Direnmenin Estetiği

The Aesthetics of Resistance #1-3

by Peter Weiss, Çağlar Tanyeri (Translator), Turgay Kurultay (Translator)

Almanya’da politik tiyatronun bir altbaşlığı olarak alınabilecek “belgesel tiyatro”nun öncülerinden ve teorisyenlerinden biri olan Peter Weiss, Direnmenin Estetiği’nde, 1937-1944 yılları arasındaki anti-faşist direnişi ve bu direnişin içinde yer alan gerçek kişilerin öykülerini/yaşantılarını merkez alarak, isimsiz bir Ben Anlatıcı’nın (sınıf bilincine sahip aydın bir işçinin) bakış açısıyla, tarihi, Antik Yunan’dan bu yana sanat ve siyaset düzlemlerinde yeniden kuruyor.

Direnmenin Estetiği gerçekliğin verilerinden yararlandığı için belgesel ve tarihsel, yazarının yaşamına göndermeleri olduğu için otobiyografik, metne giren parçaları kendine özgü bir biçimde yorumladığı ve birleştirdiği için kurmaca, metinde belirsiz bir imkân olarak yansıyan bir kurtuluş fikri bıraktığı için ütopik, yandaşı olduğu dünya görüşü karşısında eleştirel olduğu için yeniden kurucu, kullandığı farklı anlatım biçimleriyle hem belgesel-gerçekçi hem gerçeküstücü, Batı kültürünün siyasi tarihi ve sanat tarihiyle metinler üzerinden tartıştığı için metinlerarası ve kültür birikimini yeniden yorumladığı için ufuk açıcı özellikler taşıyan çok katmanlı bir derya metin.

Genres: Fiction, Roman, Literature, German Literature, Art, Novels, Unfinished

847 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

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...

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Reviews

[Deniz Urs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katman katman açılan; sanata, edebiyata, savaşa, uygarlık tarihine, ideolojilere, insana dair ne varsa diyalektik bir bakış açısı sunan devasa bir yarı-gerçek kurmaca.
Kâh MÖ. İspanya coğrafyasındaki bir kıyıda portakal bahçelerindesiniz kâh MS. 1400’lerde İsveç’in derebeylerinin ve yeni yeni filizlenen burjuvalarının çatışmasında kâh anlatılan zaman olan 1937-1944 aralığındaki sosyalizm- faşizm mücadelesinde. Ama hepsi de bir noktada aynı süreçleri işaret etmekte..Olgular, olaylar karşıtına dönüşmekte. Bir bütün içindeki homojenler heterojenleşmekte.

Katmanlar açıldıkça sosyalizmin kendi içindeki ve uluslararası arenadaki iktidarlar ile olan çatışmaları,faşizmin baskısı ve iktidarın doğası gereği daha da artar. Kitap bir sanat eserindeki çatışma imgelerinin tasviriyle sizi alıp,birden bir başka dönemdeki somut bir çatışmayı bu imgeler üzerinden önünüze seren kurgusuyla tam bir başyapıt.

[Burak Uzun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Weiss abimiz İşçi Hareketi'ne doğru Yunan Mitolojisi'nden başlayarak sanat, tarih, siyaset ve sorgulama ile yoğrulmuş bir yolda yürüyor ve bunu roman tekniğini kullanarak yapıyor.

Bence bir roman olmanın ötesinde mükemmel bir tarih, eşsiz bir toplum-sanat eleştirisi kitabı.

Ayrıca okurken sizi farklı kitaplara yönlendiriyor. İster istemez mevzuya hakim olmak için o kitapları da okumuş olmanız gerekiyor. Mesela bir bölümde Elias Canetti'nin Körleşme'si üzerinden işçi sınıfının okurluğu ile Körleşme'nin ana karakteri Kien'in okurluğunu karşılaştırıyor.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ein schweres Stück Arbeit- für den Autor wie für den Leser. Die Lektüre lohnt: eine spannende und mitreißende Darstellung der Widersprüche der Arbeiterbewegung.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

WARNING This review contains some mild spoilers.

ADVISORY This review contains language that might be offending to fascists.

DISCLAIMER I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party (or any other political party for that matter).

