SOURCE: Best, Otto F. “Self-Analysis and Confession: Leavetaking and Vanishing Point.” In Peter Weiss, translated by Ursule Molinaro, pp. 14-23. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1976.

[In the following essay, Best examines the novels Leavetaking and Vanishing Point as works of confessional literature.]

Abschied von den Eltern (tr. Leavetaking) and Fluchtpunkt (tr. Vanishing Point) are important contributions to the genre of confessional literature. Both works are marked by the attempt to reconstruct the past in its entirety, to create an “objective” image of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. In the course of the confession events that are in the narrator's past take on shape and form in the present.

In each work a narrator gives an account of the contradictory nature which he discovers within himself and which he considers typical of his world and of his time. The authenticity of subjective frankness characterizes both works. The intensity of experience is controlled by a clear prose style that adheres to the exigencies of strict classical tradition. If Leavetaking is closer to the tradition of Rousseau's Confessions in its combination of self-analysis and truth-telling, Vanishing Point follows the pattern of the formative novel and especially of the novel of development, which delineate the confrontation with the formative environment from a negative angle. In the end the prodigal son's sole possessions are freedom and language.

The narrative Leavetaking, written in the period 1960-1961, is a record of psychological captivity. Its points of departure are the death of the narrator's father during a business trip to Belgium, the son's return home with the urn, and the definitive destruction of the family, which had begun with his sister's death in Berlin. Impulses from the narrator's “earliest life” surface in the act of leavetaking. Once again he lives through “the helplessness, the feeling of having been handed over and the blind rebellion” of those days, when strangers' hands “tamed, kneaded, and did violence” to his being.

Even as a child he suffers from the contrast between the “stuffiness,” “the confinement” of the house—the same sensation Weiss attempted to express by the image of the tower in his first play—and the “world outside,” in which he sees a kingdom belonging to him alone. When the narrator describes the child's favorite hiding places, he speaks not of refuge, but of “exile,” a place of banishment. This image may be considered a key concept.

The awareness of being excluded, different, forced into a mold shaped by strangers, of which his name is a part, impels him to ignore his name, to pretend that he is deaf. Naming becomes the first outrage. In The Tower Pablo relinquishes his name, calls himself Niente, and struggles to earn his own name by self-liberation.

The first schoolday increases the narrator's fear to the point of panic, which takes on reality in images of obsession. The world becomes “enchanted”; buildings are “fortresslike”; men appear with “knives.” The classroom becomes a torture chamber; nights are filled with “inconceivables,” with “horror.” “Every night,” the narrator says, “I died, strangled, suffocated.” The daytime world, with its shocks and its pain, continues in nightmares and nocturnal excursions. But a new experience is added to the misery and the pain: desire. “This alloy of pain and pleasure set its stamp on the fantasies of my dissipations.” The hero “savored all the sorrows of humiliation.”

The titles of the books that “pierce the heart” of the adolescent reflect the stage and level of development of body and mind. “The Possessed, The Insulted and the Injured, The House of the Dead, The Devil's Elixir, Black Flags, Inferno—these were the titles that suddenly flared up in front of me and lit up something within me.” Fear and a feeling of menace become tangible and the stuff that shapes one's fate when he listens to a speech that sounded like “an incoherent screaming from hell.” His experience of Hitler's voice marks a crucial change: the boy learns that his father is a Jew. The news comes as a “confirmation” of something he had long suspected. He begins to understand his past. It becomes clear why he has been persecuted, jeered at, stoned. The narrator instantly feels “entirely on the side of the underdog and the outcast”; he comprehends his lostness, his rootlessness.

His experience and the subsequent recognition—which suddenly furnishes an explanation, a reason for suffering that had previously been incomprehensible—allow him to define his own position. Culminating in the public dialogue between Marat and Sade—a clarifying conversation between the author and himself—this awareness becomes the existential reason for writing.

When his favorite sister is run over by a car, shortly before the family's emigration to England, the dissolution of the family begins, and the author paints his first large picture. “Three figures in white costumes, doctors or judges, loomed out of the black background, their faces were bowed in an oppressive severity, their lowered glances refused all mercy.”

He paints what he feels, in order to come to terms with it. Art is used as a means of successfully objectifying personal problems.

In London the narrator becomes an unpaid clerk in a department store. He feels that he has been “banished.” This stint is followed by many months in his father's office. He senses accusations, estrangement, lack of comprehension.

Jacques brings a new dimension into his life. “By evoking my pictures for Jacques I was reminded that I possessed another life, a different life from my life between sample catalogues and rolls of material.” In his conversations with Jacques the hero suddenly loses all fear of life. “Jacques had already fought himself free, he had already conquered his consuming freedom. He had exposed himself to unprotectedness and wounds. In his life there was the wildness and unruliness that I had sought, but also the hunger and the distress.” This friendship causes serious disagreements with his parents, the “totem poles of father and mother.” The son finds himself faced with the alternatives of severing all bonds with his old life or reverting to his former self. He takes leave of his alter ego, the figure that had in many respects been “a wish image,” and drops back into the old captivity, into lostness and “instability.”

In Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf the young man finds a description of his situation, “the situation of the bourgeois who wants to become a revolutionary but is crippled by the weight of established convention.”

However, he also realizes that this book has trapped him “in a romantic no man's land, in self-pity.” “I could have used to advantage a harder and more cruel voice, one which would have torn the veil from my eyes and made me rise and shine.”

Meanwhile the family has moved to Czechoslovakia, where his father had been assigned the management of a textile factory. The narrator enrolls in the art academy in Prague—his parents have granted him a trial year. During his first night in the city he hears his “name” called as he sleeps, the name he had denied, which had been violently forced upon him, like Pablo's in The Tower.

He lives in Prague for a year. Family tyranny is replaced by self-tyranny. He feels guilty, cursed, incapable of commitment; in his sexual impotence he tends toward sadism because “the core of life” seems unattainable. The experiment in freedom and independence is a failure. He is tormented by thoughts of suicide. Gradually he comes to the realization that only one solution remains; to return to the house of his parents like a prodigal son who is “offered the grace” of shelter.

In the meantime the family has moved on to Sweden. There the narrator goes to work in his father's factory. He is a “foreign body,” living in the “vacuum between the world of my parents and the world of the workmen.” He feels his return as a “defeat.” Emigration now seems to him like the confirmation of the “not-belonging” he has been experiencing since earliest childhood. The following two years are “a period of waiting, a period of sleep-walking.” When it is over, at the end of the book, the “break-up” begins “with a violent blow.”

To sum up, it may be said that if the child and the adolescent found the experience of menace and suffering explained by his Jewish origin, the young man found in his emigration the reason for his not-belonging, which implied his failure. The child's fears suddenly appear in a worldwide political context. A dream experience marks the beginning of the break. The appearance of a “man in a hunter's outfit” symbolizes the awakening, the abandonment of passivity, the end of weakness and discouragement; the hero is on the road toward a life of his own. The hunted becomes the hunter, stalking himself. He is filled with the vital force that will give his outcast state a proper core. Henry Miller takes the place of Kafka, as the author puts it in Vanishing Point.

Written in the period 1960-1961, Vanishing Point is a more expansive novel. The searchlight of memory has a wider beam, illuminating a number of secondary experiences.

While Leavetaking was centered on the confrontation with the family, with its conventions and restrictions, the narrator of Vanishing Point begins to question a world that has always been divided into antitheses, into the two camps of victim and executioner, the weak and the strong, the oppressed and the oppressor. At particular times political constellations may reflect these oppositions. A feeling of internal schism is added to the sensation of lostness. The narrator embodies the notion that he contains within himself the dual possibility of victim and executioner.

In Leavetaking the hero briefly experienced the good fortune of admission to the ranks of the strong, although he knows that he belongs to the weak. Vanishing Point refers back to this event when the narrator joins “the party of the stronger” whom he “outdid in cruelty” “out of thankfulness at being spared.” He adds, “The only thing I saw clearly was that I could be on the side of the persecutor and hangman. I had it in me to take part in an execution.”

In almost suicidal fashion, commanding respect and gratitude, Peter Weiss touches on one of the century's basic questions. The brutal fact of lambs turning into wolves, of respectable family fathers becoming assassins, has exposed fissures in humanity's aspect that can no longer be understood in Dostoevskian terms. It is the question posed by Büchner's Danton—“What is this thing inside us that lies, whores, steals, and murders?” The potential for negative unmasking is immanent in man, a permanent feature of his existence. A crucial point, however, will emerge subsequently. To Peter Weiss the excrescences of civilization, of a repressive society, seem to exist only in what he considers the “bourgeois” world.

His self-accusation as potential “persecutor” and “executioner” is a key to the author's entire work. Images of obsession, murder, shooting, and hanging multiply. The young man who had broken with his family, who had refuted middle-class security and intended to consecrate his life to his calling as an artist, now sees himself faced with another alternative: “The only milieu I had wanted was the one I created for myself. I had been allowed to cut out and make the most of it, or die in the attempt.” But “leaving the family” does not bring the “creative explosions” he had anticipated. The “prodigal son” finally returns to the family “castle.”

At this point the narrator discovers in Kafka's work a world that no longer knows the “chance of retreat.” He is alerted to the trial in which he himself is entrapped. Like Kafka's heroes, he feels torn from a way of life dictated by birth and destiny. He is unable either to penetrate or to interpret existence. But his encounter with Kafka's writings teaches him more than the realization of “impossibility and no way of escape.”

