Despite an absurd lack of recognition and a dearth of translations, Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the greatest novels of the postwar era and the 20th century. Drawing on extensive historical research, personal interviews, and some of Weiss’s own experiences, the novel narrates the struggle of anti-fascist networks from 1937 to the end of the second World War. Except for the unnamed narrator and his family, all of the characters in the novel are based on real historical figures, many of whom were eventually killed by the end of the war. A thoroughly communist work, Weiss’s novel attempts to fully reimagine and thereby reclaim the (doomed) revolutionary aspirations of its characters. As W. G. Sebald in his essay on Weiss writes, The Aesthetics of Resistance “is a magnum opus which sees itself, almost programmatically, not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.” The first volume, the only one translated into English so far, begins with clandestine workers’ movements in Berlin and ends with the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The novel’s title might seem better suited to an academic treatise on politics and aesthetics, but the experimental form of the novel justifies its use. Weiss minimizes the emphasis on plot, offering instead massive blocks of text in which his proletarian protagonists debate the value of art and the problems of political organization. Through a kind of collective voice, the novel projects its readers into a turbulent time when artistic revolution seemed as necessary as and inseparable from political revolution. The novel begins in Berlin with the narrator and two of his comrades viewing the Pergamon Altar, a monumental artwork that pays tribute to conquering power by figuring it as divine. Here and elsewhere in the novel, Weiss, who was a talented painter, passionately scrutinizes works of art for contradictory details that might indicate the possible redemption of culture, the freeing of culture from merely being, as Benjamin put it, a document of barbarity. His protagonists note that Hercules is absent from the fragments of the altar. Hercules had betrayed the gods and taken the side of the weak and oppressed, but history effaced his presence, so that he is indicated on the altar merely by “the paw of lion’s skin that had cloaked him.” As they return to the safety of one of their homes, whose windows are blacked out, allowing free discussion, the narrator and his friends use this detail to try to reappropriate the artwork for the oppressed by dwelling on the ambiguities that it contains but that are not easily made visible. As one character states, “If we want to take on art, literature, we have to treat them against the grain, that is, we have to eliminate all the concomitant privileges and project our own demands into them.” Throughout the novel, Weiss’s protagonists, who though young “were familiar with the world of labor and also with unemployment,” are fervently engaged in a process of self education, attempting, despite working during the day, to provide for themselves the knowledge and expertise denied them by the ruling class. They assert their right to culture and the equality of intelligences: “we assumed that dealing with literature, philosophy, art was possible anywhere. Everyone had the faculty for thinking.” An important discovery was “that the upper classes essentially opposed our thirst for knowledge. Ever since, our most important goal was to conquer an education, a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion.” Excluded from educational institutions as well as from representation within culture, Weiss’s protagonists can advance only by connecting what they learn to their working class lives. “As have-nots we initially approached the accumulations with anxiety, with awe, until it dawned on us that we had to fill all these things with our own evaluations, that the overall concept might be useful only when expressing something about the conditions of our lives as well as about the difficulties and peculiarities of our thought processes.” Yet this autonomous education is fraught with political risks. “We too . . . should benefit from what was known as culture, we recognized the greatness and power of many works, we began understanding how the social stratifications, contradictions, and conflicts were mirrored in the artistic products of eras, but we did not yet achieve an image that included us ourselves, everything that was supposed to jib with us was a conglomerate of forms and styles borrowed from various sources. Whatever we read into completed things could only confront us with our own exclusion, and when we were in the midst of discovering timeless and powerful things, we ran the risk of estrangement from our own class.” Cultural liberation therefore directly called for political liberation: “Our road out of intellectual suppression was a political one. Anything referring to poems, novels, paintings, sculptures, musical pieces, films or plays had to be thought out politically.” But their debates about politics show that it is as complicated and ambiguous as the artworks they discuss. The repression of the communist movements in Germany destroyed collective solidarity, fragmenting and isolating the members of the underground, who were left trying to connect their lives to the news received from elsewhere. “We clung to the belief that something existed abroad, gaining strength and preparing to strike back, and the harder it was to take up contact among the leftovers of illegal groups, to provide mutual help and inform one another about plans, the more meaningful even the slightest detail became for drawing inferences about the status, the course of action outside our borders.” Many of the characters accept, if with reservations, the centralized structure of the Communist Party, relying on the party to give meaning and shape to their own struggle. “We tried to fit our tiny hidden precinct into the grand pattern and to accord our isolated experiences with guidelines, with slogans, whose diverse issues had been compiled, compared, assessed, revised, and hardened by the delegates and purified in disputes.” But the limitations of the organizational form of the Party become more and more apparent when the narrator travels to fight in the Spanish Civil War. At first, the enthusiasm of those joining up with the International Brigades overcomes the reality of political disagreement. “The whole of Europe was a field of antagonisms, different kinds of independent energies had to flow together in Spain and look for a synthesis. Each of us had the task of fusing divergences into a unity.” Political lines appear to become more open and inclusive: “A person belonged to the working class if he acted on its behalf no matter where he came from.” But this is only a temporary state affairs. Weiss’s characters are forced to debate the suppression of the anarchists by the rest of the left and the need for a strict, hierarchical military organization in a time of war. As the first volume draws to a close, news reports of the Moscow trials make all-too-clear the terror of Stalinism while the Spanish fascists move to win the civil war. Yet grasping on to hope in the face of retreat and defeat, one of the characters claims, “Our victory, what we called our victory, lay in our demonstrating, albeit briefly, the will to liberation, the idea of justice, lay in our managing to hold back the overwhelming material superiority, indeed, causing it to panic. That is today’s balance of strength . . . between progress and reactionism.”
