SOURCE: Garloff, Katia. “Peter Weiss's Entry into the German Public Sphere: On Diaspora, Language, and the Uses of Distance.” Colloquia Germanica 30, no. 1 (1997): 43-67.

[In the following essay, Garloff discusses the issues of exile and diaspora in Weiss's work.]

Bin inzwischen zu einem ‘deutschsprachigen Autor’ geworden. Sitze in Stockholm, mit dem Blick auf Söderns Anhöhen, auf den Turm des Maria-Fahrstuhls, am Zeichentisch, an dem ich vor ein paar Jahren noch meine Filme entworfen, meine Collagen hergestellt hatte, und schreibe in der Sprache, die ich als Kind lernte und als 17jähriger verlor—¹

Written in 1961, these sentences capture a crucial moment in Peter Weiss's literary career, the moment when he became a German-language author. Weiss had, in fact, written in German before, but it was only after the publication of Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers in 1960² that he gained that public recognition as a “‘deutschsprachigen Autor’” to which he refers here, as his use of quotation marks suggests, with some uneasiness. At first glance, the success of Der Schatten ended Weiss's tenuous existence as a displaced, or more accurately placeless, artist. The son of a Christian mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Protestantism after his wedding, Weiss left Nazi Germany with his family in 1935, stayed for brief periods in England, Prague, and Switzerland, and finally arrived in Sweden in 1939. For more than ten years, he vacillated between painting and writing, and between Swedish and German, and finally gave up writing for a period in favor of filmmaking. In the early 1960s, however, he experienced an outburst of literary productivity and a rapid integration into the German cultural scene, promoted by postwar West Germany's leading literary institution, the Gruppe 47. Yet even when Weiss's existence as an artist without an audience ceased, his exile did not. While he paid frequent visits to Germany and even considered moving back there, he ultimately decided to stay in Stockholm and observe Germany from the distant perspective captured by his image of the watcher through the window.

The purpose of this essay is to explore this paradox inherent in Weiss's entry into the German public sphere, the fact that he reasserted his exilic position exactly at the moment when he became a recognized exponent of German culture. By pointing out how the theme of exile forms a hidden center of Weiss's writings from the early to mid-1960s, I wish to shift the emphasis from politicization to displacement as the axis along which his work of this phase can be explored.³ My further claim is that Weiss's case reveals something about the critical possibilities of exile, or rather—as suggested by the decision involved in his post-1945 exile—of diaspora. In scholarship on Jewish history, an attempt has been made to distinguish between imposed and self-chosen exile, the latter being designated by the term diaspora.⁴ This meaning of diaspora reverberates in more recent adaptations of the term by postcolonial critics, in whose analyses diaspora often figures as a key concept. Critics like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have defined diaspora as a site of enunciation rather than merely a place of dwelling, and have used it to circumscribe a form of cultural identity which, although mentally bound to a lost origin, recognizes the insurmountable difference between this imaginary spatial center and the lived experience of postcolonial migrants. According to these critics, it is the gap between “here” and “there,” and the refusal to cover this gap through nostalgia and idealization of the lost home, that makes diasporic discourse intrinsically utopian and capable of producing new places from which to speak. In view of mass displacements that elude a clear distinction between imposed and self-chosen exile, these critics replace the criterion of voluntariness by that of cultural productivity. In particular, diasporic discourse may become productive for a critique of the majority cultures which figure as its implicit addresses.⁵

Although the postcolonial agenda cannot be applied to the situation of post-Shoah German Jewish exiles without qualifications, it has opened up a path towards rethinking the critical possibilities of diasporic discourse at this specific historical juncture. A distinct diaspora consciousness, expressed through ritual reenactment of the bond to the land of Israel in prayer and liturgy, was a constitutive element of Jewish group identity in premodern Europe, yet diminished considerably in the German-speaking countries during the nineteenth-century process of emancipation and acculturation.⁶ After 1945 a new kind of exile resulted from German Nazism, an exile experienced by Jews who had fled from Germany or from German-speaking Central Europe and were unable or unwilling to return, yet failed to feel “at home” anywhere else and remained linked to their country of origin through their language and memories.

A contemporary of Weiss, Jean Améry, serves as an example of how this predicament can turn into critical impulse. Coming from a mixed Austrian Jewish background, Améry survived Auschwitz and after the war lived in a French-speaking environment in Belgium while continuing to write in German. Like Peter Weiss, Améry struggled with his victimization as a Jew but remained indifferent to Jewish cultural and religious traditions as well as to the state of Israel. In his essay “Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch?” Améry objects to the cosmopolitan notion of exile as a positive force, emphasizing that for a post-Shoah German/Austrian Jew the loss of home remains devastating because the experience of having been abandoned so easily by one's homeland and fellow citizens instills a lasting insecurity. Améry neither makes an attempt to reclaim his country of origin, nor does he evoke any hope for another, a potential, or a future home. Instead, out of the bleak state of banishment emerges a voice that does not attempt to mitigate loss by restoring hope to it, but that challenges the Germans, reminding them of their guilt and calling upon them to remember.

Améry's intervening voice is most evident in “Ressentiments,” which levels a bitter charge against the tendencies of normalization during the 1950s and 1960s that succeeded in reestablishing West Germany in a Western political framework at the expense of a deeper confrontation with its past. Traveling through the economically successful, attractive, modern West Germany, Améry notes the discrepancy between his own rage and bitterness and the Germans' complacency about the successful recovery of their country. To their seemingly natural sense of time passing and effacing the past, he opposes the shattered sense of time of the concentration camp survivor who clings to his traumatic past. He calls this disposition resentment, an inability to forget that represents for him the only moral—as opposed to natural—reaction to the Shoah.⁷

The text's topography, which assigns to the speaking subject the position of a traveler who does not belong to this place but crosses through it temporarily, externalizes and reenacts the tension between Améry and his imagined German readers. Améry draws, and constantly reinforces, a line between victims and perpetrators, for example, by ironically addressing his readers, thus producing a distancing effect and suspending any cathartic relief they might otherwise derive from an identification with the victims. The traveler's position thus inscribes a peculiar distance into a text, or, more precisely, the traveler's text becomes the site of enunciations which rhythmically modulate from closeness to distance, from the hope of being heard to utter resignation and loneliness, from emotional appeal to bitter sarcasm. Améry ends his essay: “Wir Opfer müssen ‘fertigwerden’ mit dem reaktiven Groll, in jenem Sinne, den einst der KZ-Argot dem Worte ‘fertigmachen’ gab; es bedeutete soviel wie umbringen. Wir müssen und werden bald fertig sein. Bis es soweit ist, bitten wir die durch Nachträgerei in ihrer Ruhe Gestörten um Geduld” (129). The sarcasm of this sentence illustrates the utter absence of the benevolence of pedagogy from Améry's attitude toward his readership. His texts do not strive to educate, but rather to disturb and disrupt, thus accentuating the conflict between Germans and Jews.