The process of being wrenched away, the moment of self-forgetfulness, the confrontation with the truth of being, leads the narrator—as it does Kafka's heroes—to examine his life as if it were something alien.

The transition from universal law to autonomy, which remains a utopian projection for Kafka, is realized in the author's reflection, which is imbued with thoughts of obsession. “The purpose of your survival may be to find out where the evil lies and how to fight it. You are still burdened with the ballast of your bourgeois origins. You know it is all rotten and doomed to decay. Yet you do not dare make a clean break with it. Your attempts at work will be in vain as long as they do not contribute to the struggle to remold society.” Kafka's existential problem is overcome with the help of ideology. The “wall” against which Kafka finally “battered himself to death” consists, in the narrator's opinion, “of laws handed down” which he thinks he can circumvent by a simple “step sideways.”

Before gaining distance from his own past, the author, continually haunted by obsessions, must endure periods of “discouragement,” of “inability to work.”

Finally he carries destruction to the point of deliberate self-abasement, thus experiencing release and a new beginning. “This was the world of madness and I could alter it … it had only eaten away the happy childhood years, but I could find other years, could discard humbug and burst into the laughter of contempt that had once previously been restrained.” Laughter and change—one leading to Marat and to the post-Marat period, the other to Mockinpott and Sade.

In the spring of 1945 the narrator sees the end of the “development” in which he had “grown up.” The horror then being exposed to the eyes of the world, the sight of mountains of corpses, again poses the question: To whom does he now belong, as a living person, as a survivor? Has he been a passive victim or does his passivity rank him among the executioners? The step toward commitment leads to the rough recognition of his personal truth, self-analysis. Who was this self “laden … with dirt, with crap”?

The writings of Henry Miller deal the “death blow” to the world in which the author used to hold “dialogues with Kafka.” Everything was “tangible and possible” in “the dazzlingly bright world of daylight” of Tropic of Cancer; “sex, which in Kafka lay dimly in the background, assumed a tropical luxuriance”; all that had been concealed is exposed. Instead of Kafka, it is Henry Miller now, and his rebellion against any form of authority. The author apparently failed to realize at the time that Miller is actually a product of this “corrupt civilization which was longing for death”—the unintentional reverse side of the coin, so to speak—while Kafka's K “struggles” for the right to be himself.

In the spring of 1947—after a failed marriage, an intense love relationship that ended soberly, and the vain attempt to conform—the narrator arrives at the moment of definite liberation. The wish expressed in Leavetaking to take “fate” into his own hands and to make “the fact of my not belonging a source of power for a new independence” has now become a reality.

In this sense the two autobiographical works refer to one another and join in a single perspective. Leaving home, self-liberation, and setting out for a life of his own—directed chiefly at the realm of feelings—was the condition for mental and artistic autonomy and self-discovery in language; this is the effort and aim that runs through Vanishing Point. In terms of perspective, the vanishing point is that point where straight parallel lines meet in infinity.

Both works have had to be presented in detail because they furnish the basic material, a kind of skeleton key, for Peter Weiss's later work. Perhaps one of Goethe's frequently quoted phrases may be used once more in the twentieth century, the one about “the great confession” of which his works were segments. It undeniably applies to few contemporary writers as much as to Peter Weiss.

The persona of this author as presented in his writing shows his subjective personal conflicts not only as typical of his time but also as a distinct reflection of universal problems. They are thus endowed with a unique prismatic quality, a relevance beyond agreement or contradiction. The result of functioning as a ready mirror is an expansion in scope and dimension, but the themes remain essentially uniform. The subject will invariably be liberation, rebellion—and revolution.

We noted at the outset that at the end of Vanishing Point the prodigal son is left with freedom and language as his sole possessions. To these must be added the awareness of guilt—an emotional reality which even freedom has not done away with. Together they are potential indicators of the future. The narrator feels guilty when, in 1945, he sees “the end of the development” in which he grew up; killing grounds, mountains of corpses, an informal world. He is guilty because he survived, because he knew and thought about “the misery of the world” in general terms, instead of risking his life, daring to change the world. He reproaches himself for not having mustered “the strength to rebel.” The thought of childhood friends tortures him. In 1965 he once again speaks of the “great sin of omission” in a comparison of his own situation with that of Dante. “Who is my Beatrice?” he asks. A childhood love whom he had not dared approach. He was expelled, driven into exile; Beatrice remained behind. If he had had the courage, he would have taken her along on the flight. “Perhaps she was murdered, perhaps she was gassed.”

They meet again in “paradise.” But a modern Dante can see Beatrice “only as a dead person”; for him a description of paradise would be “a description of the oppressed and the tortured.”

Awareness of guilt leads to commitment. The writer becomes a “spokesman” and advocate. Kafka, with whom Weiss had identified at one time, becomes the representative of the “twisted, guilt-laden, doomed, and damned bourgeoisie,” as he put it in Partisan Review.