförallt, en oerhörd melankoli; mer än en filosofisk/politisk text eller en historisk text, en text om strävan, hopp, en väldig välvilja som sedan skulle drunkna i ett hav av ändlös svärta.

Sen är de 100+ sidorna om de interna stridigheterna hos dåtidens arbetarrörelse kanske inte jättreoliga.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kommunismens historie i Tyskland, borgerkrigen i Spania og hvordan alt dette relateres til kunst fortalt i en tankestrøm stil, helt utrolig opplevelse. Gleder meg til å lese volum 2 etterhvert!

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend mentioned this book to me, and described its conceit, and I immediately got it from the library and started a book club ex nihilo with some guy friends before reading a single word. I wasn't disappointed. For a book to be both technically sophisticated *and* committedly partisan in its socialist politics is a revelation. It makes you think all sorts of things about what a contemporary proletarian novel could be, what the aesthetics of resistance would be that was both cognizant of world socialist history, but also not bound to its more dogmatic views on literature. That is what is offered by the object of the book itself. What it talks about, the specific artistic and literary works that it critiques and analyzes, gives you an even more exciting glimpse into the possibilities of future radical art. We need only be equipped with the manifesto of dissatisfaction taken from the character of the book when he says "All these things may have been informative, stimulating, and perhaps also indicative of the future, but they did not chime with the totality we were striving for, instead they expressed traditional notions, conventions that ultimately did not renounce the standards of the dominant class."
The book is filled with these kinds of ungainly slogans and aphorisms, which I ate like candy. Make sure you peruse the index in the back which describes who all of the names actually are (apparently there are only like 3 fictional characters in the entire book filled to the brim with them). Also, as much as we all love Jameson, you can avoid the introduction, it's a healthy serving of baloney, including even one of his nerdy greimas squares, which I couldn't make heads of tails of.

[Rise · Rating 5 out of 5]

A group of students debating about art in the dialectical style of Plato. Squabbles and machinations between Social Democratic and Communist parties. The art and poetry of resistance, rebelling against the existing order, supplanting the prevailing thoughts with progressive notions, ideas. The first translated volume of a German trilogy, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, must already count among the high points of resistance art. It is difficult, stylish, philosophical, and Marxist. Novel is too limited a genre to describe its complex structures. One could consider it a hybrid of philosophical categories: a manual on Marxist literary criticism, a guide to the appreciation of proletarian art, a manifesto of aesthetic revolution, a treatise on the history and philosophy of political art. These categories provide the key words but lack the corrosive power of the text. Whatever literary species and genera it belongs to, this work of Weiss is a construct of profound inventiveness. It contains probably one of the best readings there is of The Castle by Franz Kafka and other artworks (paintings, sculptures, novels).

In transposing an actual event to the range of art, the painters had succeeded in setting up a monument to radical instants. They had shifted experience to their own present, and we, who saw each crystallization, brought it back to life. What was shown was always different than what it had emerged from, a parable was shown, a contemplation on something in the past. Things drifting by had become something lasting, freestanding, and if it possessed any realism, that was because we were suddenly touched by it, moved.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although a didactic novel, and so out of fashion these days, I enjoyed being taken along by this engagement with the cultural politics of class from a Marxian perspective. And the idea of interrogating the more or less classical (Kantian) idea of the aesthetic and its relevance to working class people’s lives is still important today, even if class structure is very different and the theoretical means (i.e. Bourdieu’s post-structuralism has relevance here to Weiss’ assumption of an underlying Kantian position on the aesthetic) have expanded and become refined. But the novel loses focus on aesthetic questions in its, although good, descriptions of the fractional fighting amongst socialists and communists and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. It only belatedly returns to address the aesthetic dimension toward the novel’s end. Is this novel still relevant? Not sure, but for someone of the left and of the ‘boomers’ generation it has great nostalgic appeal – those (ideas) were the days…

[Paul Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose in any language doesn't get much better than the Peter Weiss's intro to the first volume of Aesthetics. Weiss, best known for the Murat-Sade, describes a walk through the Pergamum Museum in Berlin, setting up his three volume elegy to the lost Popular Front.

Huh?