I would distinguish this stance from that of Theodor W. Adorno, for example, who, while launching similar critical interventions onto the German public sphere, pursues a more distinctively pedagogical goal of making this public conscious of its repressed sociopsychological dispositions.⁸ The critical thrust of Améry's discourse lies in the way it responds to, and attempts to break through, a sociopsychological disposition he perceives as specific to his German audience. Améry describes this disposition varyingly as complacency, “Ausgeglichenheit” (108), and “Ruhe” (129), reflecting the extent to which the Germans he meets remain unaffected by the monstrosity of their past. As Moishe Postone has shown, this state of mind is by no means confined to the reactionary or politically indifferent forces in German society, but is also palpable in the leftist inclination to theoretical modelings of National Socialism. These theories, Postone argues, have in fact abstracted Nazism at the expense of concretely felt horror and have been instrumental in mitigating guilt feelings (Postone 101f.). Striving to break through such defensive mechanisms, Améry departs from the enlightened, reasonable conversation that was constitutive for the critical function of the emerging bourgeois public sphere. Instead of initiating a dialogue grounded in a common reasoning, he emphasizes the abyss between victims and perpetrators and demands that the crimes become a moral reality for all Germans. Only when the Germans are gripped by real repulsion against their own history, while acknowledging it as their own and renouncing any attempt to distance themselves from it, can they find a common ground with the victims. Such a common ground can never consist in a rational understanding of National Socialism, but only in a painful affect, the urgent and vain desire “nach Zeitumkehrung und damit nach Moralisierung der Geschichte” (124).

Améry touches upon a critical potential of diasporic discourse that Homi Bhabha has conceptualized in his suggestion that one of the strongest critical advantages of diasporic (postcolonial) discourse is its ability to address cultural and historical differences that are incommensurable. Instead of mitigating such differences, diasporic discourse uses them as a disruptive force against the homogenizing discourse of the nation.⁹ Améry attempts to achieve a similar effect by injecting another time—that of the survivor who clings traumatically to his past—into the organic and progressive time of a West Germany rebuilding from an imagined zero hour. His resentments transform the survivor's words into signs that form a barrier to the discourse of normalization.

I believe that a similar transformation of exile into critical impulse informs the texts Peter Weiss wrote in the years after his first reception in Germany. Like Améry, Weiss uses the autobiographical mode in his novels Abschied von den Eltern (1961) and Fluchtpunkt (1962) to accentuate the conflict between the author's historical perspective and that of his imagined readers. The intrinsically political nature of these novels lies in their recollection and representation of the forgotten victims to a largely indifferent German public. The refugees of National Socialism whose voice Weiss publicizes were widely ignored in favor of a public concern with the German Ostflüchtlinge. In fact, the expulsion of native Germans from former German regions in the East had come to occupy the German historical imagination soon after 1945, displacing the very memory of the refugees produced by National Socialism.¹⁰ Weiss's autobiographical texts relate critically to this repression of history, especially after his reception in Germany, through his progressive foregrounding of the theme of exile.¹¹

Weiss's Fluchtpunkt (1962) recounts the life of a refugee and artist in Stockholm from 1940 to 1947, culminating in a cosmopolitan vision that transforms the predicament of forced exile into freedom while, as I will show, exhibiting the necessity of a certain force for this transformation. The text presents its subject in a clearly outlined spatial and temporal setting not previously used by Weiss, a fact that has induced most critics to read it as a more or less authentic representation of Weiss's own biography.¹² In contrast to these readings, I suggest that in Fluchtpunkt, Weiss undertakes a rewriting of exile and that the clear-cut topography inscribed into the text is indicative of his attempt to reestablish spatial boundaries and to create a site out of speech. This attempt manifests itself in gestures of self-situating whose desperate character reveals instead how ambiguous and threatened the narrator's position is. The emphatic representation of rooms and houses as intact subjective spaces, for example, contrasts with the restless wanderings of the narrator:

Ich stand in einem neuen Zimmer, an dessen kahlen grauen Wänden die Löcher herausgezogener Nägel, die Flecken von den Abdrücken fremder Hände und Köpfe und die schattenhaften Abrisse verschwundener Gegenstände zu sehen waren. Der Fußboden war verschlissen von Schritten, die jahrelang zwischen Tür und Bett, Bett und Tisch, Tisch und Ofen, Ofen und Fenster hin- und hergewandert waren. Dieser Raum sollte jetzt meine Schritte enthalten. In diesem Raum würde ich umhergehen, mit den Stühlen rücken, arbeiten, mich räuspern, husten niesen, mit Besuchern sprechen. … Ich schlug ein Lager auf und befestigte das Lager mit meinem Eigentum. Selbst wenn der Raum in einer Wüste lag und der Vernichtung preisgegeben war, konnte ich die Dinge, die mir einen Wert bedeuteten, um mich aufstellen.

(W [Werke in sechs Bänden] II 182)

Even though apostrophized as a camp, this room still exhibits the features of a “room of one's own”, a bourgeois interior space based on property. The narrator intensifies his appropriation of this space by indulging in a list of expressions of his own physical presence as he narrates the scene. Even if he will soon leave this specific room again, during his stay he takes entire possession of it. The protective house, characterized by Theodor W. Adorno in Minima Moralia as the spatial expression of a stable and secure self that has become obsolete in a world of mass destruction, is here erected as a shield against the disseminating forces of exile. Another topographical inscription affects the narrator's place of origin, to which he returns temporarily after the war is over:

Die Reise, die ich selbst in das Land meiner Herkunft unternahm, weckte in mir nicht den Wunsch, wieder dort ansässig zu werden. Die Fremde, mit der ich mich konfrontierte, war um so beunruhigender, als mir doch jedes Wort mit solcher Vertrauheit entgegenkam. Es war das Wiedersehn in einem Traum, in dem alles zu erkennen war, in dem alles offen und entblößt lag und doch von einer ungeheuerlichen Entstellung durchsetzt war. Was ich wiederfand, waren Ruinen von Häusern, in denen ich gewohnt hatte, und ein unversehrtes Haus in einem großen verfallenen Garten, doch was hier lag, war nicht wert, wieder angenommen zu werden, es ließ sich nur für Zeit und Ewigkeit verfluchen.

(267)

This passage presents an inverted and secularized version of the traditional Jewish concept of exile that presents Zion as the center of spatial imagination and of longing, as the home to which the Jews will someday return. A word like “verfluchen” introduces a sudden heightened, quasi-religious tone into Weiss's otherwise rationalizing account, and signals how the religious exilic imagination retains some of its energies. In fact, the description of the landscape here is reminiscent of the fear of touch characteristic of a taboo, which Freud related both to the psychological disposition of compulsory neurosis and to the religious structure of sacredness. Freud argues, indeed, that the taboo expresses and contains deep emotional ambivalence. This is what seems to happen here with the sense of threat and uncanniness that accompanied the narrator's search for his origins in Abschied von den Eltern and surfaces again in Fluchtpunkt when the narrator reminisces about his childhood. This sense is translated into a topography that features the place of childhood as a taboo zone, as a traumatic center whose power to be “beunruhigend” is diminished only through a gesture of banishing. The taboo structure is also palpable in the narrator's avoidance of the proper name of this place throughout the book and, if we accept Freud's analysis, it indicates that the narrator is full of ambivalence towards the country of his origin, torn between homesickness and rejection, desire and repulsion, feelings expressed by so many post-Shoah German Jews. The taboo structure, in other words, refutes the narrator's attempts at self-interpretation, in which he claims never to have felt at home anywhere.¹³

