SOURCE: Stephan, Alexander. “The Civil War as Model: Peter Weiss, Spain, and Die Ästhetik des Widerstands.” In German and International Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War: The Aesthetics of Partisanship, edited by Luis Costa, Richard Critchfield, Richard Golsan, and Wulf Koepke, pp. 477-89. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1992.

[In the following essay, Stephan asserts that Weiss's treatment of the Spanish Civil War in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands allows him to explore “the two central themes that have determined his life and writings for years: the possibilities and limits of resistance to violence, and the difficulty in portraying this resistance.”]

Much has been written about the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, especially by those authors that the Nazis had driven out of Austria and Germany after 1933. Alfred Kantorowicz, himself a veteran of the war and a writer, reckons the number of titles at more than a thousand.¹ The forms used vary from the combat unit diary to eyewitness accounts from the thick of the front, from narratives to poems, from stage plays such as Brecht's Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar to novels such as Bodo Uhse's Leutnant Bertram, from contemporary documents in the style of Arthur Koestler's exposé Menschenopfer unerhört documentary to reportage such as Ludwig Renn's Im spanischen Krieg, which had to be revised a number of times for political expediency.

Die Ästhetik des Widerstands by Peter Weiss,² the first volume of which is set largely in Spain, does not fit into any of these categories, since it uses all of them simultaneously. It is more than a history, written as it is in the first person, that of a protagonist who, like the author Peter Weiss, insecure within and persecuted without, tries to find out whether, and if so how, involvement in the Spanish Civil War can afford him stability and certainty. But it is more than a memoir, because that—fictional—protagonist constantly projects himself and the events surrounding him at the highest level of self-awareness into the worldwide confrontation, occasionally stylized even as timeless-eternal, between oppression and resistance.

The result is at once confusing and fascinating. Real persons such as Max Hodann, Willi Bredel and Nordahl Grieg engage in conversations nowhere preserved, although Weiss obviously puts much stress on having them speak as they most probably would have, were there protocols to prove it. The action, if one can speak of that at all in this book, is repeatedly interrupted by reports and digressions full of current historical facts and historical analyses of works of art. Peter Weiss calls his work a “novel” and at the same time reveals in the Notebooks that chronicle the genesis of Ästhetik des Widerstands how painstakingly he worked up his materials, in conversations with war veterans and source research in archives, on the occasion of a trip through Spain in 1974, and through the experience of much reading, screened behind long bibliographical listings. In good historical style, the internal confrontations within the left during the thirties are laid out in similar detail and without regard to political losses: the tensions accompanying the foundation of the Popular Front and the feud between the Anarcho-Syndicalists and the CP, the Moscow Trials and the topic of Stalinism, and the problem as to whether realism or modernism could serve more adequately for aesthetic representation of political struggles. All of which is not to say that the note of authenticity in the more journalistic passages of Ästhetik des Widerstands does not sometimes tempt the reader to check a reference work to see if Peter Weiss wasn't perhaps indeed in Spain in the thirties.

The point of departure for Weiss' novel, as for the writings of many of his colleagues, is the realization that the events of the Civil War amount to a turning point in the confrontation with international fascism. Here, in Spain, after years of verbal resistance, the antifascist left first succeeded in actively taking a common stand. This applies particularly to the exiled writers forced to flee Germany and Austria after the surrender of power to the Nazis. In 1936-37, writers who had never handled a weapon other than their pens hastened to leave the relative security of exile in Prague, Paris, or London, regardless of the perils of the war, for Spain. Communists and Social Democrats, anarchists and unaffiliated independents lay side by side in the trenches on the Ebro and before Guadalajara. Workers, middle class, and intellectuals more quickly joined cause under fire from the Condor Legion than under the umbrella of the Popular Front concocted by functionaries and already crumbling as it was founded.

