On Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III

All three volumes of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance are (almost) available in English. This feels as if it has been a long time coming. The three-part novel was originally published in German in 1975, 1978, and 1981, and an English translation of the first volume by Joachim Neugroschel appeared in 2005. For around ten years it looked like that this would be all that we could hope for, something seemingly confirmed by Neugroschel’s death in 2011. The fact that we now have the full version of what is regularly referred as Weiss’s magnum opus is the result of around eight years of work on the part of Joel Scott, who began volume two under his own initiative in 2016, published it in 2020, and whose version of volume three will be available in March of this year. It is worth noting off the bat just how good these translations are. Each volume consists of roughly thirty-three—the formal echo of Dante is deliberate—prose blocks of an average of around ten pages each. Within these blocks, sentences regularly cover half a page or more, and syntax is twisted to a point that makes even a language as notoriously malleable as German come close to collapse. To have rendered this into a precise, complex, and still-readable English is a massive achievement.

That said, contemporary publishing does not provide us with overdue translations of classics of communist modernism without effort and skill on the part of a number of people who want them to exist. Scott’s generous acknowledgements in both volumes make clear that, while the work remains his own, it was not the work of a lone Stakhanovite, but rather the product of conversation, exchange, and dedicated collective thinking. I mention all this at the start not just to praise Scott’s translation, but because so much of The Aesthetics of Resistance, and especially its third volume, is concerned with questions of transmission, communication, and with selves that contain mute and tangible others. It is not wrong to state that the process through which works of art are transmitted across generations is marked by the same barbarism that underpins their creation, and Weiss’s novel is, of course, no exception. Sometimes, however, this same process is also marked by friendship, solidarity, fortitude, and a dose or two of cunning. That this is part of both the content and the immediate history of Weiss’s work in English goes some way to explaining why the appearance of the final part of an infamously dense and difficult West German novel feels as timely as it does.

Nobody read the first two volumes for their plot, but it is useful to give a sense of it, not least because having the complete work in English allows us to glimpse an arc to the overall project that had previously felt sketchy at best. Throughout these first parts we follow an unnamed narrator whom Weiss, a German-born Swedish immigrant from a middle-class background, understood in part as an alternative, properly proletarian version of himself. We begin in volume one in Berlin at the height of Nazi power as the narrator engages in a process of intense proletarian self-education, first with two members of the resistance group Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) with whom he discusses the history of art, the politics of the avant-garde, and the possibilities of a communist aesthetics and resistance in the face of a triumphant Nazi regime. Following this there is a long conversation between the narrator and his father, a veteran of the German Revolution, before we relocate to the Spanish Civil War, where rumors of the depravity of show trials in Moscow and the total war brewing in Europe inflect the narrator’s encounter with a printed copy of Picasso’s Guernica. Volume two sees the narrator relocating, via a stopover in Paris, to a social-democratic Sweden inhabited by mendacious civil servants and a few undercover resistance members. Here the narrator spends a period of apprenticeship split between a tin works and a group of fellow exiles and intellectuals headed by an obnoxious and entirely self-interested Bertolt Brecht. Together the group works on a play based on the Englebrekt rebellion of 1434; although Brecht eventually abandons the project, the experience is sufficient to enable our narrator to gain confidence in his own capacities for literary production. Volume three completes something like a process of development: by the end the narrator is confirmed in his aesthetic project to render the lives of resistance members in all their vibrant contradictions.

To suggest that The Aesthetics of Resistance is a bildungsroman, while not completely inaccurate, is to give a misleading sense of what it is like to read it. The vividness and the explosive density of Weiss’s prose in the moments of ekphrasis around which the novel appears to have been designed make these moments stand out over and above any kind of through line. Volume one begins with an unforgettable rendition of Berlin’s Pergamon frieze as a portal into an ongoing process of mythologized class struggle. Volume two features an early vision of the gigantic canvas of Géricault’s Wreck of the Medusa interwoven with a retelling of the circumstances of its production and later includes an extended rendering of Brueghel’s Triumph of Death as a model for the insanities of modern war. A paradigmatic statement in volume one tells us that history exists for the narrator and his comrades as “a spiral in which we were always near the past and all components perpetually looked modulated and varied anew.”1 Within this spiral, works of art press into and make demands on the present, revealing themselves to be open, difficult reservoirs for a reciprocal energy generated between themselves and the collective praxis of those who project their needs and desire onto them. This writing is not for everyone. Weiss’s original publisher, displaying a nuance in analogy that those who follow the missives of the contemporary German media class will recognize, described reading the manuscript as “slave labor.”2 Still, ask those who care for it, and they will tell you that at times this book comes close to a literary demonstration of the transformability of the world.

Volume three arrives in English at a moment when resistance, far more than the institutions and practices that promulgate what is usually referred to as “aesthetics,” has a right to exist. It is a part of the timeliness of Scott’s translation that it stands out from the previous two volumes by not being all that concerned with individual artworks. Aside from a return to the Pergamon on its final page, the only visual works mentioned in detail are Dürer’s Melencolia I and the sculptures of the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia, the details of which are passed onto the narrator during a walk through Stockholm. Neither of these examples provide much hope and, aside from the final page, the dynamism associated with previous ekphrases is absent. Dürer is reached for after the narrator has all but abandoned the possibility of reaching his mother across a chasm of psychological distress caused by her experience of forced migration and her intense solidarity with Jewish refugees, and Angkor Wat serves as a despairing counterpoint to the Pergamon, its rows of sculpted military formations anticipating the totalitarianism that surrounds Weiss’s characters on all sides. In one telling moment, a comrade of Charlotte Bischoff, a surviving resistance member whom Weiss knew and admired greatly, and the person to whose experiences and reflections he devotes the most space in volume three, reflects on how the explosion of avant-garde creativity that came in the wake 1917 gave way to a “violence that had disavowed all culture.” Bischoff responds matter of factly that they had “lost our hold on culture because we failed at politics.”3 If follows from this that the way back to the former is to begin to win at the latter.