My claim is that the cosmopolitan vision at the very end of Fluchtpunkt is predicated on such disavowal of the place of birth as place of origin. The sudden trip to Paris that is described in the last pages of the book initiates the narrator into an absolute freedom which he experiences first as threatening, but then as redemptive as he gains a new sense of self and a cosmopolitan identity. In these scenes, the impact of an existentialism of Sartrian provenance is evident. The narrator's experience of nothingness, of an absolute rupture with his past that subsequently enables him to act freely, stages the subject's emergence out of the unreflected être en-soi into the être pour-soi. One can see the attraction this model holds for a writer who struggles with his lack of home and roots, a lack which, from the perspective of existentialism, is a necessary freedom. Jean Paul Sartre's autobiography Les Mots shows that his own sense of exile arose from the early loss of his father and the natural rootedness that comes with being the successor to a father and an economic heritage. The freedom derived from this isolation, however, was contingent upon access to and legitimation in the cultural realm, as opposed to the more radical dislocation caused by physical exile. As Améry has keenly observed, the grand gesture of breaking away from one's origin is available only to those who have a choice between leaving home or remaining (81), which explains, perhaps, why in Fluchtpunkt, the narrator's break with his past has to be introduced with a last forceful topographical inscription. By evoking Paris, Weiss inscribes a Fluchtpunkt in the technical sense of the word, that is, a point that defines the perspective of a painting and thus renders it coherent and meaningful. Textually, this painting technique translates into visual descriptions which fixate and accentuate the narrator's location through the play of light against the cityscape, such as: “Ich stand auf dem Platz im Zentrum der Stadt, in einem scharf abgewinkelten, von der Sonne beleuchteten Feld in der Mitte des Schattenkraters” (290, my emphasis), or: “Ich stand still, sah Boote vorbeifahren, sah den Abglanz der gesunkenen Sonne auf der Spitze des Eiffelturms” (293, my emphasis). Paris is the vanishing point which gives meaning to the narrator's erratic wanderings, leading him to a cosmopolitan identity and to his original language:

Und die Sprache, die sich jetzt einstellte, war die Sprache, die ich am Anfang meines Lebens gelernt hatte, die natürliche Sprache, die mein Werkzeug war, nur noch mir selbst gehörte, und mit dem Land, in dem ich aufgewachsen war, nichts mehr zu tun hatte. Diese Sprache war gegenwärtig, wann immer ich wollte und wo immer ich mich befand. Ich konnte in Paris leben oder in Stockholm, in London oder New York, und ich trug die Sprache bei mir, im leichtesten Gepäck. In diesem Augenblick war der Krieg überwunden, und die Jahre der Flucht waren überlebt.

(293f.)

This idea of an original language that belongs exclusively to the individual is contingent upon the detachment of language from history and on the disentanglement of the narrator's biography from Germany's history. This is the deeper function of the strange rebirth fantasy preceding this scene, a fantasy in which the narrator, overwhelmed by feelings of nonbelonging, imagines himself as a baby who learns to speak, immersed in the noise of the street yet undisturbed by any other speaker of this language: “ich mußte wieder von vorn beginnen, radebrechend, lallend, in meinem Korb liegend, am dröhnenden Straßenrand” (291f.). The “Korb” is also reminiscent of the Moses motif that serves in Abschied von den Eltern to depict the narrator's estrangement from his family.¹⁴ Stripped of its religious connotations, the Moses motif becomes here part of the narrator's gesture of distancing himself from a national collective, announcing: I have never belonged to the people among whom I was raised. I have always only belonged to myself.

It is significant that the site of this reinvention of self is Paris, not Berlin, the more plausible choice from what we know of Peter Weiss's biography. While he indeed spent the spring of 1947 in Paris, that summer he went to Berlin to write a series of articles on the defeated Germany for a Stockholm newspaper. These articles display an amazingly sympathetic view of the people who had, after all, persecuted and expelled him. Weiss later turned the articles into a book, Die Besiegten, which diffuses the voice of the initially identifiable narrator into a series of different voices of both victims and perpetrators, thus dissolving any possible site for the narrator's identity and location. In Berlin, Weiss also met the publisher Peter Suhrkamp who encouraged him to pursue his literary attempts in German more intensively. Weiss followed this advice and, in 1949, submitted a manuscript that was, however, published only decades later under the title Der Fremde. In short, Weiss's stay in Berlin in 1947 had a large impact on his development as a writer, and his overall attitude towards Germany and the German language and culture was far more ambivalent than the narrator's in Fluchtpunkt. Shifting the place of his retrieval of the German language from postwar Berlin to existentialist Paris in Fluchtpunkt, Weiss performs a gesture of distancing himself from Germany, paradoxically at the very moment when he was being reintegrated into German culture through the recent success of Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers. Certainly, the abrupt transitions in Fluchtpunkt, the sometimes stilted language and the imposed teleology interrupt the impression of a convincingly developed narrative. I would suggest that these stylistic features express the desire for, as well as the instability of, a cosmopolitanism that grounds the self in a place of symbolic origin rather than in a place of birth.

Fluchtpunkt sets the tone for Weiss's appearance within the German public sphere during the next few years. In interviews and letters following his initial success in Germany, he occasionally referred to himself as a “Weltbürger” before publicly embracing an internationalism of socialist provenance in 1965. Weiss's Weltbürgertum, which is based on the separation between language and place, harks back to a German humanist tradition, reaching from Goethe to Thomas Mann, that identifies German culture with an intrinsic universalizing tendency. While Weiss's familiarity with this tradition may have facilitated his sudden shift from haunting placelessness to redemptive cosmopolitanism, this cosmopolitanism nonetheless remains tenuous. The analysis of his texts reveals that the self-chosen Weltbürgertum is only one facet of his discourse on exile, that this concept remains haunted by other, nonrationalizable forms of exile, which are most prominently represented by Jewish refugees.¹⁵ This tension, I argue, not only encouraged Weiss's politicization as a Marxist, but translates into peculiar uses of language in texts that do not narrate but perform the violent rupture between the subject and its place of origin.

