SOURCE: Cohen, Robert. “Early Texts.” In Understanding Peter Weiss, pp. 21-39., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Cohen offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Weiss's early work.]

Peter Weiss's early life is defined by everything it lacked: familial warmth, friendship, a home country, a language, success, and a future. It was a life of exile and isolation, in London, Varnsdorf, and Alingsås, where the young painter led his attic-room existence. It was a nearly autistic life, an ivory tower existence. This early experience of barely existing, of being dead to the real world, is the theme of Weiss's earliest work published to date, where it appears turned on its head, as its title implies: “Traktat von der ausgestorbenen Welt” (“Treatise about the Died-Out World”). It was written in 1938-39, during the period when the twenty-two-year-old spent his second summer in the southern Swiss region of Ticino, near the revered master Hermann Hesse. It was the time when his parents fled from Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, which had just been annexed by fascist Germany, to Sweden, where Weiss was about to join them.

“TRAKTAT VON DER AUSGESTORBENEN WELT”

The world through which Peter Weiss traveled from Switzerland across Germany to Sweden was anything but “died-out”: Rather, it was filled with refugees not knowing where to go, marching soldiers, and screaming victors. But “Traktat von der ausgestorbenen Welt” does not deal with this real world. In the world in which the nameless first-person narrator one day wakes up there are neither victors nor vanquished, there are no longer any people at all, no animals, absolutely no living creatures. For five days the narrator walks through this died-out world, finding traces and collecting artifacts left behind by mankind, which has vanished from the face of the earth. All the fantasy notwithstanding, this is clearly an autobiographical story; down to the fine details there is fundamental kinship between the author and the narrator who, like Peter Weiss at that time, is an aspiring poet who has “written small books and poems” and has “dreamed of one day writing a big work, a modern epic” (56).¹ In his wanderings the narrator makes his way from the countryside to the city, passing by suburbs and industrial landscapes, passing by a fair and a circus—all frequent themes in the paintings of Peter Weiss. In the entrance hall of a small, abandoned palace he finds a cembalo, so he sits down and starts to play—precisely as depicted in Weiss's 1938 oil painting “Das Gartenkonzert” (The Garden Concert). Conversely, the 1938 self-portraits—“Selbstbildnis” (Self-Portrait), “Junge im Garten” (Boy in the Garden), and “Jüngling am Stadtrand” (Young Man at the Outskirts of Town)—depict a died-out world of industrial and suburban landscapes wherein the absence of human life is underscored by the lost, lonely figure of the artist. In the last of the five short chapters of “Traktat von der ausgestorbenen Welt,” the narrator finds himself alone on an island. Passing by in the distance is a colorful ship full of merry, smiling people. One of the narrator's hallucinations? The narrator's shout goes unnoticed. Then he is alone again.

Just how this cosmic catastrophe came about remains unclear. Though there are traces of a huge battle, there are neither wounded nor dead; rather, people have “completely dissolved and turned into air” (54). In the midst of very lively and colorful activity, streets, houses, fairs, and circus tents have eerily petrified. This particular end of mankind could certainly not be accounted for by war. The “Traktat” hints at causes of a different kind. Near the fair the narrator comes to a place where people literally must have vanished into the ground. An unearthly power seems to be at work here, and there is repeated mention of God. The concept of God, however, seems broadly conceived, embracing “motherliness” as well as “life, soul, faith, or death” (58). In the passages about this “high, unknown being,” later also termed “dual God,” a tone of religiosity unusual for Peter Weiss enters the narrative, comprehensible only perhaps if the “Traktat” is read as a “call for help from a person sick with loneliness.”² This religious tone is not present in any of Weiss's later works, and in the epic novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance, the catastrophe of the Second World War is shown to have been brought about not by some unearthly power but by human beings.

The “Traktat” is the earliest literary work by Peter Weiss that has been published in its entirety. Since 1934 Weiss had been writing and illustrating short works, fictional biographies of outsiders and artists based on his own life, and abounding in Weltschmerz and disdain for civilization.³ These texts were greatly influenced by Hesse's work, especially by Steppenwolf.⁴ Asked to judge these works, Hesse in a gentle and nonhurtful way drew the young artist's attention to their immaturity and romanticization of reality. In his first letter to the twenty-year-old Peter Weiss he advised against publication: there is “much that is beautiful and promising” in these works, according to Hesse, but they “lack independence, the reader feels strongly the literary-romantic atmosphere, but also feels the literary models and impetuses.” Hesse suggested literary exercises, intense work on the text “until you get each word precisely right and can vouch for it.”⁵ After the “Traktat,” however, these exercises had to be abruptly broken off. At the beginning of the year 1939 Peter Weiss was wrenched away from his language and all the familiar contexts of life. For a long time even painting was hardly possible. Writing? In which language?

Peter Weiss learned Swedish in an “attempt to use the Swedish language to conquer the society in which he [Weiss] was living.”⁶ Toward the end of the war this attempt was made somewhat easier through Weiss's contacts to a group of Swedish writers, the “Fyrtiotalisterna” (writers of the 1940s). According to Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, texts from this period by Stig Dagerman, Gunnar Ekelöf, Maria Wine, Erik Lindegren, and Rut Hillarp reflect the influence of surrealism and psychoanalysis and deal with man's anxiety and abandonment.⁷ There was a basic kinship to this group of artists; for the painter and emerging filmmaker Weiss had just discovered surrealism for himself, and his interest in psychoanalysis had been stirred by the exiled physician and psychiatrist Max Hodann. Especially with Ekelöf and Dagerman, Weiss seems to have entertained close relationships. After the end of the war Weiss created a series of ink drawings as illustrations for poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1907-68), and in 1947 the publishing house of Berman Fischer commissioned Weiss to do the German translation of Den dödsdömde (The Man Sentenced to Death), a drama by Stig Dagerman (1923-54) who committed suicide when he was barely thirty years old.