Weiss originally planned on titling his work simply The Resistance, and his vision of a dense history of the lives and actions of Rote Kapelle—almost all of the major characters in his novel are based on actually existing people—is visible in its final volume. The “aesthetics” with which it is primarily concerned are smells, passports, code names, slang, good-enough disguises, and inconspicuous signs left in windows whose presence or absence can determine the fate of torturable bodies. The volume is shot through with a sense of lived catastrophe and at points the form of the prose block serves not so much to allow a generative, contradictory dialogue between art and living history but rather as a form through which ubiquitous disaster breaches a too-permeable reality. We see this in the involuntary recollections of the narrator’s mother, and also when, in the middle of a truly thrilling chase sequence, the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg appears still floating in the Landwehr canal. The true extent of the horror in Eastern Europe is present as rumors and whisperings, the most vivid of which emerges in a second-hand story of a gas chamber told by a drunken aristocrat. Whether or not art could conceivably do anything in the face of this is a question so naive in its presuppositions that Weiss does not pose it.

Nonetheless, volume three retains an interest in the beautiful. One of my favorite passages appears during Bischoff’s secret journey from Sweden to Berlin, where she aims to reconnect with Rote Kapelle. As elsewhere, the form of the prose enacts jump cuts between the scenes leading up to her departure and her journey, during which she studies the layout and hiding places of a ship that has become both her fortress and her prison cell. It is in this context that Bischoff experiences what I think is the novel’s only depiction of disinterested beauty, falling into a “state of joy” upon seeing the “hovering forms” of “freighters in the middle of a war” balanced against two “translucent blocks of sky and sea.”4 We are in a different realm here than the assertions of volume one regarding the necessary effort of projecting collective needs, desires, and struggles onto great works of art in order to gain refreshed knowledge of the amputated possibilities that inhere within them. An aesthetics of resistance, it turns out, includes a momentary salve visible to the eyes of a stowaway.

Like most epics, Weiss’s ends slowly. The climax comes just over two thirds of the way through and involves the betrayal, capture, torture, and execution of all but one of the Rote Kapelle members at Plötzensee prison in Berlin. Weiss abandons any sense that his narrator is reporting events he has seen and moves us inside the cells. We read first a beautiful and strange letter written by Horst Heilmann, one of the three central characters of the first half of volume one, concerning aesthetics, the relation of the oneiric and the political, as well as his burning, unconsummated attraction to his married comrade Libertas. This latter character is herself a striking portrait of the hopelessly naive well-born activist, who believes almost until the point of her death that she will be saved by either her family connections or simply by the “good” nature of her intentions. After this we witness the executions themselves, first through the eyes of the prison’s conflicted chaplain and then via a professionally minded and largely indifferent executioner, for whom liquidating the group means overtime handy for the coming festive period. Again, “aesthetics” here designates how the condemned look, sound, feel, and smell. When art is mentioned, it reveals both its defenselessness and the absoluteness of its stakes in the face of organized legal murder. We can, I think, hear both these aspects in the surviving Bischoff’s reflection when she hears that one comrade requested Goethe to be read out loud prior to his hanging: “She herself would have preferred to yell: I die as a communist.”5

The novel concludes with what feels like a long transition into the postwar order. Weiss covers discussions on the attempted redemption of German culture, and there is a reference to the triumphant United States standing ready to wade into the mountain of corpses and remake Western Europe after its own image. We hear also of the narrator’s acute pain at witnessing what was previously conceptualized as an international tapestry of vertically charged class struggles ossify into two horizontally opposed superpowers. The narrator sustains himself by appealing to an enduring dialectical orientation and fashioning his pain into a hinge through which thought adjusts itself to reality: the abhorrent positionalities of the Cold War become necessary “points of orientation.”6 We end with a quasi-Proustian loop, whereby the narrator has learned enough to use his own writing to articulate the lives of the novel’s dead. In this he joins Bischoff, who resolves to become a teacher, as someone cast adrift in the Germany of the coming economic miracle, devoting what energy they have left to transmitting the experiences of the resistance to future generations. The final return to the Pergamon updates the convergence of past and present struggles, and we glimpse in the frieze the decolonial revolutions to which Weiss devoted intellectual energy and practical solidarity in the 1960s and ’70s. As at the start, these struggles orbit around the empty center of the missing Herakles, by now a firm metonym for the persistent unrealized possibility of a collective subject capable of sweeping away the “crushing pressure” to which the oppressed have always been subject.7

To talk about this novel as really having a conclusion, however, misses the point. The plot resolves itself, but to reiterate, nobody reads these books to find out what happens next. Even after the third volume makes obvious a developmental movement at work in the whole, the “action” registers far less than its status as a living instantiation of a historical-materialist imagination. This imagination is one in which objects, aesthetic and otherwise, radiate with the antagonisms and liquidated potentials that underpin their formation, and in which the grasping of these antagonisms enacts a convergence of art and politics that becomes a method with which to conduct and focus emancipatory energy. It is not incidental to its nature that The Aesthetics of Resistance has birthed countless reading groups: this book lives away from the page; its conversations and its modes of understanding and relating become an infectious way of thinking together in the here and now, of making contact with the shifting points of our living history. For such a thinking, the test of aesthetics is its relationship to lives lived in courage and collective sacrifice, and the demand that these lives place on any understanding of art. Then, as now, this demand cannot be settled easily.