Weiss worked out and drafted the first volume of Ästhetik des Widerstands in the early seventies. But there is no doubt that the Spanish Civil War, despite the interval of more than thirty years, had lost none of its immediacy for him. On the contrary, it was only this distancing from the events that enabled him to integrate the struggle in Spain in the continuing, worldwide resistance to oppression of every sort. At any rate, he admits no doubts as to the immediacy of his work in an interview directly after the first volume of his novel appeared. Asked “what Spain meant” for the Ästhetik des Widerstands, he said, “… Spain was the Vietnam of the generation I belonged to then. If I had had the political conviction, the strength, I could have already been in Spain in 1937-38. Because what people went through in Spain then is the same as what today's generation experiences in connection with Vietnam. … What I'm really trying to do here is to consolidate my own self—that, I think, was the idea.”³ And the historical perspective also facilitates something else: since in contrast to contemporary chroniclers he has a certain distance from the formal debates of the thirties, Weiss can apply the full breadth of modern writing technique to his own project—the documentary-archival crosschecking of facts; political addresses, historical essays, and analyses of paintings that would do credit to an expert as well as the unfolding of the private feelings and fears of an insecure and displaced self searching for a foothold.

One may praise the Ästhetik des Widerstands as the “book of the century”⁴ or condemn it altogether as an unreadable, “erratic boulder.”⁵ No other author writing on Spain has attempted, in this form at least, what Peter Weiss has produced. There have been plenty of reports about victories and defeats in the struggle against the fascists, and much discussion took place among exile authors on how best to present a topic such as the Spanish Civil War, for example at the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which convened in 1937 with a strong German presence in embattled Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. But the mutual relationship between aesthetics and resistance, to say nothing of an “aesthetic of resistance,” has never, as far as I know, before this book been considered publicly and in detail in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Viewed in this light, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands—and the chapter on Spain is but one example among many from this 3-volume mammoth project of nearly 1,000 pages of small print—fits in among the monumental attempts to come to terms with our modern world both in content and form that extend from Joyce's Ulysses and Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz through Hermann Broch's Schlafwandler and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus to Zettels Traum by Arno Schmidt. Or to put it differently, the confrontations in Spain are probably above all of interest to Weiss as a model by means of which he is able to consider the two central themes that have determined his life and writings for years: the possibilities and limits of resistance to violence, and the difficulty in portraying this resistance.

To recount what is usually called the “plot” of the Spanish section of Ästhetik des Widerstands is relatively easy. The narrator, a young proletarian inclined toward the KPD but unaffiliated, determines at the end of 1937 to exchange his passive resistance in Berlin and the idleness of exile in Czechoslovakia for the open struggle in Spain. With the blessing of his father, a Social Democrat who does not join him in his trip to Spain only because of his age, he goes via Paris to Barcelona. But to his boundless disappointment he is ordered in Spain not to the front, but to a desk job in a convalescent home. There, in long conversations about the political confrontations within the left, he is forced to measure his ideals and convictions against real events. When he has gradually come to realize that work behind the lines also promotes the common cause, it is already too late. The recovery centers are shut down at the end of 1938 in the wake of the dissolution of the International Brigades. More insecure than ever and threatened by an increasing general sense of resignation, fury, and disappointment, the narrator returns to the anonymity of exile in Paris.

But Weiss apparently cares neither for the kind of action that makes the novels of Ernest Hemingway and Gustav Regler so readable nor for the writing of party history. Battle scenes and love affairs, hairbreadth escapes from pursuit, and heroic sacrifice of selfless heroes hardly interest him. Scarcely a line is wasted on analyzing military actions; none of the novel's characters sees the white of his enemy's eyes. And yet the Spain chapter of Ästhetik des Widerstands sometimes has breathtaking suspense—intellectually and, to my way of thinking, existentially, if such a thing can be. This suspense is created in dialogues and by reports of the narrator. The background against which it is developed are the political confrontations within the Republican left.