VON INSEL ZU INSEL

Weiss's first Swedish text,⁸Von Insel zu Insel (From Island to Island), written in 1944, can be characterized as a surrealist rendition of mental states and obsessions. The same might have been said of the “Traktat,” written seven years earlier, on which From Island to Island draws in a surprisingly direct manner. Just as at the end of the “Traktat” the narrator was sitting alone on an island, in the first paragraph of Von Insel zu Insel the first-person narrator is sitting on the shore, abandoned, still “shipwrecked,” looking longingly at an island (42).⁹ In later passages images and visions from the “Traktat” are drawn on repeatedly. Thus Von Insel zu Insel is not, as has been asserted, the first text in which Weiss depicts his traumatic early life.¹⁰

Von Insel zu Insel was written in Swedish and published in 1947 under its original Swedish title, Från ö till ö. The text consists of thirty “prose miniatures,”¹¹ most of them hardly one page long, in which a hypersensitive first-person narrator painfully recalls stations of the internal and external reality of his life. Even the act of birth appears as an insurmountable trauma: “It cost me my whole life to recover from birth” (9). Childhood and youth are rendered as a succession of scenes of horror and torment where the narrator is beaten by his fellow students and slapped by a stranger, and where he himself tortures animals to death, yet at the same time identifies with the tortured animals and people.

Several passages of Von Insel zu Insel depict the absurdity of the world: to put out the flames, a man on fire jumps into a river and drowns; in a prison courtyard inmates must carry a pile of stones from one side to the other, then return them to the original site. The text reaches a bloody paroxysm in a passage where half-naked butchers slaughter horses at an idyllic lake, a dubious aestheticization of horror that ends in a pose of noble suffering: “O … this hopelessness, this despair” (38). (Much more adequate is the depiction of the suffering creature in the painting “Das gestürzte Pferd” [The Fallen Horse], from that same year, 1946.)

One may be tempted to say that Von Insel zu Insel expresses the imagination of a disturbed mind. The fact that Weiss underwent psychoanalysis three years later seems to confirm such a conjecture. But Weiss's art was never created from pure imagination. Even the nightmarish, visionary aspects of his works were based on realistic situations. This is true to a great extent of Von Insel zu Insel. Thus, the first-person narrator is waiting until a factory for dyeing fabrics is built. Then, just like Peter Weiss in Alingsås, he will spend two years of his life working in this factory, writing “business letters” (23). The narrator also describes his sister's death: “We heard the horrible crash, heard the screeching brakes, saw the overturned car, saw people come running from all sides. We came closer without comprehending it. You lay there in your blood, in your blood, in my blood” (41). This is how Weiss's sister Margit died in 1934. The first-person narrator of these passages can no longer be distinguished from the real Peter Weiss. The horrors in Von Insel zu Insel, assumed at first glance to be imaginary, seem to draw on real events and experiences. The same holds true for a passage of a very different kind describing a “new machine for carrying out executions,” built to serve the idea of “humane execution” of men, women, and children (35). This passage, as well as some of Weiss's paintings of the period can be seen as his earliest reaction to the Holocaust. The passage is also obviously influenced by Kafka. Even before the war, his Prague friend Peter Kien had drawn Weiss's attention to the author of “The Penal Colony.” Only now, however, when he needed a model for the literary rendition of an event that defied description, did the Kafka lesson take effect. (Three years later, in his journalistic reports from postwar Germany, Weiss linked a description of the extermination camps openly to Kafka's “Penal Colony.”¹²) Kafka was to remain a lasting influence on Weiss's literary work, to be joined later by Dante and Brecht.

In the summer of 1947 Peter Weiss was in Berlin to report about postwar Germany for the Swedish newspaper Stockholms Tidningen. Seven newspaper articles from Berlin were published between June and August 1947,¹³ followed in 1948 by a book on the same topic.

DIE BESIEGTEN

Die Besiegten, the work Weiss wrote in conjunction with his newspaper articles from Berlin, is a complex literary object. Like Von Insel zu Insel, it consists of numerous prose miniatures, many hardly a page in length—impressions and recollections, visions and nightmares of a first-person narrator, and an inventory of life in a war-devastated city. In the first few of these miniatures there is a strong similarity between the first-person narrator and Peter Weiss, as when the narrator speaks of Berlin as the city of his childhood, when he seeks his parents' bombed-out house among the ruins, or when, with his “brother” (probably a reference to one of Weiss's half brothers Arwed and Hans Thierbach, who had become Nazis and stayed in Germany), he looks for his sister's grave in the cemetery (32-33).¹⁴ After the opening passages the narrator is continually transformed: he is a German soldier, a student in a lecture hall, an officer or soldier of the occupation forces, a member of the resistance, a survivor recalling a prewar family idyll, a rapist, and a laborer working on reconstruction. In one instance the narration is even provided by a bombed-out house. But this change of roles does not give rise to a chorus of voices, as would be the case in The Aesthetics of Resistance. All these figures speak in the same lyrical and elegiacal tone that generalizes war and its consequences, interiorizes guilt, and deals with the causes of the war by turning them into vague anthropological metaphors—“an epidemic … that eventually went up in flames” (91). Weiss lifted this image almost literally from one of his newspaper articles that had already termed fascism a “dark illness” (147). But fascism is precisely not an illness or an epidemic; it is neither something inherent in nature nor a relic from former times (something “dark”). On the contrary, it is something created by human beings, created in the twentieth century under specific historical circumstances and in the name of definite interests. It is not part of nature, like an illness that must be endured, but something contrary to nature that must be combated. Peter Weiss, whose later work contains these thoughts, did not have such insights at the time. For thirty years he had been among the weak and persecuted, and he had come to consider his weakness a virtue: “I want to preserve my weakness. I want to remain among the weak” (93).