This book is long. After Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream, Karl Ove Knausgård’s sixth and final volume of Min Kamp, and Witold Gombrowizc’s Diaries, Peter Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance was the fourth book with more than one thousand pages that I finished this year. And it’ll be the last of this kind for a while (that is up until another one finds me). I don’t know if there is a list of German literature equivalent to the one of the fourteen independent mountains higher than eight thousand meters that every serious mountaineer has to climb, but if there is such a list, and this novel isn’t on it, the list isn’t much good. This book blew me away. It took me the better part of one month to read it through. But it was a time well spent. The feeling that I had right after I finished was similar to the one I had after I read the Man Without Qualities. It’s a feeling of being part of something big, something of great importance. In my review of the Man Without Qualities, which, by the way, should also be on the above list, I compared Musil’s work with a mountain. With the Aesthetics of Resistance the image of the sea comes to mind. It’s not that hard to make progress once your floating and it is certainly easier than climbing Musil’s steep sentence slopes. Nevertheless it takes some courage and stamina to set out to sea. It is what I like to call a breakers novel. What I’m trying to say is, that, in order to reach the open sea and get to explore distant shores, you first have to pull through the surf, the waves the book is throwing at the readers at the start. I experienced this before. Especially with long books some authors seem to like scaring away readers to make sure that the ones who stay with the book believe in it more firmly. This also means, and now I’m talking to you, dear fascists, who happen to read this review, that this book is not for you. You better stay away from the Aesthetics of Resistance. You wouldn’t understand most of what Peter Weiss is talking about anyway. Culture, art, and literature are not exactly your forte, is it? Find salvation elsewhere. What I mean by this is: fuck the hell off. And don’t let the blurb of the English edition fool you when it says that the novel “dramatizes anti-fascist resistance.” This isn’t true. If anything, you can call it a dramatization of fascist resistance. Or, if you like that term better, anti-fascist assistance.

The unnamed first person narrator is a young man and we first get to meet him and two of his friends at the Pergamon Museum where the three of them discuss the world famous frieze, whose fragments were brought to Berlin by Carl Humann at the end of the nineteenth century, and which shows the divine struggle between the Giants and the Olympian Gods in Greek mythology. It’s the twenty-second of September nineteen thirty-seven and the narrator just turned twenty. He’s the son of a worker, who is a former member of the socialist party, and so are his friends whose names are Coppi and Heilmann. Admittedly I didn’t know much about the resistance movement of the communists and socialists against the Nazis prior to reading this book, and my knowledge of the development of the worker’s movement in Germany was also rather small. But that has changed somewhat. In the first part of the first volume of the novel a whole lot of white spots were colorized for me (painted red if you like), and that is through discussions and sometimes arguments between the narrator and his father. He tells his son about the time in Bremen were the family first lived, and about the short-lived state called the “Bremen Soviet Republic” which existed for only twenty-five days in 1919. The father was part of the revolt, which cost the lives of over eighty people, and he has the scars to prove it. This part of the book was the breaker for me and I had to force my way through it. But it wasn’t high winds or forceful waves that were hindering my attempts. It felt more like being stuck in a slump from which there seem to be no way out. I felt an inner refusal to read on, but, luckily, I didn’t succumb to those feelings. Every calm will end eventually and no fight (if reading a book like this can be considered one) was ever won by giving up. Early on it is already suggested that the narrator will soon go to Spain to support the International Brigades there in their fight against the Spanish fascists under Franco. So that was what I was anticipating. That’s what was promised. And that’s what was delivered in the second part of volume one. But don’t expect a classical war novel at this point. The narrator, having a little experience in medical techniques due to a short term at a med school in Berlin, is not sent to fight in battle, but rather to a field hospital hinterland, behind the front lines. There he meets Max Hodann, a German physician, sex educator, and socialist, who fled Germany in nineteen thirty-three, a character I liked right away and who will re-appear multiple times in the course of the entire novel. I found out, more or less by chance, that Hodann (whose nickname “Hodenmaxe” I cannot translate without spoiling the joke) was a real person, so I also looked up other characters from the book, and it turned out almost all of them were real. The only invented characters, as far I could see, are the narrator himself and his parents, although the narrator shares some of Peter Weiss’ biography, but not enough that I would call this a fictionalized biography. In addition to Hodann the narrator meets a whole lot of other people from different countries that made up the International Brigades, like Norwegian writer Nordahl Grieg, German resistance fighter Karl Mewis, who later became a high ranking politician in the German Democratic Republic, or war correspondent Lise Lindbæk who lived with Hodann at that time, to name but only a few. Alas, he neither meet Ernest Hemingway nor George Orwell. The men and women of the International Brigades have very different political backgrounds. There are, for example, members of the Comintern, the Communist International, who advocate world communism. There are “ordinary” communists, Trotskyists, socialists, radicals, anarchists, leftist intellectuals and who knows how many more of the “fifty shades of red” as I like to call them. To all, the goal is to defeat fascists, first in Spain, but then also in other countries including Germany. Reaching this goal, however, is hindered by the growing distrust between the different factions, which in the course of time rises to the point of open hostility. No one is trusting anyone else, and everyone is determined to implement their respective ideology after a successful battle against fascism as the victorious alternative. There are some passages worth reading about this form of “self-deprecation” as the characters gather around the fire in the hospital’s meeting hall. This inner struggle was also one of the reasons for the disbandment of the International Brigades in October nineteen thirty-eight. The soldiers were ordered out of Spain in a relatively short time, and many of them, being stripped of their citizenship by their home countries, were now stateless. The narrator cannot go back to Germany. One can assume he will be arrested by the Gestapo on entering the country, so he ended up being stranded. This is, roughly speaking, where the first volume ends. There is, however, another aspect of great importance that needs to be mentioned, and that is the Aesthetics part of the book’s title. In addition to the “calm” parts where the sails were lolling there were also some rather stormy parts that I read in some kind of frenzy and didn’t want to end. Herein Peter Weiss lets his narrator experience several different paintings and draw conclusions from those. You could say the narrator learns and builds up his conscience and character by looking at art pieces that were painted long ago (or not so long ago in the case of Guernica). The most memorable one, to me, was Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. The narrator and a friend called Ayschmann (I’m not sure whether this character is fictional or not), discover a reproduction of the painting in an art magazine. The reception of The Raft of the Medusa, the discussion, description, interpretation, and illumination of the background of this painting and of the painter’s biography, the discussion of Picasso’s Guernica, of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People”, and one by Bruegel called The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, which is discussed in tandem with Kafka’s novel The Castle, is worth the price of the book alone, in my opinion. If you ever decide to read it I urge you to look up high quality reproductions of said paintings on the internet to make it easier to follow the characters’ observations – it’s truly fascinating. And it’s also no big surprise given the fact that Peter Weiss was not only a writer and playwright, but also a gifted painter and graphic artist, as you can tell by looking at one of his own painting called Die Maschinen greifen die Menschen an (The Machines attack the Humans, which is not featured in the book).