Here then is the first main way in which this work differs from the books of almost all other writers on Spain. It is not the struggle of the Republic against the fascists that forms the centerpiece of Ästhetik des Widerstands—these confrontations, their background, justification and outcome, Weiss suggests, are familiar enough already. What interests him and obviously troubles him much more deeply than the brutalities and military victories of the Franco forces are the paralyzing, fratricidal conflicts within his own ranks. Here, where solidarity and discipline, individualism and centralism are debated—his hope of defying reaction stands or falls—in the Spain of the thirties, just as in Vietnam and in the two Germanies of the seventies.

One of the narrator's first experiences after his arrival in Spain therefore has to do not with the fascists but with the armed confrontation in Barcelona in May 1937 between the anarchists and followers of the POUM on one side and the communists and Guardia Civil on the other. For the outsider this civil war within a civil war means at first little more than a sharpening of the conflict between ideological tendencies that he had already come to know in Paris, on his way to Spain. Now, however, squabbles about the opinions and power plays in journals and party congresses had degenerated into bloodshed and into violence: “… every movement needed its simplifications and syntheses. … But this was perhaps again proof that we were repressed by a superior leadership, that we acquiesced to our presumed dependency, that we remained trapped in our tutelage. …”

For the protagonist of the Ästhetik des Widerstands, things in Spain are not going to get any better. What the narrator as a kind of political tourist passively observes from the outside in Barcelona soon becomes physically a real threat in the convalescent hospitals behind the front. Anyone there expressing an opinion deviating from the party line is met first with contradiction and then icy silence. Delegates from the Central Committee appear and see to it that the ideological line is kept pure. Men and women who only shortly before had risked their lives at the front fall silent or are turned into spineless yes-men at the sight of the instruments the party inquisitors exhibit to them. Anyone still holding to his opinions is likely to disappear untried and without a trace:⁶ “We tried to shut Marcauer up, to protect her from her own words. … But at the same time we knew we would deliberately stop thinking about her. And pretty soon the early morning hour when the military police came and got her paled from our memories. …”

Confused and unwilling, the narrator tries to make sense of what he is forced to witness in Spain. Slowly he begins to realize that the individualism and spontaneity demanded by the independent left from the Communist party have to yield, at least temporarily, the place they hold in the structure of pure doctrine before the oppressive superiority of the fascist military machine. Self-help ideologists who think they can rely on the power of the masses more than on the party's organization, so he allows himself to be convinced, may in fact be holding lost positions against the planes that bomb Guernica and Madrid. The ideals of democracy and free speech that had brought him to the communist movement apparently have to wait until the cessation of hostilities.

But what in civil war Spain may have its justification threatens elsewhere, in the Moscow show trials, to turn into senseless and brutal caprice, a caprice that imperils not just the political convictions but the existential basis of the narrator. It is here, and not so much in view of the worldwide advance of the fascists, that the narrator's descent into Hades, that will accelerate until 1945, begins. The members of the International Brigade amid the Spanish inferno at first greet the news from distant Moscow, for them a far more dangerous inferno, with incredulity. Not unaware of their own convictions and fears, they wait for one of the accused publicly to tear aside the network of lies of the show trials. Confused and disoriented, they perceive how easily the monstrosity of the personality cult can nullify the rules of intraparty democracy. In shock they watch as their paragons of the October Revolution accuse themselves without resistance of the most incredible crimes.

The end of the Spanish phase in the katabasis of the exiles speaks for itself. With his last strength the narrator retreats once more, together with all the others who cannot bring themselves to abandon their convictions in spite of the outrageous news, behind the old but ever-new formula that puts the intensifying struggle against fascism ahead of debates over the disregard of human rights and human lives in their own camp. “We … didn't ask anymore about the ones that were shot in the cellars, nobody wanted to think about the justice or injustice of the sentences … now … it was only a matter of what was most pressing, of mobilizing your last strength, for the impossible holding out, to gain time, before all of Europe would be plunged into the decisive confrontation.”