Weiss's rarely quoted pseudo-ethnographic report Bericht über Einrichtungen und Gebräuche in den Siedlungen der Grauhäute is an interesting example of his critical diasporic gaze directed towards West Germany.¹⁶ There is a hint in Weiss's notebooks that his encounters with the Entschädigungsamt, that is with the West German administrative discourse on the plight of those persecuted under Nazism, were a possible inspiration for the Bericht. During the early 1960s, Weiss and his brother sought compensation for the damages their father suffered because of war and emigration. The application process proved protracted and difficult, with the German administration demanding ever more medical evidence and legal opinions.¹⁷ In the midst of excerpts from ethnographic works, we find in Weiss's notebooks observations on the ritualistic moments of this application procedure, which might have been in his mind when he wrote the Bericht: “Haus der Entschädigungen, Versicherungen—wie man versucht, die Überlebenden zu umgehen, zu betrügen mit Zaubersprüchen—Medizinmänner werden entsandt (Entschädigungsamt)” (Nb Notizbücher] 106). Furthermore, an unpublished note suggests that the traveler is Jewish and afraid of being found out as a Jew because of his physical difference:

mit Schrecken?

wieder die Vorstellung der anders gearteten Kleidung und—z.B.—der Nase—Soweit er es aus der Entfernung sehen kann—Vorhaut—¹⁸

The Bericht mimics the perspective of a traveler who enters into a Western industrialized city lacking the cultural knowledge that would enable him to recognize everyday objects and actions like cars, cigarettes, shopping, reading the newspaper, etc. Adopting an ethnographer's point of view, the traveler circumscribes the observed incidents and actions meticulously, using ethnographic terms to understand their ritualistic meaning. Gross misreadings of situations (busses as “Ruhebetten,” 130) emphasize the discrepancy between the traveler's horizon of interpretation and that of the culture he visits. The text as a whole harks back to the Enlightenment tradition of using the foreigner's perspective as a hermeneutic device to launch a critique of Western European societies.¹⁹ Its depiction of commodities as fetishes that are guarded and protected by those who bought them (120), for example, reads like a satire of Western consumerism. Yet the text betrays a seriousness which indicates that more is at stake here. There is a pervasive sense of danger. The traveler has heard rumors about the cruelty and vindictiveness of the inhabitants (121) and is constantly afraid of being discovered by them as a stranger. Simultaneously, he undergoes an uncanny process of assimilation, adopting a “Mimikry” “die ihm das Dasein hier ermöglicht” (121). Walking through the cramped space of the city, whose wake pulls him into the masses, the traveler gradually loses his panoramic and distanced view. He discovers similarities between his own physiognomy and the species he researches, or more precisely, the differences between the two become blurred and indeterminable:

nur glaubt er, in der Hautfarbe das Grau zu erkennen, das den Bewohnern dieser Gegend bei uns ihren Namen gibt, doch auch dies ist ungewiß, denn wenn er jetzt seine eigene Hand betrachtet, so erscheint sie ihm in derselben schmutzigen Bleichheit, die die Farbe des Himmels und des aufgetürmten Gesteins widerspiegelt, und die auch von dem glühenden Klumpen der Sonne nicht erwärmt werden kann.

(126)

What happens here, and what happens increasingly during the traveler's walk, is that his perceptive categories cease to keep his objects of research at a distance from himself.²⁰ He gradually loses his sense of orientation, as well as the control over his steps while following a tramp as if hypnotized. He moves underground, and enters into a public restroom which he perceives as the sacred center of this society. At this moment, the text breaks off, necessarily, for its very composition depends on distance, a distance that alone enables the traveler to write his report. Furthermore, it seems significant that the text breaks off at that very moment when the mark of the traveler's particularity—the circumcised penis—is in danger of becoming exposed. Without stretching this point too far, we may say that the Bericht epitomizes the difference between Weiss and the Enlightenment, which had used the stranger's perspective in order to confirm its premise that cultural differences ultimately dissolve—and should dissolve—in view of universal reason. In Weiss, the discovery of the unity underlying cultural difference does not lead to a redemptive universalism, but to anxiety, thus making distance the necessary prerequisite for an encounter with this country.

The most unsettling effect of Weiss's Bericht derives from its radicalization of the monkey's perspective in Kafka's Ein Bericht für eine Akademie. Kafka's monkey tells a story of assimilation, the transformation of an African monkey first into a domesticated animal and then into an almost-human civilized European. The narrator-monkey presents his report to a scientific academy, that is an institution that represents the society that captures monkeys to display them in zoos or to make them objects of scientific research. It thus brings to a head the double bind of the minority writer who is forced to explain herself to the very culture that denigrates her. I would argue that Weiss's Bericht establishes a similar double bind. Throughout the text, the narrator invokes a collective “we” or “our” that establishes the horizon of interpretation for the strange incidents and habits the traveler observes and that simultaneously addresses a readership as the inscribed audience of the report. Aimed at a German-speaking audience, this text constructs a specific diasporic perspective, a perspective that draws its readership into the paradoxical situation of observing its own society as if from a distance.

Gleichzeitig arbeitet sich, von vorn her kommend, eine Gestalt zwischen den Angesammelten hindurch, die ihren [sic] Ausdruck und ihren Gebärden nach dem Hüter entspricht, dem der Reisende bereits in den Höhlungen der festen Gebäude begegnet ist, und führt, im Zusammenwirken mit den Händen der Insassen, das schon bekannte Spiel des Tauschens aus, und diesmal scheint er den Sammlern den Genuß des eng aneinandergedrückten Dahingleitens zu geben, und dafür reichen ihm die Hände die kleinen Marken hin, die er in einem umgehängten rachenförmigen Gebilde verschwinden läßt, und er streckt den Händen die bereits angefertigten, in dicken Schichten zusammengehaltenen, schnell losgerissenen Bilder oder Beschreibungen hin, die ihrem neuen Besitzer das Recht zur Teilnahme an diesem Zusammensein verbürgen.

(129f.)

The bureaucratic, pseudo-scientific language is reminiscent of Kafka's Bericht. However, Kafka emphasizes the monkey's mimicry of gestures he does not understand to alienate the readers from their own behavior. Weiss instead creates the sense of distance and noncomprehension entirely through his peculiar use of language. The exacting technical descriptions using ethnographic terms of the most common and recognizable events makes the reader thoroughly aware of the force being used to tear her away from habitual, familiar language. Through such long-winded circumlocution, Weiss makes the German language alien to itself.

In 1964, shortly after composing the Bericht, Weiss left for Frankfurt to observe the Auschwitz trial which became the subject of Die Ermittlung, one of his best known and most controversial works. Situating this play with a number of other, partially unpublished, texts, I argue that Weiss's diasporic perspective has shaped his representation of the trial and of its particular discourse on history, that is, the pursuit of historical truth via pieces of evidence and oral testimonies which are verified and evaluated by a codified system of juridical rules. Weiss's specific angle on the trial expresses and intensifies the crisis of witnessing brought about by the Shoah, the difficulty of testifying to events which shatter human forms of perception and comprehension. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, who have theorized on this crisis, emphasize the performative aspect of testimony as a mode of narration in which the witness does not possess but instead embodies a truth that constantly eludes him or her. Felman and Laub draw attention to the situational context of testimony, which is essentially a dialogic event between a witness and an addressable other, an empathetic listener. The effect of such dialogicity can be shown by the example of the interviews with survivors that are currently being conducted and collected in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. During these interviews, the stories the survivor tells frequently break down, as traumatizing memories interrupt the flow of his or her speech. The interviewer then helps the survivor to resume speech by listening attentively and empathetically or by asking questions, so that like a psychoanalytic session, the interview provides a dialogic situation appropriate to the recollection of traumatic experience (70ff.). Felman and Laub emphasize that testimony does not aim at an “objective” historical truth but that it creates a meaning for the past, a meaning that emerges from and reflects upon the community which is formed in the act of giving testimony. In this case, not only the individual sessions, but also the larger context of the Video Archive, which was founded to preserve the survivors' testimonies and to learn from them, encourages survivors to tell their life stories and thus to break “the frame of death.”²¹