So that’s it, in a nut shell, what I wanted to say about the first volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance. I deliberately left out quite a few topics and you also have to consider that I usually don’t recognize quite a few more in a work as thorough and complex as this. It’s an exceptional piece of literature in its very own way and I hope some of you will check it out and share some thoughts. Unfortunately only the first volume, about thirty-seven percent of the whole novel, has been translated into English and I cannot say if or when the other two volumes will be translated. The translator, Joachim Neugroschel, sadly passed six years ago, and I imagine it’s hard to find a replacement who is up to the task, after John E. Woods went to retirement.

(Perhaps, I will continue this review someday, with my thoughts on volumes two and three)




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Demet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simdiye kadar olan okurluk tarihime okurken en zorlandigim, bir o kadar keyif aldigim, bol bol arastirma yapmak zorumda biraktigi gibi onumde bircok pencere acan bir kitap olarak gecti "direnmenin estetigi".

Sayet ikinci dunya savasi oncesi almanyanin politik durumu, sovyet rusya, ispanya ic savasi, komintern ile ilgili bilginiz varsa bosluklari politik anlatisiyla ince ince dolduruyor. Yazarimizin biz ile basladigi anlatisinin ben'e nasil evrildigini ve neden evrildigini de anlama firsatiniz oluyor bir nevi bu politik anlati ile.