Peter Weiss ends the Spanish chapter of Ästhetik des Widerstands even more darkly and hopelessly than do most of his colleagues their books on the Civil War. For him the retreat before the fascists, the dissolving of the International Brigades, the flight over the Pyrenees, and internment in the camps of the Western European democracies bent on appeasement not only mark the end of a local conflict but threaten to destroy an entire—and a personal—world. We know from reports and letters of Weiss' fellow exiles how many turned their backs on communism in 1938-1939. The laconic simultaneity with which the worldwide destruction of the left and its hopes is announced in Ästhetik des Widerstands is witness to how complete this collapse was: “The Military College of the Soviet Supreme Court had retired to consider at nine thirty p.m., Blum was making deals, while Negrin waited to be received by him, with the Radical Socialists, who made their participation in a Popular Front administration conditional on maintaining nonintervention in Spanish internal affairs, and in the Hotel in Linz the Conqueror of Austria slept, gathering strength for coming deeds.”

It is in this utterly hopeless situation that the narrator turns his thoughts to a capacity he has apparently detected in himself long ago: the saving, preserving, and clarifying power of the chronicler. “During the summer months—Grieg had left, Marcauer had been arrested, Hodann suffered once more severe attacks of his illness—the foundations began to take shape in me for what I regarded as my future work without being able to put an exact name on it. Only a kind of tonality had been struck that made it seem possible for me to give expression to all thoughts and experiences. Words or images would be the media, as needed.” Still, the intentions of the eyewitness, who later in his report will handle documents and facts as dexterously as he does the subjective resources of fiction, remain for the time being in the subjunctive. The “gag” blocking the narrator's mouth still turns “every word” he tries to say about Spain into an uncanny groan. The narrator-protagonist of the novel will in fact only write when he believes he has found a mode of presentation that not only reflects the conflict between realism and modernism but at the same time gives it form.

None of which, to be sure, prevents the narrator from continuing in Spain what he had begun in Berlin, to inventory world culture for models and examples that might offer him answers to the chaos of his time and aid in the search for adequate means of expression. Now, however, the narrator, deprived of the help of his middle-class, educated friend Heilmann, who had initiated him years before in Berlin into the history of the Pergamon altar, must rely in his undertaking altogether on the instincts and spontaneous thirst for knowledge of the born proletarian. The result of the search, presented in several extended analyses of paintings, provides the second aspect of the Spain chapter that distinguishes the Ästhetik des Widerstands from other Civil War books: that is, the hope that by aesthetic means that free space that has to be contracted in the course of political confrontations to an almost unbearable degree can indeed be once more expanded to make room for at least a moral survival of resistance.

Indeed, works of art convey the narrator's first and last impressions during his time in Spain. Thus there stands at the beginning of the Spain chapter, even before the confrontations within the left in Barcelona are presented, a description of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. The irrational, dreamy Don Quixote and the folk hero Sancho Panza put in appearances in the following pages; Mayakowsky and Tretyakov are contrasted with the “heroic” and “pathetic” in the art of Socialist Realism; failures and outcasts from Forster and Kleist to Büchner and Heine are confronted with the Luthers and Goethes; Willi Bredel's impeachment of Thomas Mann's “nonspecific humanistic antifascism” is cited; there are repeated references to the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers of 1934, which the narrator (and Peter Weiss) apparently sees as a kind of culmination in the formal debates of the left. And the end of the Spain report is accompanied by a veritable fireworks display of art analysis, reaching from Picasso's Guernica through Delacroix' Liberty Leading the People and Géricault's Raft of the Medusa to Goya's Execution of the Revolutionaries, Adolf Menzel's The Rolling Mill and Robert Koehler's The Strike.