Weiss's texts on and around the Auschwitz trial, in particular the unpublished Divina Commedia project, the essay “Meine Ortschaft” (1964), and Die Ermittlung (1965), reflect on the possibilities and the limits of testimony in the case of witnesses who, in contrast to the interviewed survivors, lack a sympathetic audience or, worse, who speak in front of a decidedly unsympathetic audience. This dilemma affects the witnesses of the Auschwitz trial as well as the diaspora author. At no time does Weiss seem to have been more skeptical about contemporary Germany, and about his own role with respect to a German audience, than during his attendance of the Auschwitz trial. His notebooks of the time feature, for example, notes on the dulled faces, the monotonous culture and the latent readiness to chauvinism, racism and anti-Semitism he observed during a reading tour through Germany (Nb 190ff.). Scraps of language, overheard in everyday situations, further testify to a linguistic and ideological continuity between the Third Reich and the West Germany of the 1960s:

“Schacher doch nicht so, bist ja schlimmer wie ein Jude!”

das gab ihm den Rest, dieser Antisemitismus im Bus

“Bis zur Vergasung” heute im Sprachgebrauch—ein scherzhafter Anfang

(Nb 227)

From the very beginning, Weiss was highly attentive to the position of the witnesses in the trial, which he perceived as problematic because of the intrinsic bias of the trial. In his notebooks he further draws an analogy between the situation of the witnesses and that of the returning exile, who is subject to the same discursive strategies of scrutiny and denial that devaluate the witnesses' voices. This analogy culminates in a vision depicting the returning exile as a belated victim of Nazi persecution:

Paradiso: die Zeugen stoßen immer wieder auf die (fast gleichgültig, mechanisch ausgesprochenen) Ablehnungen, Verneinungen der Angeklagten—

Studenten können “Emigration” mit ihm diskutieren—völlig unwissend (und im Grunde uninteressiert)

(Nb 275)²²

Die Wiederaufnahme

Der Besuch des Emigranten in Deutschl.—Er stirbt daran, wird also verspätet doch noch gemordet—”

(Nb 226)

Originally, Weiss had planned to incorporate the material from the Auschwitz trial into a modern adaptation of Dante's Divina Commedia. Weiss's fascination with Dante's world theater was related to his own attempts to universalize the meaning of the Holocaust by linking it to other forms of violence and exploitation. Moreover, Dante's inferno was the metaphor most widely used in connection with Auschwitz. Yet this metaphor, as it was employed sensationalistically by the media, also implied a highly problematic shift of meaning: Dante's inferno, originally the site where sinners suffer brutal punishments, came to depict the suffering of innocent Holocaust victims (Walser 190f.). Weiss evidently planned to rescind this shift of meaning by foregrounding the stubbornness of the inferno's sinful inhabitants—which he reinterpreted as the complacency of the perpetrators in contemporary Germany—rather than the drastic images of suffering itself.²³ However, Weiss intended to adopt the Divina Commedia not as an objectifying frame to depict the reality of contemporary Germany, but as a subjective perspective. In fact, his notebooks show almost more concern with the figure of Dante than with the imagery of the inferno, and it is clear that Weiss endows his Dante with features that he identified in himself: Dante knows no “Heimat” (Nb 253), is emotionally attached to a dead woman (Nb 254), is Jewish (Nb 258), suffers from phobias (Nb 284), and is persecuted (Nb 289).

In Weiss's Nachlaß several sketches exist which portray Dante as a half-Jewish exile returning to the inferno of postwar West Germany, sketches that reflect on Weiss's own position at the time. Although he seems to suggest in his “Vorübung zum dreiteiligen Drama divina commedia” that his main insights upon his own return from his visit in Frankfurt concerned his own faults, his historical blindness and his failure to act, something else transpires in these sketches: they depict the returning exile as instrumentalized and silenced by the German public. The first version, for example, transforms the allegories of human vices, which appear at the beginning of Dante's journey, into three deceptively friendly beings who draw an ideological picture of a modern country that has come to terms with its past, and who try to persuade the exile to return.²⁴ The next scenes, then, show how the phraseology of peace and harmony serves to cover up the continuity with the past. An all-pervasive philosemitism barely conceals the underlying anti-Semitism, and the returning exile is treated in a friendly manner only to improve the public image of the country. As soon as he resists conforming to the role that is imposed on him, he is silenced, sometimes by rebukes, sometimes by violence. And while this modern Dante does not face a homogenously hostile front—there are hints that he has some genuine allies on the Left in this country—the sketches foreground the loneliness and the vulnerability of the exile who, in contrast to the original Dante, cannot even rely on the support of his Virgil. This does not mean that Weiss fashions Dante exclusively as a victim. The self-criticism hinted at in “Vorübung” is also evident in the preliminary sketches, for example in Giotto's reproaching Dante for narcissism.²⁵ Yet the figure of Dante, in all its ambiguity and faultiness, continues to embody the only voice of testimony in these sketches. Dante's exilic biography and his inability to comply with the alleged demands of the present are all that is left of the past.

Why did Weiss abandon this focus on the subjective perspective of the returning exile? Why did he choose instead a form of representation that claims the utmost objectivity, the documentary theater of Die Ermittlung? As is well known, the play is based on documentary material from the Auschwitz trial, on testimonies of both victims and perpetrators, which Weiss compiled, condensed and rearranged without radically altering the wording. It has not gone unnoticed that the play nonetheless conveys a distinct interpretation of the Shoah, one which has drawn criticism from the very beginning. James Young has formulated a compelling critique of Die Ermittlung, contending that Weiss uses the alleged objectivity of documents—their “rhetoric of fact”—to conceal his own particular reconstruction of the Shoah, a reconstruction undertaken from a reductionist, economic Marxist point of view. According to Young, this point of view effaces the Jewish identity of the victims, and subordinates the specific role anti-Semitism played in National Socialism to a universal critique of capitalism and fascism.²⁶ It is certainly true that Weiss intended to show that German industry collaborated with and profited from National Socialism, and that the continuity of the German administrative and economic elite after 1945—at least in the Western part of the country—prevented a deeper confrontation with the past and fostered a latent continuity of National Socialism itself. By focusing exclusively on questions of representation, however, Young overlooks the play's reflection on what I would call the location of testimony. Weiss certainly does not use the courtroom motif to establish an objectifying framework and a discursive authority, as Young contends (72), nor does he pretend to present the documents from the trial in an entirely unmediated fashion. Rather, by drawing attention to the particular constellation of motivations and relations between witnesses, defendants, and juridical authorities, he unmasks the hidden bias of juridical discourse. Throughout the play, it becomes evident that the juridical categories for objectifiable enunciations do not match the witnesses' forms of memory. In the name of these categories, the defense claims that the emotions and traumata that surface as the witnesses have to face their persecutors once again renders their testimony unreliable:

ZEUGE 7:
Herr Vorsitzender
es ist lange her
daß ich ihnen gegenüber stand
und es fällt mir schwer
ihnen in die Gesichter zu sehn
Dieser hat Ähnlichkeit mit ihm
er könnte es sein
Er heißt Bischof
RICHTER:
Sind Sie sicher
oder zweifeln Sie
ZEUGE:
Herr Vorsitzender
ich war diese Nacht schlaflos
VERTEIDIGER:
Wir stellen die Glaubwürdigkeit des Zeugen
infrage
(…)
Die Übermüdung des Zeugen
kann keine Grundlage bilden
für beweiskräftige Aussagen

(W [Werke in sechs Bänden] V 22f.)