This resigned attitude is accompanied by a complete rejection of ideology. Along with fascism, all ideology is rejected, and in the postwar climate this meant mainly the rejection of socialism—a seemingly nonideological position that was in fact the ideology of the recently ended era of the cold war. For the author of Die Besiegten the history of mankind is an endlessly recurring battle for survival and power (53-55). Suffering also remains eternally the same, as conjured up by Weiss in precious aesthetic images: “wounded horses, their large bloody heads raised in a mute scream” (20); in bombed-out houses “the wind's flute creates crystalline sounds” (22); and from each cross at a veterans' cemetery “a white flame glimmers forth, blurring into the sky's blue-white sea of light” (96). The real horror of these scenes tends to disappear behind flowery aesthetics.

Lacking in Die Besiegten are the ideological and linguistic tools for dealing with the recent history and present situation of Germany. Weiss was by no means unique in his aestheticizations and in his tendency toward vague generalizations. His lack of interest in ideology and in attempts at explaining fascism rationally—hence historically, economically, and politically—fit into the conservative and restorative tendencies of the time, tendencies that would define public discourse in the FRG into the 1960s.¹⁵

The two texts Weiss had written in Swedish, Von Insel zu Insel and Die Besiegten, did not lay to rest the doubts about his new language. In early 1948 he informed the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, whom he had met while on his trip to Germany, that he had started a new work and that he was again writing in German.¹⁶ The manuscript was given the title Der Vogelfreie (The Outlaw). Suhrkamp rejected it as incomprehensible. (It was published by Suhrkamp in 1980 under the title Der Fremde [The Stranger], with authorship attributed to a certain Sinclair [an author pseudonym once used by Hermann Hesse] and without any reference to Peter Weiss.¹⁷)

DER FREMDE

Der Fremde is a hermetic text. Its narrative prose fits no literary genre—one even hesitates to call it narrative, since nothing is narrated here that can be grasped or summarized, no story, no action, no characters. No reality is described that is familiar to everyone, or to many, or even to a few. The voice that speaks or seems to speak is not a narrator who can be named or described in terms of age, origin, or appearance. Lacking identity and any clear definition, the narrator represents both the internal and external world; in his dreams, visions, and obsessions, which make up this text, reality is present only as a trace element.

There is little that can be ascertained about Der Fremde.¹⁸ The text describes a twenty-four-hour period. Early in the morning a first-person narrator approaches a city, enters it, passes through it, and at the end appears to leave it. The narrator seeks contact with the city and its residents. He would like to belong with them: “I am one of you” (63). Looking for work, for any kind of meaningful activity, the narrator turns up at various places: a gymnasium where boxers are training, a glass-blowing factory, a public morgue, and an enormous construction site. To the hypersensitive “I” that narrates the text, all these stations seem places of terror from which he flees in horror. He does not fit into this world and does not even want to fit in. In a passage in the middle of the text the narrator performs an endless and liberating dance (66ff.) as an act of resistance against the constricting structures of normality. This narrator has hardly any reality, he is “a nothing. Nameless. A kind of seismograph” (82), at times losing himself to the point that he beats on himself to assure himself of his own reality (66). He experiences his existence as comparable to that of the “sole survivor after a cosmic catastrophe” (107)—an idea that recalls the “Traktat von der ausgestorbenen Welt,” written ten years earlier. The narrator spends the evening in the “palace of the night” (119) where people are amusing themselves in a world of freak shows and carousels, circuses and brothels, a world made of “cardboard and glitter” (129) that the narrator longs for and nonetheless cannot be part of.

The artist here is at once expelled from and longing for the “delights of normalcy.” A literary topic that conjures up Hesse, Kafka, and Thomas Mann's short novel Tonio Kröger, which contains this turn of phrase. But to Peter Weiss this was more than a literary topic; it was his own fate. The feeling of losing his own identity, of losing himself, derived from an existential experience. Much of this had already been present in his earlier work. In the “Traktat” there was a narrator approaching an unfamiliar city. The self-and-the-city configuration had also been the topic of many paintings, particularly of several self-portraits from the last prewar years. It had been repeated in the just completed work, Die Besiegten. Honky-tonk entertainment and fair and circus scenes were major themes in numerous Weiss paintings as well as in his literary work. Even the frequently evoked image of “palace of the night” in Der Fremde had already been found in Von Insel zu Insel.¹⁹

New, in contrast, is the vehemence with which erotic obsessions are depicted. From the opening paragraph the vocabulary and the metaphors make it clear that the image of the narrator penetrating the city, which structures the entire work, is conceived in sexual terms (the city is later also termed an “enormous womb of stone,” 103). There is obsessive eroticism as well in the passages about a street of prostitutes (53) or about the guests in the “palace of the night” who become aroused by a “Negro” with a “phallus … like a cannon barrel.” Although intended to show the emptiness and decadence of society, this passage today seems kitschy, if not vaguely racist (128ff.). The sexual fantasies were undoubtedly intended to shock, in keeping with the program of surrealism: to destroy the sexual and erotic taboos of bourgeois society. It was a program Peter Weiss had largely made his own after his encounter with surrealism, at the end of the war, and especially with Luis Buñuel's (1900-1983) films Un Chien Andalou and L'age d'or. Also evident in the erotic passages of Der Fremde is the influence of Henry Miller (1891-1980)—Weiss would later describe his encounter with Miller's work in Vanishing Point.²⁰ The American expatriate's novels made an overwhelming impression on Weiss. In Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn he found a model for the literary rendition of erotic fantasies and obsessions. However, in Der Fremde not only the sexual taboos of society but Weiss's own sexual and emotional deformations are explored in ways which furthered the author's own liberation. A process of self-liberation that was only to be completed twelve years later with the autobiographical texts Leavetaking and Vanishing Point.