There is no space here for details of these analyses, although most of them give novel interpretations.⁷ Two other aspects in connection with the Spain chapter are of greater importance. First, the descriptions of the paintings provide an indirect but none the less illuminating commentary on the events in Spain. Common to all of them is the theme of oppression. They also share the possibility, even though often only in vaguest terms, of resistance to the oppressor. Menzel's The Rolling Mill stands at the lower end of this scale, because, when looked at closely, it not only misinterprets work as surrender of the individual, but also puts the factory owner in the center of the composition's lines of perspective. But in Delacroix and Koehler, too, resistance remains but a pale “possibility,” a gesture already intimating betrayal of the middle-class conformist. Only Géricault's Medusa and Picasso's Guernica get more positive marks. In the one, the narrator pretends to see in spite of the hopeless gloom of the representation at least in the choice of theme a “dangerous attack” on “corruption,” “cynicism,” and “vanity” of “established society.” In the other, Picasso's Guernica, the effort with which “the shreds” are tied together “into a new totality” seems to oppose “a defense against the enemy” that could be “invincible—” “forged into a language of a few signs, the picture contained shattering and renewal, despair and hope.”

But the dialectic of destruction and vision of a better future in which the lot of the exiles and fighters in Spain is reflected is but one aspect of Guernica and the other paintings that fascinates Weiss. Just as important, perhaps more so, might have been the private, existential connection between artistic experience and participation in the struggle of the times. Thus Guernica interests him above all because in it, “as in the structural elements of poetry, … every detail is ambiguous,” challenging the observer to use “the first impression only as an impetus to analyze what is given and examine it from various viewpoints.” And as to Géricault and the Raft of Medusa he has the narrator say: “… madness hung constantly over him, like a revolt against torpor. He, who wanted to intervene in the system of oppression and destruction, saw himself perishing as a casualty. And still it had never before become so clear to me how values were able to be created in art that overcame an exclusion, a lostness, how with the formation of visions the attempt was made to afford relief for melancholy.”

With the analysis of the paintings by Picasso and Géricault Peter Weiss comes full circle, for nowhere in the Spanish part of the Ästhetik des Widerstands does it stand out more clearly to what degree the confrontation with the events in Spain means for him an act of quest for self. In this light the Spanish Civil War is in fact not only a model for the fundamental political confrontations of our century but also a kind of laboratory in which an uprooted and disoriented person contemplates himself under the most extreme conditions. Indeed, what Weiss says about Géricault and Delacroix applies just as well to himself: “… the impulses to paint arose on those levels where the unbearability of life had its roots.” “The painters had wrested one second of survival from overwhelming destruction and converted it into timelessness. From such an effort something uncanny, a silence in breathlessness, had to remain.”

We know from the interviews and notebooks of the years 1960-1980 that Peter Weiss had suffered for his entire life under conditions that harry many of his writer colleagues: a rootlessness and existential homelessness only sharpened by the experience of permanent exile;⁸ disgust at the brutality with which humans treat each other and an almost perverse pleasure in the portrayal of physical atrocities; the oscillation between the vita contemplativa in the retreats of the intellectual and artist and the vita activa in the trench warfare of class confrontations; and—not least—the quest for public recognition and a deficiency of self-respect in the face of the “locomotive of history” that threatens irresistibly and unfeelingly to run down the individual. We know also that after years of lonely and frustrating attempts as a painter and writer since the middle of the sixties Weiss thought he had found a new identity in closing ranks with the international left. The dispute between the hedonist de Sade and the revolutionary Marat documents this as much as do the plays against colonialism and on Vietnam.

And yet resistance against oppression, as Weiss was also forced to learn, had its price. This is witnessed not only by the reactions to the Ästhetik des Widerstands in the German Federal Republic⁹ but also by those passages in the second Notebook having to do with the relationships of Peter Weiss to the GDR.¹⁰ Unconditional, unlimited political discussions, in the face of real confrontations, seem to be, in the thirties or today, as impossible as a boundless realism. The archives from which, once opened, the narrator and his friends had expected to obtain information about the Moscow trials were still sealed, even after 40 and 50 years. And also in matters of aesthetics there has been but little progress since the time when the KP “wanted to remove” Picasso's Guernica “from the Spanish pavilion of the Paris World's Fair” because it is “antisocial, ridiculous,” and “altogether unsuitable to express the cause of the proletariat.”

