Peter Weiss (1916–1982) was a German playwriter, dramatist, visual artist, filmmaker, and novelist. His works include Marat/Sade, The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, The Aesthetics of Resistance, The Conversation of the Three Walkers, Trotsky in Exile, and Bodies and Shadows: Two Short Novels. His documentary drama The Investigation, which recreates the trial of Auschwitz concentration camp guards, was produced on American television in the 1960s. West Germany’s most important literary prize, the Georg BÜchner Prize, was awarded to Weiss only after his death in 1982.

James Rolleston is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Duke University. His previous books include Narratives of Ecstacy: Romantic Temporality in Modern German Poetry and Kafka’s Narrative Theater. Kai Evers is an advanced graduate student in the German Department at Duke University who presently lives in Woodland Hills, California.

The New Trial – CL

By Peter Weiss

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Peter Weiss
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326816

Introduction

The Theater of Peter Weiss

Almost twenty years after his death in 1982, Peter Weiss is today considered one of the most important writers of German postwar literature. Always an outsider, as often denounced as celebrated during his lifetime by literary critics, politicians, and fellow writers, Weiss has emerged as one of the few writers whose work survived the post-unification reevaluation of literature in Germany. Curiously enough, amid the widespread criticism directed by mostly conservative critics at mainstream writers such as Heinrich Boll, Christa Wolf, and Gunter Grass, Weiss has been named again and again as the author of some of the finest literary achievements in postwar German literature. Given these attacks against formerly canonical works and writers, it has become fashionable to claim the term “outsider” for a writer. In Weiss’s case, however, that term is accurate.

Geographically, politically, or in the context of literary debates, Peter Weiss always insisted, even at the height of his fame, on his position at the margin of Germany’s cultural and political life. A Jew according to the racial laws of the Third Reich, he and his parents survived in Swedish exile. Weiss became a Swedish citizen in 1946 and, except for visits, never lived in Germany again. In the late 1940s, Weiss published his first literary texts, but in Swedish, not German. His career as a German writer did not begin until 1960, when, at the age of forty-four and after four books of prose in Swedish, he published The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman. This experimental text immediately established Weiss as one of the most innovative writers in German, and its surrealist influence revived a literary tradition that had almost disappeared from postwar German literature. In the 1960s, when Weiss’s documentary theater made him Germany’s preeminent playwright, he thwarted attempts to make him Germany’s literary representative by embracing socialism, by his anti-Vietnam War activities, and especially by reminding West Germany of its Nazi past in his play The Investigation.

Between 1972 and 1980, Weiss worked on his magnum opus, The Aesthetics of Resistance, a wide-ranging novel about the antifascist resistance movements in Europe from the late 1930s to 1947 that describes the search for the fusion of radical art and politics, a search that becomes-in the form of Weiss’s novel-its own realization. Harsh criticism in both Germanys initially “welcomed” each of the three volumes of his monumental novel. In his notebooks, Weiss summed up the initial reactions: “In one Germany the book is published and publicly condemned, in the other Germany it is forbidden and secretly praised.” Today, the formerly scandalous novel has not only become a cult book of the Left but has also been recognized as one of the great modernist achievements of postwar Germany. Although The Aesthetics of Resistance is now frequently compared to the masterworks of Joyce, Musil, and Proust, during his own lifetime Weiss was primarily known not as a novelist but rather as one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, named in the same breath with Brecht and Beckett.

With Marat/Sade (1964), Peter Weiss became overnight a national and international star in the theater world. Set in a mental asylum in post-revolutionary France, the highly theatrical clash between the anarchist revolutionary Marat and the extreme individualist de Sade shattered the boundaries of postwar Germany’s theater. Weiss, whose works not only fused Artaud’s theater of cruelty with Brecht’s epic theater but also incorporated pantomime, bawdy ballads, and elements of classical tragedy, was celebrated as Germany’s first great playwright since Brecht. The unresolved confrontation between Marat and de Sade, between the political activist and the libertarian, polarized its audiences, opening up a space for identification and repulsion that, in the midst of the Cold War, proved successful with both West Germans (who favored de Sade) and East Germans (who favored Marat).

The play’s triumph immediately transcended national borders. Peter Brook’s staging of the play with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London and on Broadway as well as his film version secured its worldwide fame. Susan Sontag praised Marat/Sade as one of the truly great theater experiences of a lifetime. Performed on all five continents and translated into more than fifteen languages, the play continues to be a bestseller, having sold almost half a million copies in Germany alone. At the age of forty-eight, having been a largely unknown painter, filmmaker, film theorist, and writer of experimental prose, Peter Weiss was suddenly celebrated as Germany’s preeminent playwright. Older than Wolfgang Borchert and Boll, Weiss established himself as a writer at the same time as much younger authors such as Johnson, Grass, and Walser, whereby his experimental prose influenced a still younger generation, ranging from Ror Wolf to Hubert Fichte.