Ama bu kitapta -yine sahsi bir yorum olacak- benim en etkilendigim yerler yazarin sayfalarca uzun uzun anlattigi sanat eserleri ve onlara bakis acisi oldu. Bircok resim eserinden, bircok kitaptan, heykelden orneklerle kitapta estetige ve sanata bakis acilarindaki farklilasmayi da gorme firsatimiz oluyor; ki bu kisim oldukca etkileyici. Bertol Brechtli bolumler ise akmiyor, tam brechtvari karmasa mi desek bilemedim :)

Bu zorlu kitabi okurken 1 gunde 10 sayfa okudugum zamanlari sansli saydim; bitirene kadar zorlandim ama bitirdikten sonraki keyif ise baska oldu. Son oneri olarak ise "direnmenin estetigi"ni kaliteli zaman ayirabileceginiz bol bol google aramasi yapacaginizi bilerek ekipmanlarinizin da tam oldugu bir zamanda okuyun; ben bir tasinma seruveni ve zorlu bir mesai ardinda okuyarak tam hakkini verebildim mi diye ara ara soruyorum kendime.

[Mehmet B · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Kültür bir karşı koyuştur, başkaldırıdır."

[Marion · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich habe sehr lange überlegt, wie ich dieses Buch bewerten soll und es ist eher eine 3,5.
Es ist eigentlich überhaupt kein Roman. Die Ramenhandlung ist die Geschichte eines Mannes, der Teil der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung ist, als Teil der internationalen Brigaden im spanischen Bürgerkrieg ist und anschließend im schwedischen Exil untertaucht.
Der allergrößte Teil des Buchs besteht aus theoretischen und kritischen Betrachtungen der Lage in Deutschland und der Frage, wie es zum faschistischen Regime kommen konnte und was danach noch kommen kann. Ein weiterer Aspekt bezieht sich dann tatsächlich auf künsterlische Ästhetik und der Betrachtung von Kunstwerken aus proletarischer Perspektive bzw. der Frage, welche Kunst das Proletariat selbst schaffen kann.
Zusammengesetzt ist diese Geschichte aus einzelnen Biographien von Menschen, die der Autor trifft, viele davon fiktiv, andere (z.B. Brecht, von Ossietzky) real.
Die Thematik ist interessant und einige Passagen haben eine ungeheure Wucht, andere Passagen, in denen Menschen spazieren gehen und sich über irgendwas unterhalten, ziehen sich hingegen manchmal sehr. Und es gibt viele solcher Passagen.
Das Buch ist interessant und auf seine Art auch faszinierend, aber bei weitem kein unterhaltsamer Roman, das sollte man wissen.

[Yasemin Salihoglu Karagul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kitabı bitirmem 4 yılımı aldı. Itiraf etmeliyim ki entellektüel birikimim bu kitap icin yeterli degilmis bu sebeple kitaptan 20 sayfa okuduktan sonra hazmetmem 20 günümü alıyordu. Gerek sanat, gerek edebiyat, gerek politika gerekse tarih alanındaki bilgi birikimimi arttiran bir eserdi.
Ote yandan konunun derinliğinin yaninda yazi boyutunun kucuk olmasi ve bir paragrafin 10 sayfa sürmesi okumami zorlaştirdi.
Ne olursa olsun muthis bir eser, zaten bu eseri yorumlamak haddim degil.

Isimler, kitaplar, sehirler, olaylar ile kitabin arkasinda da yazdigi gibi cok katmanli derya deniz metin.
Okumam sirasinda sıkça google'a danıştım.
Mesela, 298-325 arasında anlatilan tablolari internetten arastirdigimda her bire hayran kaldım. Gerek eserler gerekse Peter Weiss'in tablolari yorumlamasi harika.

Zor bir metin kabul ama ayni zamanda olağanüstü bir metin ve mükemmel bir çeviri.

[Sebastian Schwark · Rating 5 out of 5]

a must read for anyone who wants to understand the pre-1989 west-european left.

[Anton Ruffen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastisch, als hätte jemand den Lichtschalter für eine sonst von einer nur alterschwachen Glühbirne beleuchtete Industriehalle der Geschichte gefunden! Die Mühe war es auf jeden Fall wert! :))))

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental. Ein Plädoyer für die befreiende und selbstermächtigende Natur von Kunst und Literatur. Und noch so viel mehr.

[Turicum · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Für mich, der ich noch keine feste Formen vor mir hatte, der ich nicht einmal ein Stück meines eigenen Wegs vor mir sah, war der Richtpunkt einer Gemeinsamkeit das einzig Haltbare."

Monumental book, both to read and to write. 1.2k pages and every single one could use some explanatory wikipedia pages and secondary literature. Sometimes it was way too slow and dense for my taste but where it is good, it is really really good. Will never read again in full but will definitely revisit in some way.