In his novel, in which Spain appears as the central and symptomatic exemplary case, Peter Weiss has tried as far as possible to get to the bottom of the potential and limits of an aesthetic of resistance. In spite of the author's immense efforts in collecting and writing up his materials, the book does not reach a final solution in the face of historical realities. Indeed, it seems that Weiss anticipates with the Spain chapter that path into hopelessness with which the third and last volume of the Ästhetik des Widerstands appears to end: the battle against violence and its perpetrators, the powerful, is lost, and the hope that resistance can be combined with generosity and open debate is shattered. Puzzled, the narrator realizes, shortly before fleeing across the Pyrenees, that he has learned essentially nothing about the country for whose freedom he was ready to die. Whether and in what form he will someday pass on his experiences is still unclear. There appear to remain, as Gert Ueding expatiates with sardonic malice in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, only “disappointment, resignation,” and the “automatism of carrying on not out of conviction, but because there is no choice.”¹¹

And still Weiss' novel offers more than a minute description of the left's descent into Hades. For what would the Ästhetik des Widerstands be if not a monumental attempt, using all possible forms and writing techniques, to draw an image of how men at all times and under the direst extremities resist oppression and contempt for human life? The fact that this image is at once of the greatest possible documentary authenticity and the highest subjectivity constitutes its artistic and moral value. For only when an expansion of our capacity for historical knowledge goes hand in hand with a rigorous will for self-exploration, when the “uncompromising struggle” is united with the “absolute freedom of the imagination,” does Peter Weiss see a slim hope of breaking the seemingly eternal chain of violence and resistance to violence.

Notes

1. Alfred Kantorowicz, “Die Exilsituation in Spanien,” in Die deutsche Exilliteratur 1933-1945, ed. Manfred Durzak (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973), 97.

2. 3 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, 1978, 1981.

3. “Es ist eine Wunschautobiographie. Peter Weiss im Gespräch mit Rolf Michaelis über seinen politischen Gleichnisroman.” In Die Zeit, 10 October 1975.

4. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Die ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ lesen,” in Kürbiskern 2 (1982): 107.

5. Hans Christoph Buch, “Deine Rede ist: Ja, ja, nein, nein,” in Der Spiegel 47 (20 November 1978), 258.

6. Patrik von zur Mühlen says that “most” of the arrested foreigners “survived” and “did not disappear forever into some cellars. … As far as can be estimated from the sources, some 200-300 German civilians may have been arrested and imprisoned. How many of them ‘disappeared’ for good and have to be presumed murdered is not clear, but the number cannot be very large. … Occasional suppositions about thousands of victims are therefore exaggerated” (“Säuberung unter deutschen Spanienkämpfern,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 1 [Munich, edition text und kritik, 1983], 173-175). See also idem, Spanien war ihre Hoffnung. Die deutsche Linke im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg 1936-1939.

7. See among others Jost Hermand, “Das Floß der Medusa. Über Versuche, den Untergang zu überleben,” in Die ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ lesen. Über Peter Weiss, Heinrich Dilly, “Lektüre und Kritik der ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ von Peter Weiss. Bericht über das Stuttgarter Colloquium im Wintersemester 81/82”; Uwe Schweikert, “Kunst als Widerstand, Widerstand der Kunst. Peter Weiss: ‘Die Ästhetik des Widerstands,’ in Text und Kritik 37 (2nd, rev. ed., 1982), 107-114; Klaus Herding, “Arbeit am Bild als Widerstandsleistung,” in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, ed. Alexander Stephan, 246-284; Heinrich Dilly, “Die Kunstgeschichte in der Ästhetik des Widerstands,” ibid., 296-311; Klaus Jochem, Widerstand und Ästhetik bei Peter Weiss. Zur Kunstkonzeption und Geschichtsdarstellung in der ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ 60.

8. For example, Weiss declared in an interview with Peter Roos that the death of his sister had created a much “more decisive upheaval” in his life than “emigration” (in Der Maler Peter Weiss. Bilder. Zeichnungen. Collagen. Filme. Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Kunstsammlung des Bochumer Museums, 8 March-27 April 1980, ed. Peter Spielmann, Bochum, 1980, no page numbers).