In 1965, the year after Marat/Sade, Weiss confirmed his newly won status as Germany’s leading dramatist with his next play. The Investigation, a recasting of the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, remains one of the most successful and controversial works of literature on the Nazi genocide. The play established Weiss as the German author who did the most for Germany’s dawning confrontation with its Nazi past. Unlike Rolf Hochhuth in The Deputy, Weiss avoids any direct representation of Auschwitz. As Lawrence Langer notes, The Investigation “gradually narrows the space separating the imagination from the camp.” Eschewing the brilliant fireworks of Marat/Sade, with its two infamous historical title characters at its center, the austere Investigation uses a completely different aesthetics. Almost static, without any dramatic stage action, and with an anonymous dramatis personae, the play relies entirely on words-the testimonies in court-to convey the horror and the logic of the camp.

The play’s importance and timeliness were recognized immediately, even before its first staging. On 19 October 1965, The Investigation premiered simultaneously in fifteen theaters in East and West Germany. Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow, directed a scenic reading for the East German Academy of Arts. Like Marat/Sade, it became an instant international success, attracting such leading directors as Ingmar Bergman and, again, Peter Brook. In Europe as well as in the United States, adaptations for television brought The Investigation to a large audience. It became the most powerful example of documentary theater in Germany. Weiss used the court testimonies almost verbatim, often only slightly rhythmicizing the language. During the controversy over the Holocaust monument, Jurgen Habermas remembered The Investigation as a central occasion in Germany’s postwar construction of a collective identity that refuses to repress its murderous past.

Between 1964 and 1975, Weiss wrote nine major plays, provoking several political and aesthetic controversies in both Germanys. Shortly before the premiere of The Investigation, Weiss published in Dagens Nyheter and in Neues Deutschland his “Ten Working Points of an Author in the Divided World,” which documents his conversion to socialism. Beginning with The Investigation, his emphatic siding with socialism, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and revolutionary movements in developing countries often invited polemical rejections of his literary works in West Germany. Conservative as well as liberal critics, while still acknowledging Weiss as one of the few important German writers of his generation, blamed his turn to socialist politics and documentary theater for a supposed wilting of his aesthetic powers. Plays like the Discourse on the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Viet Nam and Song of the Lusitanian Bogey disappeared almost immediately, after the initial scandal, from Western stages. West Germany’s most important literary prize, the Georg Buchner Prize, was awarded to Weiss only after his death in 1982. In 1966, the GDR awarded him the prestigious Heinrich Mann Prize, but it would soon find out that the famous author could be a thorn in its ideological flesh. While always aiming to remain a supporter of the socialist state, Weiss criticized the GDR for the expulsion of Wolf Biermann and provoked it with Trotsky in Exile as much as the Viet Nam Discourse provoked the West. Official admonition abounded, and his open letters and essays found virtually no outlets inside the GDR. East Germans were not allowed to read The Aesthetics of Resistance until eight years after the publication of the first volume in the West.

With The New Trial (1982), Weiss not only returned his attention to the stage, he also returned to Kafka’s novel The Trial. Given Weiss’s own position at the margin of German literature, it might not come as a surprise that he had a lifelong interest in Kafka, another writer of Jewish origin with an interest in socialist ideas, who also wrote German in a basically non-German environment, and who also became a towering influence in German literature only after his death. The New Trial, a free adaptation of Kafka’s novel finished only few months before Weiss’s death, marked a new start for him. Although he had been a filmmaker in the 1940s and 1950s in Sweden, Weiss directed his own play for the first time, in collaboration with his wife, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. After the long and exhausting work on his novel, he planned to concentrate again on work for the stage. His plans for future theatrical works were energized by his ability to write the play in just four months, a pace made possible by his long familiarity with the novel and with Kafka’s world. He had read the novel as early as 1940 and wrote his first adaptations of The Trial in the early 1970s. Weiss’s dramatizations of Kafka’s The Trial thus frame his work on The Aesthetics of Resistance.

In 1974, Weiss interrupted his work on the first volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance to follow Ingmar Bergman’s suggestion that he adapt Kafka’s novel for Bergman’s theater, the Dramaten. Staying as close as possible to the original text, Weiss intended to disappear as an author behind Kafka’s work. He saw his role as that of one who “only searches for theatrical means that can do justice to the content of the book.” In a short preface to the play, he stated, “It seemed absurd to me to undertake translations that would transpose the material into a style that would reflect either the excesses of my own invention or the need to adapt to various ‘contemporary’ issues.”