With Der Fremde Weiss reached an artistic impasse where there was no longer anything communicated, where no conceivable reader was being addressed. Nonetheless, this text remains part of a contradictory logic in Peter Weiss's development. The surrealist and dreamlike tone developed in texts like Der Fremde will impart with artistic truth even those of Weiss's works most anchored in reason and rationality, The Investigation, Viet Nam Discourse, and The Aesthetics of Resistance.

THE TOWER

Der Fremde as a depiction of a loss of self and a loss of reality, can be read as an artistic response to Weiss's own loss of identity. But how had this loss of self, this loss of identity come about? This tormenting question had caused Peter Weiss to resume psychoanalysis in 1948 (after a brief psychoanalytic experience in 1941) with very visible consequences for the next work, The Tower (Der Turm), conceived as a radio play in 1948. The Tower is a psychoanalytic drama, more precisely a dramatized psychoanalysis. The play is constructed on the model of Freudian analysis, as Weiss makes clear in the “Prolog zum Hörspiel” (“Prologue to the Radio Play”). Pablo, the main character, grew up in a tower. Once in the outside world, he finds himself unable ever to really leave the tower. The tower appears as the place of a traumatic childhood, a metaphor for all that had not been dealt with and that had been repressed. Only if Pablo dared once again “to penetrate deep into the tower and deal with his past” would he be able to free himself from his childhood traumas.²¹

Pablo is a circus entertainer; more precisely (and in keeping with the goal of psychoanalysis), he is a wizard at becoming unchained, at breaking free, in essence an escape artist. At the beginning of the play Niente (Nothing), as Pablo calls himself, appears in the tower. It is home to circus performers with whom he spent his childhood and youth, and where he once performed a balancing act. He would like to perform again, though this time demonstrating his new skill as an escape artist. The tower is run by the “director” and “manageress,” parent figures who once had “trained” him for his performances.²² The two of them grant Pablo (the name once again recalls Hesse: in Steppenwolf Pablo is the name of the protagonist's alter ego) just one appearance, for which he is bound with rope from head to foot. With a supreme effort he succeeds in the course of the performance to free himself. While the director, manageress, and the rest of the circus performers drown, Pablo is free at last with the rope dangling from him “like an umbilical cord” (348).²³

The play shows a “liberation process,” an expression Peter Weiss was to use in 1954 to describe one of his experimental films, Studie IV. In The Tower liberation metaphors from psychology seem to have been translated too literally into a work of art. Again, as in Der Fremde, the main character is a “nothing” who tries to become the subject of his own existence. Once again there is the traumatic relationship to his deceased sister (328-29), once again there is the world of the circus with a lion, a dwarf, a female animal tamer, and a magician. In The Tower, however, not much remains of this circus world that Weiss had so often painted. The figures and their appearances are nothing more than metaphors for submission and repression, far removed from the reality of the circus as a creative, cheerful, self-contained world of fantasy. This metaphorical circus has moved into a tower, in Weiss's work a frequently recurring symbol for loneliness and being locked in. However, the circus world as metaphor clashes with the symbolism of the tower, and their real and implied meanings fail to converge. The Tower, nonetheless, is a less hermetic text than Der Fremde: the formal necessities of a play (The Tower was first performed on a stage in Stockholm in 1950) and the creation of actual characters and their placement in an audible and visible world led to a gain in realism. Pablo's struggle against the devastations caused in him by the parent figures of the director and the manageress makes for a credible family drama. It is a drama of revolt, as Manfred Haiduk has noted, but not of revolution.²⁴

DAS DUELL

Weiss continued to vacillate between languages. In 1951 he returned to Swedish. In the continuing disorientation of his life, Das Duell (The Duel) became a text about disoriented people and their chaotic lives. Clearly influenced by Miller's novels, the text recreates the deformed existence of a deformed bohème, their deformed relationships and especially their deformed sexuality. As in Weiss's previous texts, there is hardly any plot, and the borders between the characters are repeatedly blurred, particularly at the transitions between passages. Das Duell, like the earlier work The Tower, is a “labor in the operating room of the mind” (126),²⁵ as one of the main characters says. In the course of a year, from winter to winter, Weiss recreates the mutual entanglements of four figures. Gregor is a penniless, tortured artist living in an abandoned factory. He has a relationship with Janna but loves Lea, who is pregnant by him (a presumably autobiographical constellation that recurs in Vanishing Point). At the beginning of the text Lea leaves her husband Robert, who works as an anonymous “warehouse manager” in the Kafkaesque wholesale operation of Lea's father, and moves in with Gregor—the name recalls Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Gregor and Lea are psychologically and sexually disturbed figures, incapable of any mature relationship of mutual respect and consideration. Their life together consists of a series of tormented, sadistic, and masochistic attempts to work out their individual tales of suffering and to overcome their emotional limitations. At the end both characters are on the way to a cure—Lea leaves Gregor.