9. See Alexander Stephan, “‘Ein großer Entwurf gegen den Zeitgeist.’ Zur Aufnahme von Peter Weiss' Die Ästhetik des Widerstands,” in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, 346-366; Volker Lilienthal, “Literaturkritik als politische Kommunikation. Zur Kritik der massenmedialen Rezeption der Ästhetik des Widerstands von Peter Weiss,” in Publizistik 1 (1985), 72-88. Lilienthal's study “‘Das Atavistische in diesem Krieg.’ Spanien in der Ästhetik des Widerstands von Peter Weiss,” in Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 60 (1986), 112-123, which I did not yet have access to while composing this article, overlaps only slightly with my remarks. Genia Schulz, ‘Die Ästhetik des Widerstands.’ Versionen des Indirekten in Peter Weiss' Roman, 1986, deals with Spain only in passing.

10. Peter Weiss, Notizbücher 1971-1980 Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981, 67, 24-28 passim.

11. Gert Ueding, “Der verschollene Peter Weiss. ‘Die Ästhetik des Widerstands,’ Teil zwei,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9/12/1978.

Works Cited

Buch, Hans Christoph. “Seine Rede ist: Ja ja, nein nein.” Der Spiegel 47 (20 November 1978): 258.

Dilly, Heinrich. “Lektüre und Kritik der ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ von Peter Weiss. Bericht über das Stuttgarter Colloquium im Wintersemester 81/82.” Kritische Berichte 2 (1982): 38-47.

Götze, Karl-Heinz and Scherpe, Klaus R., eds. Die “Ästhetik des Widerstands” lesen. Über Peter Weiss. Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1981 (Literatur im historischen Prozeß, NF, vol. 1).

Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. “Die ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ lesen.” Kürbiskern 2 (1982), 107.

Jochem, Klaus. Widerstand und Ästhetik bei Peter Weiss. Zur Kunstkonzeption und Geschichtsdarstellung in der “Ästhetik des Widerstands.” Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1984 (Argument Studienhefte, 60).

Kantorowicz, Alfred. “Die Exilsituation in Spanien.” In Die deutsche Exilliteratur 1933-1945, ed. Manfred Durzak. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979.

Lilienthal, Volker. “Literaturkritik als politische Kommunikation. Zur Kritik der massenmedialen Rezeption der ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ von Peter Weiss.” Publizistik 1 (1985): 72-88.

Mühlen, Patrik von zur. “‘Das Atavistische in diesem Krieg.’ Spanien in der ‘Ästhetik des Widerstands’ von Peter Weiss.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 60 (1986): 112-123.

———. “Säuberungen unter deutschen Spanienkämpfern.” Exilforschung 1 (1983).

———. Spanien war ihre Hoffnung. Die deutsche Linke im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg 1936-1939. Bonn: Dietz, 1985 (Dietz Taschenbuch, 12).

Peter Weiss, text & kritik 37, 2nd rev. ed. 1982.

Schulz, Genia. “Ästhetik des Widerstands.” Versionen des Indirekten in Peter Weiss' Roman. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986.

Spielmann, Peter, ed. Der Maler Peter Weiss. Bilder, Zeichnungen, Collagen. Filme. Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Kunstsammlung des Bochumer Museums, 8 March-27 April 1980.

Stephan, Alexander. ed. Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983 (suhrkamp taschenbuch, 2032).

Ueding, Gert. “Der verschollene Peter Weiss. ‘Die Ästhetik des Widerstands,’ Teil zwei.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 December 1978.

Weiss, Peter. Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, 1978, 1981.

———. “Es ist eine Wunschautobiographie. Peter Weiss im Gespräch mit Rolf Michaels über seinen politischen Gleichnisroman.” Die Zeit, 10 October 1975.

———. Notizbücher 1971-1980. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981 (edition suhrkamp, N.F. 67).