Anne Popadic, borrow a copy from Terry Ford and ask him if he's finished it yet.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an interesting (and, I am sure, important) book, but I found it way too dense and obtuse. No chapters, no paragraphs, just one 300-plus page run-on sentence of sorts. I think I do not have enough tough Germanic blood at present to be able to fully appreciate this book.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, this the worst book i've ever read and i hope to never read anything this dull ever again

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you parse a left-wing political militant's involvement with thinking about art, especially art from the deep eras (as all it seems are) of reactionism? Do we heave the past from the steamship of modernity and start again? Do we fall into the trap of Socialist Realism, another benevolent approved product of the Workers' State for the Good Party Member to enjoy after a long day at the blast furnace? Or do we find a way to suit art and its long historical afterlife to our needs? And then what of those famously vanished left-oppositionists in the artists' ranks--what novels are we lacking in this world in the vein of the projects laid out and unfinished by the likes of Pilnyak and Mayakovsky? Of Babel? Was there really a way to create an art of the revolutionary moment that lived up its stated aspiration?

Weiss, beginning in a long ekphratic meditation on the strangely real Pergamon Altar in a Berlin Museum, essentially finds the hidden european novel of the 20th century (that I always felt like had to exist) within this ancient root of Western civilization. It is a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the historical and aesthetic past as a means of understanding the ways we can move forward within the political and politicizing present. There is here a sort of metacommentary insofar as the characters attempt to see their way through the haze of the oncoming Second World War and Holocaust, something they intuit due to their general opposition to fascism, but also something that they cannot really see (the novel begins in 1937 when so much remains unfinished)--while they look to the past of art- and world-history, we look to their now-historical partisan struggle within Europe against fascism's rot, and so we worry for them knowing what they don't quite yet know: just how fucking bad it's about to get.

Remarkably, this strange late-modernist project is really-late modernist, written between the mid-70s until the early-80s. The prose is great, an excellent translation, and there are some very funny if understated jokes and recurring metacommentary (e.g., Our narrator's stated departure for the Spanish Civil War within the first five or so pages ends up so deferred that some hundred-twenty odd pages in we find him on a train to France [in order perhaps at last to sneak into Spain] reading Kafka's The Castle and commenting on how finally he has found a real proletarian novel, one that understands the minutiae of just what his life really feels like). Similar stylistically in its way to Musil or Szentkuthy in the long insertions of essay-like conversations that pass between the floating figures among often dark cities in the throes of political collapse, it can drag at times, but it seems to not really be so concerned with the arguments in their particulars as much as in their sweep. After a long section of conversation between the narrator and the phantasmagoric image of his father on the topic of the failed November Revolution in all its intra-party yearslong dramatic fallout, his father concludes a thorny bogged down monologue essentially saying "if I were a young person who had the option to go shoot at the Fascists, I too would find that preferable."

Perhaps my biases show in that I am happy Weiss everywhere seems to tacitly endorse the anarchists--whether in Spain, Russia, or Germany, and how the distrust placed in them by the larger hegemon of Communist organizing is what really did perhaps seal the fate of Europe to the Fascist creep, and that perhaps it need not have been this way. The power of this novel (at least within the first volume) is that is does manage to square the circle and show us an illuminated slice of left-oppositionism to all official histories, whether of art or of politics, and does so gracefully even while inundating us as readers with dread. The writing on art here, always within the guise of conversation or interior musing, is truly unparalled and feels like it is giving you an arts education while it's giving you a political one. Dogmatists of all stripes will shrink before it, but perhaps in resistance to inherited truth we truly reap the greatest knowledge.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Weiss, on his birthday November 8
Surrealist-Absurdist narratives of Kafka-esque nightmares, the theatrical techniques of Brecht, Artaud, Ionesco, and Beckett, and a prose aesthetic developed from Genet, Robbe-Grillet, and Queneau, with a vast intellect and command of history and culture; Peter Weiss has created treasures of world literature and theatre whose power to motivate change and transform meaning will endure forever.
The great and stunning play and film Marat/Sade is an apex achievement and immortal classic of the theatre. Also, the music for the Brooks production is a masterpiece in itself.
Peter Weiss' magnum opus is The Aesthetics of Resistance, a thousand page historical novel of the fight for freedom, both against the Nazis and later the Communists. Only the first of the three volumes have been translated into English; hopefully this will change, but its more fun to read books in their original languages if one can. In it he argues that art prolifically generates new forms of resistence to authority, having a defensive function like a shell protecting our humanity. His many critical passages on art and literature are insightful and enliven this three volume Proustian work.
The story begins with the missing figure of Hercules in the Pergamon frieze, and three men who begin a conversation about it in 1937 Berlin, then recounts and examines the lives of hundreds of historical figures throughout all of Europe, encompassing the war and beyond. It's been compared to Ulysses as a sea of words, and is among the most important novels of the Second World War and European history in general, but its also some of the most compelling writing about the value and meaning of art, literature, and culture I've ever read.
The Investigation records the testimony of the Auschwitz War Crimes Tribunal as observed by the author, who wrote this play from the actual evidence. Constructed in eleven cantos and modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, it is a stark and chilling interrogation of guilt and responsibility, and the rhetoric used by the perpetrators to avoid confronting their own evil.
Holderlin portrays the iconic poet in a hallucinatory play of violence, maladaptive sexuality, class struggle, and a descent into madness. Among the characters are important and insightful portrayals of Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte, and the play contains a brilliant exposition of Holderlin's play Empedocles.
Shadow of the Coachman's Body, Trotski in Exile, Discourse On Vietnam,
and his revised stage adaptation of Kafka, The New Trial, are all wonderful.
In The New Trial, Peter Weiss has recast Joseph K as the lawyer for an ominous corporation, which exploits his idealism to mask its true intentions in a game of smoke and mirrors.

