Weiss, Peter (1916—82)
German author, artist, and activist. Born near Berlin to a Hungarian Jewish father and Christian mother, he lived in Bremen and Berlin as a child, then moved to London to study photography, and after that to Prague until Germany annexed the Sudetenland in 1938. He fled, first to Switzerland and then to Sweden, where he remained for the rest of his life. In the 1940s and 1950s, Weiss divided his time between teaching art, making experimental films, and writing prose and drama in both Swedish and German. His first play Der Turm (The Tower) was premiered in 1950, but it was not until the production of Marat/Sade in Berlin in 1964 that Weiss gained a large international audience. The internationally renowned director Peter Brook staged Marat/Sade in New York the following year and Weiss’s reputation as an innovative, highly political playwright was made. Set in Charenton Asylum, where de Sade was incarcerated, the play revolves around the attempt by the inmates to stage a play about the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat (a leading figure in the French Revolution) under the direction of the Marquis himself. Exhibiting the influence of both Artaud, Antonin and Brecht, Bertolt, the play quickly became a classic and was subsequently and successfully transposed to cinema with Peter Brook directing. For many though, Weiss’s true masterpiece is his three-volume historical novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975—81), partially translated as The Aesthetics of Resistance (2005), which explores the rise of Nazism in a more overtly political fashion than Thomas Mann’s allegorical Doktor Faustus (1947), translated as Doctor Faustus (1948), and also takes in the Spanish Civil War. Further Reading: R. Cohen Understanding Peter Weiss (1993). F. Jameson The Modernist Papers (2008).