[Cecile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary book, not for the faint hearted. Dense, complex and challenging. A novel but much more than that, a treaty of philosophy, of politics, of history. Takes place in the 1930s and early 1940s, it is the story of resistants in Germany, written by a young narrator, his participation in the resistance in Germany, then the Spanish war, the exile in Sweden. It is about art, how art and resistance are linked, about the impossibility of organising a coordinated resistance for so many reasons (both practical and political), about the failure as well of individual initiatives, and the difficulty of pursuing art and education whilst being a manual worker, about despair when faced with some much evil. The ending is crushing, the parallel with the lack of hope and complete darkness that Europe and Germany went through during the Second World War.

[Michael H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dieses Buch habe ich vor langer Zeit gelesen. Ich kann mich noch daran erinnern, dass es einmal um die Reliefs auf dem Pergamon-Altar geht und um deren politische Bedeutung. Ein bemerkenswerter Buch. Schwer zu lesen, weil der Text nicht in Absätze eingeteilt ist.

[Graham George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Die Ästhetik des Widerstands is probably the most difficult book I've ever read, carefully portioning its 99 paragraph breaks across 1200 pages of run-on sentences and purposeful obfuscation. I can guarantee you that I wouldn't have made it far past the stunning analysis of the Pergamon Altar had I not been in a seminar focused solely on this work and its historical/art-historical reference points.

However, despite its intentional inaccessibility, the third volume pulled me in with a series of emotionally affecting vignettes that tie up the narrative (to the extent that there is one) in a way I had been seriously doubting it could.

I don't know if I can recommend this read without someone leading you through, Virgil-style, telling you all the names and dates to look up, and giving you materials like Weiss' incredible essay Meine Ortschaft or excerpts from Kafka's Der Schloss.

[Jaime · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Los iniciados, los especialistas, hablaban de arte, ensalzaban la armonía del movimiento, la intima compenetración de los gestos, pero los otros, los que ni siquiera conocían el concepto de cultura, clavaban la vista furtivamente en las fauces abiertas y sentían el golpe de la garra en la propia carne"

Una novela increíble, lastrada por una edición incompresiblemente mala en la versión de la editorial Hiru. De ahí mi baja puntuación. Pepitas de Calabaza se ha hecho con los derechos. Esperemos una edición como se merece y una revisión de la tradición de la tercera parte.

"Sabia lo rápido que el olvido se abatía una y otra vez sobre quienes habían muerto luchando. Así había sido con los revolucionarios después de la ultima guerra, y así ahora, al final de esta guerra, podría ocurrirles también a aquellos que habían llevado a la muerte su sigilo."

[draxtor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished (in German), mind-blown, quick break with a bit of a lighthearted SciFi series (reading together with my 22 y/o son), then re-read in English.

This sentence of Weiss I want to print on a tee shirt:

"A place in the scuffle would be free, the lion's paw would hang there, within reach of everyone, and as long as they didn't let go of each other down below, they wouldn't see the paw of the lion's skin, and no one else would come to fill the empty space. They would have to become masters of that singular grip, that lunging out, sweeping movement with which they could finally tear down the terrible pressure that weighed on them."

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Denso, profundo, pero muy necesario. Un auténtico novelón.

[Mr No mai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intressanta böcker, men är lite väl detaljrika.

[Cihad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took more than a year to finish and totally worth it. There is a lot to digest. Highly intellectual reading.

[pia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Side eye an jeden, der sich das freiwillig zumutet

[daniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

abgebrochen weil es super langweilig ist

[Avşar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yazarın dildeki ve kurgudaki akıl almaz becerisine hayranlık beslemekle birlikte kitabın zamanı (akışı, kitapta zamanın geçişi) ile senkronize olamadım, duyguları ile empati kuramadım. Duyguları anlamadığımdan değil aksine, her şey o kadar tanıdık ki, belki de bu kadar tanıdık olduğundan, kapağını açtığım kurmaca dünyada gerçekliğimle karşılaşmaktan bir usanç duymuş olabilirim. Bir gün devam edilmek üzere şimdilik rafa kaldırıyorum kendisini.

[Emilie · Rating 4 out of 5]

2015 READING CHALLENGE: A book with more than 500 pages

[Mimmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting and educational read.