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In his three-part novel, Die sthetik des Widerstands (The
Aesthetics of Resistance), published successively in 1975,
1978, and 1981,1 Peter Weiss accomplished for the working
class what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar did for feminist
theory in 1979 and what Edward Sad did for postcolonial
studies in 1994.2 That is, he provided a sweeping
reinterpretation of major elements of the Western cultural
canon from the point of view of a hitherto marginalized
perspective. To read this novel is to experience a reeducation; to be receptive to it is to undergo an intellectual
transformation.
The novel has long enjoyed a prominent place in the German
intellectual left. Now that the first volume is finally available
from Duke University Press in a superb English translation
by Joachim Neugroschel (with a readable and engaging
foreword by Fredric Jameson),3 Weisss work can finally
emerge into the wider public sphere where it deserves to
occupy a prominent space.
Weisss monumental novel is, first of all, a Bildungsroman, a
novel in which the inner development of the hero is
portrayed. Secondly, this is a historical novel that depicts
and discusses the history of the European left from 1918 to
1945. Weiss based his novel on extensive research, and his
portrayals of leftist activists is a work of memorialization, an
enterprise carried out against the forgetfulness of history,
and in particular against the way that written history tends
to discount the vanquished. Third, the novel is a meditation
on the way that visual art and literature can represent
dissident worldviews against hegemonic political and
cultural configurations, thereby ultimately empowering
resistance. All three levels are united by a common workingclass milieu that expresses itself in the narrative voice (the
working-class hero of the Bildungsroman), the perspective of
German communist movements or of popular liberators (in
the historical narrative), and the interrogation of art and
literature for the purpose of seeing how it depicts popular
struggle or, at the very least, represents class oppression.
First, the Bildungsroman. Here, the problems Weiss poses
are the following: By what stages can a working-class person
who chooses to define himself as an intellectual appropriate
the European cultural legacy that heretofore has been
understood as belonging to the elite? How does such a
person find a voice? For whom or against whom does he
speak? Coming to writing, as Weiss portrays his narrators
trajectory, requires a reworking of Western culture from the
point of view of class analysis, whether it be the Pergamum
friezes, surrealism, Franz Kafkas Castle, or Gricaults
painting The Raft of the Meduse. The intellectual trajectory
of the narrator (who remains nameless and is one of the only
fictional characters of the work) is also the forging of a new
pathway through familiar cultural monuments that the
reader learns to see with new eyes. What is more, these
discoveries are doubly exciting because the narrator is
personally invested in them, in seeing how our cultural past
matters for present struggles. The story of the writers
awakening is also the story of how this work could be
written. Unlike the heroes of his literary models (like the
protagonist of Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks), he has no
stable home, no originating place. Rather, he finds his home
in the international class struggle (136). Another
intertextual dimension is offered by the historical context.
For example, in Vol. II, there are fascinating glimpses into
the work habits of Bertolt Brecht, whose Swedish exile the
narrator witnesses.
The second narrative line, the history of the European left, is