[Eran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Last night, a friend read poetry he was inspired to write after visiting an Egyptian exhibit on Museum Island in Berlin. His poems confronted the tyranny of the Pharaohs while recognizing their place in Berlin, home to one of the most notorious tyrants. The bust of Nefertiti is beautiful. The Pharaohs enslaved their people. I, too, notice these things. I lack the creativity and skill to confront these works with art of my own.

Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance opens with three young communists contemplating Berlin's most famous artifact, the Pergamon Altar. It has been under construction and repair for the decade I've lived in this city. What is a decade in the life of a 2,000 year-old altar? The three friends discuss the history of the altar, the frescoes depicted, the wars and plundering then times of peace which led to it being commissioned in the first place. The young men feel the altar's historical weight bearing down on them. Through their aesthetic analysis of fascism and beauty, they fight the growing oppression of the Nazi party. There isn't much else to the story. Just history, art, critique, the life of the mind under oppression.

This book is not pleasant to read and is tangled and difficult. Weiss isn't fond of commas nor paragraphs nor chapters. It's not a novel in any normal sense. It's a form of art holding the line. It shows what can be done when physical resistance seems out of reach. We still have our minds, our conversation, our analysis, our freedom to create and to wonder and to argue with one another.

[jq · Rating 5 out of 5]

"All they have is stones, said Coppi's mother, to defend themselves against armored and heavily armed opponents, they kneel, crawl, shatter, and fall into torn-up asphalt, the targets of water cannon, gas grenades, and machine guns." (44)

"Luxemburg, on the verge of physical collapse, still nurtured some hope of a final, instinctive advance of energy, driven by the pent-up revolutionary tension, it was this vision, said my father, that she, like the rest of us, kept alive, and a few weeks later we were fighting only to avenge her death, pushing any other thoughts from our minds, in the desperate satisfaction that the courage to perform revolutionary acts was preferable to submission." (98)

In Spain: "we walked along the thicket, in the softened earth, grayish-violet mossy plants blossomed here, as late as November, were called romero, wild asparagus grew between the root of trees, it tasted bitter, the swarms of tiny mosquitoes smoldered up, hung motionless overhead for a while, then, with a sudden swerve, fled across the river and then back again into the overgrown woodland." (217)

On Picasso: "I found it immediately comprehensible that the destruction of Guernica should take place on the square tiles of a kitchen floor." (296)

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es increíble, realmente no pasa nada, lo leí en las reviews antes de comprarlo y es cierto: lo que sucede en la novela se puede resumir en menos de 10 páginas. El esfuerzo titánico y político por condensar una política estética, una idea de hacer futuro que tiene que ver con la creación y recepción de la cultura en el mundo. Ese es el tema, pero lo curioso es que no es un ensayo, no son largas diatribas puramente filosóficas sino que la narración está imbricada en la reflexión de una manera extraña y maravillosa en la que de una revolución a otra, de una disputa política a otra, la vida y el arte se van abriendo paso. Esto solo son las primeras 300 páginas de una obra de más de 1000, pero merece la pena asomarse a ver este mundo, que es uno posible.

[Alicia]

“For our efforts to conquer art and literature could have no other purpose than to strengthen the togetherness of people who had so far sensed only their isolation” (159)

The thesis that art plays a central role in political struggle, specifically to help the working class understand how and why to resist oppression, is exactly what I love about art. I have an endless list of empowering quotes from this book and wholeheartedly agree with its politics. At the same time, it was the most demanding book to read, and much of its “plot” remained skimmer over/un-comprehended. Embarrassing how poor my reading comprehension felt!