In view of such references to the witnesses' vulnerabilities, it seems remarkable that the play does not show the witnesses' reactions and emotions in a more expressive manner. Their language is impersonal, descriptive, and utterly devoid of emotional investment.²⁷ In contrast to this, the defendants oscillate between emotionalized, personalized forms of speech when defending themselves and abstract, passive, euphemistic forms when referring to what they did in Auschwitz.²⁸ As for their expression of emotions, the defendants occasionally exhibit friendliness or anger, but more important, they repeatedly break out into a collective, ritualistic laughter. “Die Angeklagten lachen” reads the monotonous line that is almost the only stage direction Weiss uses in this play, all the more astonishing if one considers the wide range of theatrical forms he employed in his previous play, Marat/Sade. Only in one case does a stage direction refer to a witness, that is, when a woman falls into silence after having been asked to testify to the medical experiments to which she was subjected (88f.) However, this silence is not an expressive silence; it evokes an extreme absence of affect rather than nonverbalized loss and trauma, an absence of affect that is also palpable in the witness's depersonalized language as she resumes her speech: “Die übrigen Ärzte des Lagers / erstellten das Menschenmaterial” (88).

Given this scarcity of expressive moments, the collective laughter of the defendants is all the more effective. It recalls the musical form of an oratorio—Die Ermittlung bears the subtitle “Oratorium in 11 Gesängen”—in which the laughter of the defendants represents the chorus, while their individual, whining vindications correspond to the arias.²⁹ Considering that the original function of the chorus in drama was to represent the public and common reaction to the dramatic events,³⁰Die Ermittlung implies a sharp criticism of the Auschwitz trial as a form of public discourse: the alleged objectivity of the trial proves to be contingent upon a public consensus that allows the subjectivity of the defendants to resonate within a collective, while it excludes the subjectivity of the witnesses. In other words, Weiss has transformed the theme of the Divina Commedia project—the exile's loneliness within the German public sphere—into a critique of the discourse established in the Auschwitz trial.³¹

What kind of speech is available for the witnesses in this constellation? Interestingly, Weiss originally planned to use the material of the Auschwitz trial for the Paradiso part of his Divina Commedia project, and his notes suggest that topographical precision and a factual, detailed language were to mark the witnesses' discourse. “Die Ermittlung (Paradiso), mit äußerster Genauigkeit nach jeder Einzelheit fragen, wieder und wieder—kamen sie von rechts? Wo lag die Tür? Wie sah sie aus?” (Nb 282); “vor allem im Paradiso: ganz einfache, kurze Sätze, äußerste Sparsamkeit, zentrale, gegenständliche Angaben” (Nb 255). Another note suggests that heaven and hell were to represent two different discursive spaces, allowing for two different modes of speech.³² Given that Weiss intended to rewrite the Divina Commedia from a radically secular perspective, rejecting the possibility of other-worldly compensation for earthly suffering, it seems consistent that the victims' testimonies figure as the sole substitute for paradisiacal redemption. The sober, largely descriptive language of the witnesses in Die Ermittlung still betrays Weiss's intention to set a sober recounting of facts against the distortions of the defendants.³³

The problem, however, is that such a descriptive language cannot be separated from the language of instrumental reason that Weiss shows to be complicit in industrial genocide. We may speculate how the scraps of Nazi language overheard by Weiss on the German streets of the 1960s must have affected him and how his sense of an affinity between the German language and National Socialism must have interfered with his attempt to use this language as a neutral, objective tool. Weiss's decision to discard the Dante model, with its division into different realms of speech, perhaps reflects the insight that the perpetrators' and the victims' modes of speech can never be clearly separated. This is true particularly when the witnesses describe their jobs within the administrative apparatus of the camps, but also when they refer to KZ practices in general: “Es fielen bis zu 300 Tote pro Tag an” (59); “Und auch hier wurde Einsperrung / mit Kostentzug praktiziert” (165). The victims' testimonies, then, are confined not only by a trial constellation in which their memories cannot find full expression, but also by the fact that they have to articulate their experience within a language that reproduces the system of persecution. Weiss intensifies this linguistic predicament by depersonalizing the witnesses in Die Ermittlung to a degree that they are nothing but “Sprachrohre,” mouthpieces of a language that itself testifies to the crimes of Nazism.³⁴ This is testimony in a modest, nonemphatic sense, far from the means of resistance and healing Felman and Laub envision it to be. Yet it is, perhaps, the only adequate form of testimony in a situation in which the witnesses lack both an empathetic audience and a language able to express their memories.

I would argue that this aporetic position of the witness shapes Die Ermittlung as a whole. Read against the backdrop of Weiss's earlier sketches and the play's reflection on the location of testimony, Die Ermittlung constructs a specific author persona, that is, the figure of a distant observer, a nonpersona whose essential characteristic is to remain unaffected by the trial he witnesses. Just like the witnesses within the Auschwitz trial, Weiss functions as a medium of a discourse detached from himself as he travels to Germany to attend the Auschwitz trial, to compile the documents and to present them to the German public. The shift from the Divina Commedia project to documentary theater transforms the vulnerable subjectivity of the returning exile into a hyper-objectivity that may be regarded as a protective mechanism on Weiss's part, but that was also likely to produce an unsettling effect on its audience. As other critics have noted, Die Ermittlung was meant to have an impact on its (German) audience beyond its rational insight. Huyssen defines the effect of the play as numbing, devised “to affect the consciousness rather than emotions of sadism or horrified empathy” (Huyssen 110). Söllner argues that the cold shock-technique employed by the play potentially induced a kind of collective psychoanalysis in the German audience (Söllner 181ff.).

I have attempted to show that this performative force of the drama derives from a continuous, experimental reconfiguration of the diasporic perspective. This reading is also supported by Weiss's short essay “Meine Ortschaft,” which describes his visit to the Auschwitz death camp in 1964 as the collapse of an empathetic understanding of history. Walking over the camp and registering meticulously the material remnants of the Shoah—the barracks, the crematoria, the prison cells, but also the piles of hair, clothes, and shoes—the narrator is incapable of establishing any imaginative relationship to the events that happened here. Filled with an anaesthetic indifference, he can neither empathize with the victims, nor identify with them, nor mourn them. In other words, although designed as a memorial space, the camp utterly fails to function as a lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora) that would enable its visitor to create in his imagination a connection between history, collective, and individual.³⁵ I would argue that the lengthy topographical descriptions of Die Ermittlung as well as its topographical macrostructure are attempts to reproduce just such a sense of overproximity to a place of death that nonetheless remains withdrawn from the imagination. The structure of Die Ermittlung parallels that of the inferno part of the Divina Commedia in that it moves gradually toward the center of horror: from the ramp, to the inmates' barracks, the examination and torture rooms, the “black wall” where people were shot, the hospital where medical experiments were conducted, the bunker cells, the gas chambers, and finally to the ovens. This structure forces the audience into the camp while it stares at a stage which, according to Weiss's own instructions, is stripped of any decorative setting, of anything that would make it a place, and which thus reproduces the incommensurability of place, narration and subjectivity that I have shown to be a central moment in Weiss's rewriting of exile. Less optimistic than the cosmopolitan vision of Fluchtpunkt, Die Ermittlung suggests that catastrophic exile cannot be converted into freedom, but that the fissure between the subject and its place of origin, which returns as the fissure between the subject and its language, can be performed upon an audience with a radically different historical perspective.