Das Duell continues the attempt begun with the radio play, The Tower, namely to create a more objective depiction of Weiss's biographical theme. For the first time there is no first-person narrator; the third-person narrative alternates between the perspectives of each of the four main characters. The text opens with surrealist passages of a type Weiss had already explored in Der Fremde. In the course of the narrative the surrealist images become fewer; toward the end language and imagery from psychology and psychoanalysis dominate. At the same time, the focus of the text narrows from the four protagonists to Lea and Gregor, and finally to Gregor, the emotionally crippled artist who, alienated from his work and life, is trying to find himself. Gregor's efforts at self-liberation are depicted by Weiss as a pandemonium of gruesome brutalities, attacks, incest, abortions, attempts at suicide, and murder; even Auschwitz is conjured up (127-28). The first part of Das Duell contains passages of unbearable misogyny and violence toward women:

he tore her body, sticky from blood and spit, with his weapon he slit her womb, in her longing for destruction she whispered into his ear commanding, blind words of endearment, and he choked her while the wound of her womb, in death tremors, sucked around the penetrating weapon.

(40)

Too little attention has been paid to the literal content of such passages. The issue here is not the fantasies of male dominance and male sadism—depicted openly and honestly—of a figure that, after all, is fictional. What is problematic, however, is that the misogyny of this figure is presented uncritically by the author, and that this has not been commented upon by the critics. The psychoanalytic interpreter, for instance, notes that the bloody rape in the above passage promotes “the liberation of the beloved.” Although the language appears non-gender-specific in translation, the critic clearly refers to the male figure Gregor. This interpretation omits consideration of the woman Janna, bloodied and abused, who is the means by which Gregor furthers his liberation.²⁶ In the misogyny of his text, too, Weiss follows Henry Miller: the erotic liberation that is attempted in this kind of literature is a liberation of the man. It should be kept in mind, however, that Weiss learned much throughout his life (he remains exemplary in this respect). Years later, in a time of heightened awareness created by the women's movements, he will show insight into and understanding for the situation of women in a male-dominated society. In the figures of Lotte Bischoff, Karin Boye, and the mother of the narrator, in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the author of Das Duell provides lucid and accurate descriptions of the experiences of women in dark, violent times.

Literature as therapy. Der Fremde, The Tower, and Das Duell are texts of self-therapy through art. Such therapy is not always successful—one need only think of Lenz, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Büchner among German writers. Among Weiss's friends, the writer Stig Dagerman had killed himself at an early age. Weiss did not succumb to self-destruction. In Gregor's duel with himself and his demons the writer was able to objectify and thereby exorcise his own psychological torments and his struggle to overcome them. The cost of such efforts at objectification is evident in the text, and is itself the subject of the text. In an illuminating passage toward the end of Das Duell, Gregor—and along with him probably Peter Weiss—reflects about his poetic means. His literary output appears to him as the expression of an illness, as “self-help in a desperate situation” (99). The illness, the dark, destructive forces blocking his artistic work must be overcome, and the route of “consciousness” must be ventured (100).

With Das Duell Weiss's artistic consciousness gained strength. He decided to return to the German language and created a text entitled The Shadow of the Coachman's Body.

THE SHADOW OF THE COACHMAN'S BODY

This work, written in 1952 and generally referred to as a micro-novel, was published by Suhrkamp in 1960, after years of the author's efforts to have it printed. The critics were surprised and enthusiastic about this barely 100-page text by an unknown 44-year-old author, a text for which they found no comparison. The book was generally read as a kind of “word graphics,” with hardly any grounding in reality; a text in which things seemed to be reduced to their “language material” and language seemed to be treated as its own topic.²⁷ The text, completely unlike anything on the German literary scene, was compared to the French nouveau roman.²⁸ It is not known whether Weiss at that time (or later) was aware of the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Raymond Queneau (the influence of absurdist French drama, however, from Beckett to Ionesco and Genet on Weiss's later dramatic work is undeniable). In Queneau's Exercices de style (1947), for example, a ridiculously insignificant event is related in more than 100 different ways: a pure exercise in language and style, albeit one of great wit and radical doubt in regard to mimesis. In contrast, the topic of The Shadow of the Coachman's Body is the real world. The narrative takes place in a clearly defined setting; there are individually distinguishable figures and there even is a storyline. The Shadow of the Coachman's Body is very different from Weiss's previous work. The paroxysmal tone and the merging of fantasy scenes and barely autonomous characters—as in The Tower, Der Fremde, or Das Duell—have been replaced by an emotionless registering. The hermetic aspect of those earlier texts is preserved mostly in the visual appearance of the printed page: blocks of text, often several pages long, that are emblematic of Weiss's prose and will recur in all of Weiss's prose works, including The Aesthetics of Resistance.

A first-person narrator relates three days of his stay in a remote, rural boarding house. With compulsive attention to detail he describes the landscape, the buildings, and the interiors, as well as the inhabitants of the boarding house and their doings. These inhabitants, guests and servants, are grotesque figures: the gloomy hired man, the housekeeper, the senile “captain,” and the dreadful family consisting of the brutal father, the mother, an extremely disturbed son, and an infant. There is also a Mr. Schnee who collects stones, and a horrifying physician completely wrapped in bandages who is doctoring himself and wasting away in terrible pain. Soon after the beginning of the story one learns that another guest is expected, and almost imperceptibly the narrative focuses in on this guest's arrival. On the evening of the third day the expected guest arrives: it is the coachman, who remains only for the evening meal. Afterward, in the kitchen intercourse takes place between the coachman and the housekeeper, which the first-person narrator registers as a shadow-play: “the shadow of the coachman's body thrust forward again, and the shadow of the housekeeper's body came to meet him” (56).²⁹ Soon after, in the middle of the night, the coachman drives off.