Nevertheless, the play is imbued with Weiss’s hope for political revolution. Emphasizing K’s social and political existence, Weiss blames Josef K’s demise on his failure to understand his position in a class society and to act against it accordingly. Expecting a “bold experiment” and a “personal interpretation,” Bergman was disappointed by such sterile faithfulness to both Kafka and dogmatic socialism, and he rejected Weiss’s Trial for the Dramaten. At least in the West, this simplified reading of Kafka quickly disappeared, as Weiss himself noted, into the trash bin of modern theater. The play’s failure reinforced Weiss’s own doubts about the possibility of putting Kafka’s novel on stage. He also fulfilled Theodor Adorno’s prediction in his Notes on Kafka that any attempt at dramatizing Kafka’s novels is not only doomed to failure but, even worse, would mock some of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century.

But The New Trial, Weiss’s second attempt to bring Kafka’s novel to the stage, met with positive critical response and is now considered to be a culmination of Weiss’s quest for a theatrical aesthetics. Using some events and many of the characters from the novel as his starting point, Weiss then combined elements characteristic of his early work, from surrealism to the literature of the grotesque, with his later interest in a literature of engagement to rethink the relationship between aesthetics and resistance in the age of the global market. Weiss considered The New Trial his most spontaneous and personal play, one in which he not only expressed his doubts about his own aesthetics and politics, but also addressed Adorno’s question as to whether the subject could still have any hope for freedom in the age of late capitalism, and whether any potential for resistance to capitalism remains in aesthetics. The New Trial, full of Weiss’s own inventions and experiences, comes much closer to what Bergman might have hoped for.

Weiss’s rewriting of Kafka to give voice to his own struggles follows the logic of his oeuvre; the process of identifying with and distancing himself from Kafka is a structuring force of Weiss’s works throughout his literary career. Kafka’s importance for Weiss reaches far beyond his attempts to dramatize The Trial. As early as the early 1940s, the Kafka novel had become, according to Weiss, his “central reading experience.” Throughout his life, Kafka would remain a point of reference for Weiss. More precisely, Kafka represented for Weiss one of two extreme poles that structure his whole work.

In his first reading of The Trial, Weiss identified completely with Kafka. The similarity of their backgrounds-the estrangement from family, culture, and language-has often been noted. As in Kafka, the experience of writing German in a non-German environment left indelible traces in Weiss’s relationship to language, to literature, and to Germany. Weiss never identified himself as a German. After his exile from Germany and his attempts to write in Swedish, German became, as he once claimed, not much more than a “tool among other tools.”

Reading and identifying with Kafka in 1940 initiated a process of self-reflection for Weiss that made him aware of his own isolation. He found in Kafka his own tendency to succumb to authority. As Weiss wrote, Kafka and Josef K “held me tightly in the sweet erotics of humiliation.” In his 1962 autobiographical novel Vanishing Point, Weiss describes his extensive readings, which included many of the great modernist achievements of German literature, from Rilke, Musil, and Canetti to Doblin, Jahnn, and Thomas Mann. Kafka’s novels The Castle and The Trial, however, provoked a far more existential reaction in the young Weiss.

In all the books that revealed their worlds to me so that I might recognize myself in them, there remained always possibilities of retreat into a mysticism, or a notion of beauty, or an idyll, or an illusion of love. In all the books were limitations of risk and escape clauses that ceased to be available in Kafka’s report…. By reading The Trial, I thus became fully alert to the trial that kept me myself prisoner.

The period of identification with Kafka, however, was followed by an identification of Kafka with the world that oppressed and stifled Weiss. Attraction and identification provoked repulsion. For Weiss, Kafka, Josef K, and the world of the novels became a closed totality, a crypt, from which he needed to escape. The recognition of being part of Kafka’s world moved Weiss, as he said in an interview, toward revolt, toward a breaking down of the walls of this “completely twisted, guilt ridden, cursed, and damned world of Philistines”: a revolt not only against the world Kafka describes, but also against Kafka himself.

Unlike Elias Canetti, who considered Kafka not only the greatest expert on power but also one who offered strategies to escape from it, Weiss read Kafka not merely as a victim of power, but as a victim who succumbs to and affirms his own death sentence.

Basically, Kafka glorified the dominant authority, he humiliated himself constantly before it, he was fascinated by it; as soon as he found himself beginning to see through it, he sank immediately to the ground to ask its forgiveness. K held me tightly in the sweet erotics of humiliation. All the longing for death inside myself bound itself tightly to his descriptions of total annihilation. For a long time I lived as a suicide, surrounded by images of sickness until they slowly burned themselves out; then I could penetrate to their sources, to their roots.

Continues…
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