Notes

1. Weiss, Notizbücher 1960-1971, 54f. These notebooks were published only after the great success of the Notizbücher 1971-1980, which appeared at the request of Suhrkamp as a commentary to Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. Although they came out only after his death, the Notizbücher 1960-1971 were prepared for publication by Weiss himself. Unfortunately, the Suhrkamp edition fails to make the readers aware of the fact that Weiss edited his original notes quite extensively. He not only omitted some notes, but inserted whole passages, i.e., part of the text was actually written around 1980, and not during the 1960s. This is important because the alterations affect some of the most explicit passages on Peter Weiss's outsider status in the West German literary scene. The published version occasionally takes on an aloof and rationalizing tone at the expense of more impulsive, emotionalized impressions. The quotes in this paper are drawn from the published Notizbücher, hereafter referred to in text as Nb. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this paper are also in the unpublished version, although sometimes with slightly different wording.

2. The book was originally written in 1952, yet the first excerpt appeared in the magazine Akzente in 1960, and the book was published by the prestigious publishing house Suhrkamp in 1961.

3. The phase of Weiss's writing examined here (1960-65) has thus far largely been researched under the aspect of his politicization as a Marxist. This focus was sustained partially by Weiss's own representation of his transformation from an idiosyncratic, self-centered surrealist into a politically engaged writer. From this perspective, Weiss's experimental prose texts of the 1960s, for example, appear as mere “relapses” into apolitical subjectivism and aestheticism. See for example Gerlach 177. A notable departure from this teleological model is Söllner's study, which shows that Weiss's allegedly apolitical early writings (written before 1953) present an aesthetically and politically intricate expression of Weiss's “exile after exile.” By drawing on techniques from the modern avantgardes, especially from surrealism, Söllner argues, and by transforming them in a way that lends a voice to the victims of the Shoah, Weiss challenged both the literary paradigm of realism and the repression of the past prevalent in postwar German culture, which in turn proved unreceptive to his voice. Söllner's excellent analysis of Weiss's initial exclusion from the German public sphere, however, does not explain why Weiss insisted on his exilic position even when his voice was welcomed in Germany.

4. This definition of diaspora reflects the insight that since the establishment of the state of Israel, Jewish life outside of Israel has become largely self-chosen, as it has been in previous periods of Jewish independence or compact settlement in their own land. In contrast, the term Galut (Hebrew/Yiddish for “exile”) refers to the forced dispersion of the Jewish people. For a discussion of the terms “Diaspora” and “Galut,” see the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 6: 7-19 and 7: 275-95. For diaspora in the contemporary German Jewish context, see Gilman, Jews 1-16. Gilman suggests that the two concepts of exile correspond to different notions of the Jewish body, the inherently distinct and unchanging versus the infinitely malleable Jewish body.

5. For postcolonial concepts of diaspora see Bhabha, Hall, Said and Gilroy. For recent theories on Jewish diaspora that share some concerns with postcolonialism, see Boyarin/Boyarin and Finkielkraut. See also Jean Améry's claim that there is an analogy between Frantz Fanon's works on colonized subjects and his own attempts to restore dignity to the victims of Nazi persecution (142).

6. This generalization brackets such related issues as the rise of Zionism and the persistence of religious belief, particularly in some parts of the Habsburg Empire. Futhermore, the process of emancipation clearly remained incomplete, situating Jews rather uneasily within German-speaking cultures, a process that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have described as “deterritorialization”. However problematic such integration into new “fatherlands” was, it nonetheless represents a significant shift from the earlier bond to a distant homeland.

7. The word “resentment,” in fact, picks up on a catchword that has served in West Germany to exclude the voices of emigrants after 1945. With its Nietzschean undertones, the word insinuated that the refugees from Nazism were in an overly subjective state of mind, unable to abstract from their past experiences, and therefore could not seriously and rationally contribute to the debates on Germany's responsibility for Nazism and on its future. Peitsch quotes, for example, Alfred Andersch's request that the exiles should switch from “Ressentiment” to “Objektivierung” (Peitsch 109). “Objektivierung” soon came to denote a rejection of the Kollektivschuldthese and to imply an exculpation of large parts of the German population, especially of its army. The devaluation of the victims' voices continued, and grew even stronger, in the 1960s when psychological discourses were pathologizing and marginalizing these voices instead of taking them seriously as testimonies to the Nazi crimes. By accepting the representation of the survivor's subjectivity as damaged, tortured, and extremely sensitive, Améry recuperates it as a valid moral reaction, thus challenging its ongoing psychologization and marginalization.

8. For examples of Adorno's more positive attitude toward pedagogy after 1945, see his Erziehung zur Mündigkeit.

9. For the connection between nationalism, diaspora and the “other temporality” of migrants, see Bhabha, especially the chapter “Dissemi-Nation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation” (139-70).

10. Santner has analyzed such a strategy of displaced memory as a “narrative fetishism” indicative of the inability to mourn: “Narrative fetishism (…) is the way an inability or refusal to mourn emplots traumatic events; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and the origin of loss elsewhere” (144).

11. The word “exile” appears already in a pre-1952 Swedish text variant related to Abschied von den Eltern, although not in very prominent places. The unpublished manuscript Abwechselnd lag der Garten, which was probably written in 1958 or at the beginning of 1959 and is already quite close to Abschied von den Eltern, returns to the notion of exile in the narrator's childhood alienation. I am indebted to Jürgen Schutte, Freie Universität Berlin, for the details about these earlier sketches. During my own research in the Peter-Weiss-Archiv, I noticed that Abschied von den Eltern (written between 1959 and 1960) foregrounds the theme of exile more strongly than Abwechselnd lag der Garten. Some of the most explicit phrases first appear in Abschied von den Eltern, for example: “Diese Spiele waren wie Psychodramen, in denen wir uns mit der Emigration auseinandersetzten, in meiner Arbeit war alles nur ein Abgewandtsein und ein Verbergen” (WII 123; Weiss's Werke will be referred to parenthetically following citations). For a more detailed discussion, see my forthcoming dissertation. I argue there that in Abschied von den Eltern, the surface psychological narrative of exile, that is, the story of a youth who is alienated from his bourgeois family, is gradually undermined by the historical dimension of exile.

12. Even Bohrer, who focuses on the formal features of Weiss's work, writes of Abschied von den Eltern und Fluchtpunkt: “Ohne literarische Überanstrengung, ohne den Versuch, sich selbst zu stilisieren, hat Weiss hier in einfachen Sätzen buchstäblich seinen Fluchtpunkt getroffen” (197). Among the few critics who have stressed the constructed character of the text is Grimm.

13. See for example his self-presentation at the beginning of Fluchtpunkt 146 ff.

14. In Abschied von den Eltern, the narrator twice likens his mother to the Egyptian princess who found him as an infant in a basket (63, 93).