The narrative tone of The Shadow of the Coachman's Body appears to be that of a visitor from Mars who has absolutely no understanding of the events he observes, makes not even the slightest effort to interpret them, and is content to describe them as precisely as possible. This narrative perspective in The Shadow of the Coachman's Body caused critics to perceive it as an example of “utmost objectivity in describing objects and events,”³⁰ and to compare the first-person narrator to a “mechanical recording device,” such as a film camera or sound-recording equipment.³¹ Eventually, Gunther Witting's careful reading revealed the apparently disinterested narration in The Shadow of the Coachman's Body as a pose.³² This is particularly apparent in the passage in which the first-person narrator seemingly unselectively notes scraps of the guests' dialogue. From these scraps of dialogue—banalities and tired clichés—one can reconstruct a meaning. The housekeeper, for instance, describes the preparation of a dish, the captain talks about his retirement, the father fusses about the no-good son, and the doctor complains about his suffering. In a grotesquely funny passage the hired man describes how the bull mounts the cow and, as the high point of these absurdly comical linguistic acrobatics, the mother is heard complaining about the father's inadequacy in sexual intercourse. With great mastery of language (and uncharacteristically bizarre humor) Weiss creates a portrait of each character and his or her world. While the narrator appears unaware of the meaning of what he jots down, it is clearly revealed to the attentive reader. The narrator registering events without a trace of involvement turns out to be a role created by an author who is passionately involved in his narrative. In the wake of Der Fremde, The Tower, and Das Duell, Weiss here once again expresses his hatred of and outrage about a (petit bourgeois) world that deforms the psyche of the individual.

How else should one interpret the now famous opening situation? The narrator, his pants lowered, is sitting in a smelly outhouse. The laconic language of the opening passage should not distract from what is actually being talked about here. Aversion and repulsion are induced by this apparent rural idyll, later recalled in Vanishing Point as a “place of damnation,” and as “hell.”³³ How else, too, should one interpret that implacable inventorying of the housekeeper's room (38-39), which does not fail to describe in minute detail every small bucolic “china statue,” every “shell-covered box,” every “realistically colored wooden fawn,” and every “basket filled with violets”? The real-life personality, which is absent in the figure of the housekeeper as well as in the other figures of the novel, appears reified in all these objects, this accumulated tastelessness, this trashy bric-a-brac. (Twenty years later the aesthete Peter Weiss still registered his aversion to such petit bourgeois ersatz aesthetics, which he had seen in the apartments of East German communists [N II/101]). But there is another theme in The Shadow of the Coachman's Body that reveals the placid narrator as a role created by a passionately involved author.

There is the family: the irascible father, the oppressed and sexually frustrated mother, the eternally screaming infant, and the disturbed son who is unable to cope with life. In one passage of Weiss's malevolent satire on the bourgeois family idyll, the father chases the misguided son around the room, places him on his knee, and the mother with the infant at her breast starts sobbing. In the middle of the beating he is administering the father suffers a heart attack and, finally, with the narrator's help, has to be brought to bed (22ff.)—a passage of a liberating comical power that evokes the often mean-spirited humor of early silent film comedies. After so many previous attempts, Weiss finally succeeds in turning his own tale of suffering into a masterfully controlled literary work.

Equally successful is the integration of Kafka's influence. The former Czech national's intimate acquaintance with the world of the Prague writer can be traced in the father-son conflict as well as in the narrative tone of The Shadow of the Coachman's Body: this laconic registering of a small, shabby, and miserable world (not unlike the world in Kafka's The Castle), and even in the archaic vocabulary—“outhouse,” “hired hand,” “housekeeper,”“coachman,” and “garrison town.” And, as with Kafka, Weiss's characters are waiting for redemption. This constellation calls to mind still another writer.

The influence of Samuel Beckett (1906-89) on Weiss's micro-novel was noticed early on.³⁴ That same year, 1952, when Weiss described characters waiting for a guest, marked the publication of Waiting for Godot. Obviously this was a coincidence, but then again maybe it was not. Both writers were reacting to tendencies of their time with descriptions of the “dehumanized alienation of the modern individual,” as Leo Kofler states about Beckett's play. According to Kofler, the expression of this alienation is “his [the alienated person's] chattiness, as well as his muteness and lack of articulation, his emptiness, and stupidity and his absurdity bordering on the comical.”³⁵ What Kofler notes with regard to Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon fits without reservation Weiss's captain and hired man, the father and the housekeeper.

But Peter Weiss, who occasionally characterized his micro-novel as “completely realistic” (G/R 35), stopped short of Beckett's metaphysics. In contrast to Waiting for Godot, with Weiss the absurd is not absolute, he does not leave his figures in complete hopelessness. Granted, the coachman who finally arrives and has intercourse with the housekeeper is not Godot nor the Messiah. But in The Shadow of the Coachman's Body, coitus is not reduced to the “purely copulative event,” as has been asserted.³⁶ It is obvious that there is pleasure involved, not only for the coachman but for the housekeeper as well. That some small redemption is possible for the housekeeper, this most lowly of human beings whose miserable existence is reified in accumulated knickknacks, provides Weiss's dark, gloomy text with the trace of hope that is absent in Beckett's work.

DIE VERSICHERUNG

In the work that followed The Shadow of the Coachman's Body, Weiss modified the redeemer figure. Instead of the anonymous coachman there is in the play Die Versicherung (The Insurance, written in 1952) a lewd anarchist revolutionary by the name of Leo. Unlike the coachman in Weiss's novel, he screws not only the hired help but the ruling class as well—in the literal as well as in the figurative sense. He seduces the wives of the police chief, the doctor, and other pillars of society, and ultimately places himself at the head of a revolt against this entire corrupt rabble.