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance
Despite an absurd lack of recognition and a dearth of translations, Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the greatest novels of the postwar era and the 20th century. Drawing on extensive historical research, personal interviews, and some of Weiss’s own experiences, the novel narrates the struggle of anti-fascist networks from 1937 to the end of the second World War. Except for the unnamed narrator and his family, all of the characters in the novel are based on real historical figures, many of whom were eventually killed by the end of the war. A thoroughly communist work, Weiss’s novel attempts to fully reimagine and thereby reclaim the (doomed) revolutionary aspirations of its characters. As W. G. Sebald in his essay on Weiss writes, The Aesthetics of Resistance “is a magnum opus which sees itself, almost programmatically, not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.” The first volume, the only one translated into English so far, begins with clandestine workers’ movements in Berlin and ends with the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The novel’s title might seem better suited to an academic treatise on politics and aesthetics, but the experimental form of the novel justifies its use. Weiss minimizes the emphasis on plot, offering instead massive blocks of text in which his proletarian protagonists debate the value of art and the problems of political organization. Through a kind of collective voice, the novel projects its readers into a turbulent time when artistic revolution seemed as necessary as and inseparable from political revolution. The novel begins in Berlin with the narrator and two of his comrades viewing the Pergamon Altar, a monumental artwork that pays tribute to conquering power by figuring it as divine. Here and elsewhere in the novel, Weiss, who was a talented painter, passionately scrutinizes works of art for contradictory details that might indicate the possible redemption of culture, the freeing of culture from merely being, as Benjamin put it, a document of barbarity. His protagonists note that Hercules is absent from the fragments of the altar. Hercules had betrayed the gods and taken the side of the weak and oppressed, but history effaced his presence, so that he is indicated on the altar merely by “the paw of lion’s skin that had cloaked him.” As they return to the safety of one of their homes, whose windows are blacked out, allowing free discussion, the narrator and his friends use this detail to try to reappropriate the artwork for the oppressed by dwelling on the ambiguities that it contains but that are not easily made visible. As one character states, “If we want to take on art, literature, we have to treat them against the grain, that is, we have to eliminate all the concomitant privileges and project our own demands into them.” Throughout the novel, Weiss’s protagonists, who though young “were familiar with the world of labor and also with unemployment,” are fervently engaged in a process of self education, attempting, despite working during the day, to provide for themselves the knowledge and expertise denied them by the ruling class. They assert their right to culture and the equality of intelligences: “we assumed that dealing with literature, philosophy, art was possible anywhere. Everyone had the faculty for thinking.” An important discovery was “that the upper classes essentially opposed our thirst for knowledge. Ever since, our most important goal was to conquer an education, a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion.” Excluded from educational institutions as well as from representation within culture, Weiss’s protagonists can advance only by connecting what they learn to their working class lives. “As have-nots we initially approached the accumulations with anxiety, with awe, until it dawned on us that we had to fill all these things with our own evaluations, that the overall concept might be useful only when expressing something about the conditions of our lives as well as about the difficulties and peculiarities of our thought processes.” Yet this autonomous education is fraught with political risks. “We too . . . should benefit from what was known as culture, we recognized the greatness and power of many works, we began understanding how the social stratifications, contradictions, and conflicts were mirrored in the artistic products of eras, but we did not yet achieve an image that included us ourselves, everything that was supposed to jib with us was a conglomerate of forms and styles borrowed from various sources. Whatever we read into completed things could only confront us with our own exclusion, and when we were in the midst of discovering timeless and powerful things, we ran the risk of estrangement from our own class.” Cultural liberation therefore directly called for political liberation: “Our road out of intellectual suppression was a political one. Anything referring to poems, novels, paintings, sculptures, musical pieces, films or plays had to be thought out politically.” But their debates about politics show that it is as complicated and ambiguous as the artworks they discuss. The repression of the communist movements in Germany destroyed collective solidarity, fragmenting and isolating the members of the underground, who were left trying to connect their lives to the news received from elsewhere. “We clung to the belief that something existed abroad, gaining strength and preparing to strike back, and the harder it was to take up contact among the leftovers of illegal groups, to provide mutual help and inform one another about plans, the more meaningful even the slightest detail became for drawing inferences about the status, the course of action outside our borders.” Many of the characters accept, if with reservations, the centralized structure of the Communist Party, relying on the party to give meaning and shape to their own struggle. “We tried to fit our tiny hidden precinct into the grand pattern and to accord our isolated experiences with guidelines, with slogans, whose diverse issues had been compiled, compared, assessed, revised, and hardened by the delegates and purified in disputes.” But the limitations of the organizational form of the Party become more and more apparent when the narrator travels to fight in the Spanish Civil War. At first, the enthusiasm of those joining up with the International Brigades overcomes the reality of political disagreement. “The whole of Europe was a field of antagonisms, different kinds of independent energies had to flow together in Spain and look for a synthesis. Each of us had the task of fusing divergences into a unity.” Political lines appear to become more open and inclusive: “A person belonged to the working class if he acted on its behalf no matter where he came from.” But this is only a temporary state affairs. Weiss’s characters are forced to debate the suppression of the anarchists by the rest of the left and the need for a strict, hierarchical military organization in a time of war. As the first volume draws to a close, news reports of the Moscow trials make all-too-clear the terror of Stalinism while the Spanish fascists move to win the civil war. Yet grasping on to hope in the face of retreat and defeat, one of the characters claims, “Our victory, what we called our victory, lay in our demonstrating, albeit briefly, the will to liberation, the idea of justice, lay in our managing to hold back the overwhelming material superiority, indeed, causing it to panic. That is today’s balance of strength . . . between progress and reactionism.”
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