15. In my forthcoming dissertation, I show how the narrator of Fluchtpunkt arrives at his vision of self-chosen exile only by separating himself from two other exiles in the novel who are associated with Jewishness and who embody forced exile and persecution. These figures are the narrator's father and the painter Anatol.

16. The text was written in 1963, yet remained a fragment and was first published in 1968.

17. For some documentation on the application process see the letters by Weiss's lawyers Kröll and Gregor. Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste (abbreviated: SAdK), Berlin, Peter-Weiss-Archiv, 76/86/1272-1 to 76/86/1272-5.

18. SAdK, Berlin, Peter-Weiss-Archiv, Notizbuch 2, 86/76/2-53. In the published Notizbücher, this note would have appeared on 110. The Notizbücher also contain a reminiscence of what seems to have been Weiss's own circumcision during his first years of exile in Sweden. Unfortunately, we have little documentation of those years and of the circumstances that may have convinced Weiss to undergo circumcision. The description is nonetheless highly interesting. Not the act of circumcision itself is depicted, but its negative reflection on the face of the female assistant; the circumcised penis, then, is not a positive sign of Jewish identity, but a sign of the disgust felt by others: “Die Beschneidung wurde vollzogen als ich schon erwachsen war, bei dem Arzt in Alingsås—seine Assistentin ekelte sich—fühlte selbst nichts, sah nur dieses verzerrte Gesicht” (Nb 105). For the significance of circumcision as a mark of male Jewish difference, see Gilman, “Male Sexuality.”

19. For examples of this tradition see Goldsmith and Montesquieu.

20. See also 131: “glaubt, daß er mit seinem Gesicht, seinem Leib, den ringsum vorbeischwankenden Gesichtern und Leibern gleicht, und er nimmt an, daß auch die grundsätzlichen Bedürfnisse, die bei uns gelten, nicht von denen der Ortsbewohner unterschieden sind” (my emphasis).

21. See, for example, the scene where a survivor remembers the Auschwitz uprising, during which one of the crematory chimneys was blown up. She, however, remembers the destruction of all four chimneys. As Laub argues, this distortion of the historical facts is marginal considering the deeper meaning of her testimony. “She had come, indeed, to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death” (Felman and Laub 62).

22. Inferno and Paradiso refer to the parts of Dante's Divina Commedia.

23. See Weiss: “Inferno / beherbergt alle die, die nach des früheren Dante Ansicht / zur unendlichen Strafe verurteilt wurden, die heute aber / hier weilen, zwischen uns, den Lebendigen, und unbestraft / ihre Taten weiterführen, und zufrieden leben / mit ihren Taten, unbescholten, von vielen bewundert. Alles / ist fest hier, geölt, gesichert, nichts bezweifelt, und jegliches Leiden / ist weit abgeschoben” (“Vorübung” 137).

24. “Luchs: Wir werden alles tun um Dante Alighieri / in seinem schwierigen Unternehmen behilflich zu sein / Löwe: Jedem der als Freund kommt / erleichtern wir die Schritte / in unserem Land des Friedens und der Gerechtigkeit / Luchs: So wie wir auf der Hut sind vor den Kräften / die die erreichte Harmonie stören und gefährden wollen,” SAdK, Berlin, Peter-Weiss-Archiv, no. 76/86/6095-2°, Mappe 17-1/1.

25. See SAdK, Berlin, Peter-Weiss-Archiv, no. 76/86/6095-2°, Mappe 18-26/3.

26. This reductive explanation of National Socialism has been noted by most critics. See for example Huyssen 111. Young's critique goes further than this, maintaining that Weiss consciously uses the documentary form in order to make his ideological point of view more credible.

27. Weiss's representation of the witnesses as devoid of emotional reactions is one of the few and striking instances where he departs from the documents, which frequently depict witnesses as being horrified, angry, or crying. See for example Naumann 89, 108, 115, 123. In Die Ermittlung, the witnesses prefer the pronouns “we” and “one”, and they mainly use passive verb forms. They refer even to their own bodies as if to objects outside of themselves, as one witness recounts his own beating: “Vor allem aber waren die Geschlechtsteile / den Schlägen ausgesetzt” (70). If they mention personal emotions at all, they do so in a most laconic manner: “Zeugin 5: Ich konnte nicht darüber sprechen / Verteidiger: Warum nicht / Zeugin 5: Es hat persönliche Gründe / Verteidiger: Können Sie uns die Gründe nennen / Zeugin 5: Ich habe seitdem nie mehr / ein eigenes Kind haben wollen” (63).

28. In contrast to the witnesses, the defendants often use the personal pronoun “I” and recount moments of their personal life (e.g. 21, 24). They show friendliness when facing a witness they know, and anger when they feel wrongly accused (e.g. 33, 48). For the change of linguistic registers, see for example: “Angeklagter 7: Wahllos zu schießen / wäre mir nicht eingefallen / Hätte ich schießen wollen / dann hätte ich auch den getroffen / den ich aufs Korn nahm / Scharf war ich / das kann ich schon sagen / Aber ich habe nur getan / was ich tun mußte / Richter: Und was mußten Sie tun / Angeklagter 7: Zusehn daß der Betrieb klappte / Kinder wurden grundsätzlich / gleich übergestellt / auch Mütter die sich von den Kindern / nicht trennen wollten / Alles ging reibungslos / Die Transporte kamen an / wie warme Brötchen” (48). For other examples of the strategies of the defendants to play down their agency in the camps, see also Salloch 131.

29. For the form of the oratorio, see also Salloch 137.

30. For the function of the chorus as public in Greek drama, see Lehmann 48.

31. This critique is all the more important since the publicity of trial procedures in court was an important element of the emerging bourgeois public sphere (Habermas 83). Weiss profoundly questions the Enlightenment's notion that public debate can “transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all” (my emphasis).

32. See for example: “Die Hölle vielleicht nur aus Verhören, Anklagen, Fragen, Lügen, Verteidigungen bestehend. Im Himmel dann die Opfer” (Nb 216).

33. The play also attempts to establish a truth by means other than description. Witness 3 (81-88), who explains fascism in terms of its links to capitalism, stands for the possibility of political resistance. He speaks with more emphasis and persuasiveness than most of the others. I argue, however, that even his position is undermined by the aporetic constellation created when a witness stands in front of a German audience and uses the German language.

34. For Weiss's portrait of the witnesses as “Sprachrohre” see his annotations (9).

35. The narrator's inability to identify empathetically with the victims is especially striking in view of his awareness that he himself was meant to perish in Auschwitz. The only tenuous link between the narrator and the victims of the camp is the negativity inscribed into the exile's origin. Although he emphasizes the singularity of Auschwitz, as the only fixed point in the topography of a life which otherwise features only transitory spaces (114), the narrator goes on to compare Auschwitz with his place of birth, a town near Berlin: “Auch sie [i.e., Auschwitz] trägt einen polnischen Namen, wie meine Geburtsstadt, die man mir vielleicht einmal aus dem Fenster eines fahrenden Zugs gezeigt hatte” (115). Just as Auschwitz lies outside of experience, memory, and narration, such a place of birth fails to be an imaginative point of departure from which to recollect the fragments of one's life.

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