Die Versicherung is less a drama—as its subtitle indicates—than a surrealist revue with music, dance, and film projections. The police chief Alfons, a pillar of society, gives a formal dinner party at which he intends to finalize numerous insurance policies covering any conceivable damages to his property. In the course of nineteen grotesque and chaotic scenes, the collapse of this society is depicted. The festive group turns up at the cabinet of one Dr. Kübel, whose delusions of grandeur match those of Dr. Caligari (of German silent film fame). While Kübel tortures his guests, Leo abducts and seduces the wife of the police chief, leaving her in a garbage can. Meanwhile, war and revolution have broken out. After losing his wife, Alfons also loses his personal papers. Drunk, he is mistaken for a bum by his own policemen, beaten, and taken to the police station. Leo has placed himself at the head of the uprising.

There is an undeniable resemblance between this surrealist work and the French theater of the absurd of the late 1940s and 1950s³⁷—to the dramas of Ionesco (1929, The Bald Soprano [1950] and The Chairs [1952]), Genet (1910, The Maids [1947] and The Balcony [1955]), and Beckett. Following his first trip in 1947, Weiss had repeatedly spent time in Paris, as in 1952, 1958, and in 1960. During one of these visits he even met with Beckett.³⁸ Weiss himself has pointed out the importance of Ionesco (G/R 99) and Genet for his own works.³⁹ But all of this comes later. At the time of the writing of Die Versicherung no direct influence can be shown. One can only note that the postwar atmosphere of Western Europe had created in Weiss and in the French absurdist dramatists a similarity of vision and of artistic sensibility. Weiss's depiction of the “dehumanized alienation of the modern individual” once again approximates Beckett's imagery. In the fourteenth scene the chaotic Leo and the bourgeois Erna, smeared with excrement and garbage, climb out of a garbage can: humans as trash. Five years later, in 1957, Beckett will use the same image in End Game. It was through Beckett, however, and not through Weiss, that garbage cans became “emblems of the civilization rebuilt after Auschwitz” (Adorno).⁴⁰

But Die Versicherung can no more be reduced to its absurd aspects than The Shadow of the Coachman's Body. It is a clearly identified world whose chaotic decline is presented here. The “CATASTROPHES REVOLUTIONS” (63)⁴¹ that the police chief learns about from newspaper headlines, are striking at the world of power and wealth. The ridiculous compulsion of this entrenched upper bourgeoisie to insure its property against any conceivable catastrophe, even against “hurricanes, invasions, cosmic storms, explosions in space” (48), is what first sets the play in motion. But the insurance contracts come too late: the world of the police chief and his guests is “in the grips of a severe epidemic” (68) that will cause its demise. As critic Heinrich Vormweg has noted, “There is no amount of insurance that can protect this society.”⁴²

Die Versicherung does not move beyond the pose of an antibourgeois revolt. Leo, with all his macho behavior, is not a revolutionary and, despite the fur he is wearing, he is also no Heracles, whose siding with the oppressed in their fight against the oppressors is repeatedly evoked in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Die Versicherung is the strongest attempt Weiss was capable of at the time of resistance against the prevailing order. Since the end of the war his literary work had been defined by his compulsion of re-creating over and over his own tale of suffering. This compulsion, which had largely blocked the study of social issues, now begins to wane.

At this point, however, Peter Weiss's literary production came to a halt: he escaped from the psychological pressure of the continuing lack of literary success. Before the end of the productive year 1952 he made his first two films, and until the end of the decade—by which time this route also turned out to be a dead end—Weiss was a filmmaker. The literary texts that followed Von Insel zu Insel and Die Besiegten had attracted no interest and were either published privately in minimal editions (Der Fremde, Das Duell, both in Swedish) or many years later (The Tower in 1963, Die Versicherung in 1967). Only one of Weiss's early works eventually managed to escape this fate. In 1960 The Shadow of the Coachman's Body was finally published in a special series by Suhrkamp, in an edition of merely 1,000 copies. It immediately created great interest. Suddenly, unexpectedly, there was success; there was a readership, people willing to pay attention to this new voice. The time of isolation had come to an end. After forty-four years the endless meandering route of the painter, filmmaker, and author Peter Weiss had revealed some kind of inner logic.

Notes

1. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Peter Weiss, “Traktat von der ausgestorbenen Welt” (1938-39), in Der Maler Peter Weiss (Berlin: Frölich and Kaufmann, 1982) 56.

2. Rainer Gerlach, “Isolation und Befreiung. Zum literarischen Frühwerk von Peter Weiss,” in Gerlach, ed., Peter Weiss (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984) 153.

3. On Weiss's thus far unpublished early writings, see Heinrich Vormweg, “Der Schriftsteller als junger Künstler,” in Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss and Jürgen Schutte, eds., Peter Weiss. Leben und Werk (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) 24-38.

4. See chap. 1 above.

5. “Aus dem Briefwechsel mit Hermann Hesse” (1937-62), in Raimund Hoffmann, Peter Weiss. Malerei Zeichnungen Collagen (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1984) 163 (Hesse's letter of 21 January 1937).

6. According to Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss in her foreword to Peter Weiss, Von Insel zu Insel (1947), German trans. Heiner Gimmler (Berlin: Frölich and Kaufmann, 1984). Peter Weiss later described in detail his battle to acquire the new language, in “Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Sprache” (1965), in Weiss, Rapporte (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2d ed., 1981) 170-87, esp. 176ff.

7. See Palmstierna-Weiss, “Vorwort,” in Von Insel zu Insel; see also Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, “Nachwort,” in Peter Weiss, Die Besiegten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985) 153-57.

8. Research has not determined whether this and the following texts were written entirely in Swedish. Henceforth, those texts which were first published or performed in Sweden are termed Swedish texts. On the language problems involved in the writing of Von Insel zu Insel, see Jochen Vogt, Peter Weiss (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt-Monographie, 1987) 49-50.

9. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Peter Weiss, Von Insel zu Insel.

10. See Alfons Söllner, Peter Weiss und die Deutschen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988) 45.

11. Ernst J. Walberg, “Die Ästhetik der Imagination. Peter Weiss' Frühwerk: Von Insel zu Insel,” die horen 4 (1984): 137-39.

12. See Peter Weiss, “Sechs Reportagen aus Deutschland für Stockholms Tidningen” (June-August 1947), in Weiss, Die Besiegten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985) 149.

13. In addition to the 6 articles in Die Besiegten, see also Peter Weiss, “Die Bibliothek in Berlin,” in Peter Weiss. In Gegensätzen denken. Ein Lesebuch, selected by Rainer Gerlach and Matthias Richter (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) 14-18 [hereafter G/R].

14. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Peter Weiss, Die Besiegten.

15. See Helmut Peitsch's excellent article, “Wo ist die Freiheit? Peter Weiss und das Berlin des Kalten Krieges,” in Jürgen Garbers et al, eds., Ästhetik Revolte Widerstand. Zum literarischen Werk von Peter Weiss (Lüneburg, Jena: zu Klampen, Universitätsverlag, 1990) 34-56.

16. See Peter Weiss, “Brief an Peter Suhrkamp” (1948), in Siegfried Unseld, Peter Suhrkamp. Zur Biographie eines Verlegers (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) 123.

17. See Sinclair (i.e., Peter Weiss), Der Fremde. Erzählung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). The page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

18. Concerning Der Fremde, see especially the detailed study by Rüdiger Steinlein, “Ein surrealistischer ‘Bilddichter.’ Visualität als Darstellungsprinzip im erzählerischen Frühwerk von Peter Weiss,” in Rudolf Wolff, ed., Peter Weiss. Werk und Wirkung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987) 60-87.

19. See Weiss, Von Insel zu Insel 46.

20. See Peter Weiss, Vanishing Point (Fluchtpunkt, 1960-61), trans. E. B. Garside, Alastair Hamilton, and Christopher Levenson, in Weiss, Exile (New York: Delacorte, 1968) 217-19. Missing in the English translation, however, is any reference to Miller's Tropic of Cancer. The translation of this entire passage is distorted, conveying the impression that at issue is a book by Amos, a character in the novel, rather than by Henry Miller. For the actual content of the passage, see Peter Weiss, Fluchtpunkt (1960-61) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 6th ed., 1973) 163ff.

21. Peter Weiss, “Prolog zum Hörspiel (Der Turm),” in Weiss, Stücke I (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976) 453.

22. Ibid.

23. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Peter Weiss, The Tower (Der Turm, 1948), trans. Michael Benedikt and Michel Heine, in Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, eds., Postwar German Theatre (New York: Dutton, 1967) 315-48.

24. See Manfred Haiduk, Der Dramatiker Peter Weiss (East Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1977) 18.

25. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Peter Weiss, Das Duell (1951), German trans. J. C. Görsch in collaboration with Peter Weiss (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 4th ed., 1982).

26. See Carl Pietzcker, “Individualistische Befreiung als Kunstprinzip. ‘Das Duell’ von Peter Weiss,” in Johannes Cremerius, ed., Psychoanalytische Textinterpretationen (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1979) 216-17.

27. Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel, “Die Wortgraphik des Peter Weiss,” in Volker Canaris, ed., Über Peter Weiss (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 4th ed., 1976) 15-24; Ror Wolf, “Die Poesie der kleinsten Stücke,” in Canaris, ed., Über Peter Weiss 26; and Helmut J. Schneider, “Der verlorene Sohn und die Sprache,” in Canaris, ed., Über Peter Weiss 46.

28. This comparison has been made since the earliest reviews. For a more recent example, see Heinrich Vormweg, Peter Weiss (Munich: Beck, 1981) 42ff. On this topic, see also Gunther Witting, “Bericht von der hohen Warte. Zu Peter Weiss' ‘Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers,’” Der Deutschunterricht 37, no. 3 (1985): 57.

29. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Peter Weiss, The Shadow of the Coachman's Body (Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers, 1952), trans. E. B. Garside, in Weiss, Bodies and Shadows (New York: Delacorte, 1969) 1-57.

30. Vormweg, Peter Weiss 43.

31. Sepp Hiekisch-Picard, “‘In den Vorräumen eines Gesamtkunstwerks.’ Anmerkungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen schriftstellerischem, filmischem und bildkünstlerischem Werk bei Peter Weiss,” Kürbiskern 2 (April 1985): 123.

32. See Witting 57ff.

33. Weiss, Vanishing Point 154.

34. See Ror Wolf 27.

35. Leo Kofler, “Beckett, Warten auf Godot” (1975), in Kofler, Avantgardismus als Entfremdung. Ästhetik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt/Main: Sendler, 1987) 203.

36. Gerlach, “Isolation und Befreiung” 171.

37. Weiss mentions the French theater of the absurd for the first time in “Avantgarde Film” (1956), in Weiss, Rapporte 17.

38. See Peter Weiss, “Aus dem Pariser Journal,” in Weiss, Rapporte 93-94.

39. See Peter Weiss, “Aus dem Kopenhagener Journal” (1960), in Rapporte 51, 67. The narrator of Vanishing Point also points out the great significance of Beckett and Genet for his work. See Weiss, Vanishing Point 140.

40. Theodor W. Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen” (1961), in Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981) 311.

41. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Peter Weiss, Die Versicherung. Ein Drama (1952), in Weiss, Stücke I 35-87.

42. Vormweg, Peter Weiss 33.