ESSAY // the aesthetics of resistance

“it is the principle of art to do something, although the odds are against it.”

Hi folks,

Thanks for hanging with me during the longest break I’ve taken since starting this thing up last year. As I alluded to previously, I was on the road all month, running a giant circuit from New York out to the Pacific Northwest, down the mountain and Southwest desert zones, up through Gulf swampland, back out West to play a single concert and bask in the proud state of the budget airline before hey, look at that, I’m home again. I’ll have more to say on all of it soon, but for now: it was a sick trip, a boon for jangled northeast nerve-ends, an overdue check-in with geodistant friends, and a general testament to the pleasures and treasures bracketed by the rash decision to get in the car and drive straight across the surface of the nasty earth. For instance: have you ever seen a Space Needle??

Anyway, like I said, more to come. This week, though, we return to the usual beat: countercultures and vanguard movements, their sorry historical lots and variously doomed fates, and the messy and punishing efforts entailed in remembering and writing about them. My favorite thing to think about, in case you’re just joining us, which is why it’s such an absolute fucking honor to have gotten to write the following essay on Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance this past spring. The piece was published in May’s issue of The Whitney Review of New Writing, and with their generous permission I’m sharing it below, in an annotated and expanded form. You can (and should) subscribe to the Review here.

I have blathered end•less•ly about this book all year, so I’ll skip the proselytizer intro here and let the exhausting blogpost do the talking. Thanks to Bela and Esra and Ben Swift and Sophie for helping the piece get there, and thanks to Whitney for giving it a space to hang out and encouraging the longform treatment. I am a self-conscious lunatic and I get stressed out about everything, but it’s no use denying that I’m proud of this essay, and psyched to have gotten to do it. I hope it moves a needle or two.

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Libertas Schulze-Boysen, a member of the “Red Orchestra” antifascist ring featured in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Peter Weiss, in an interview conducted in 1981: “When I was writing about the annihilation of the resistance movement in Germany, I became completely petrified. For weeks at a time, I couldn’t carry on at all. It was horrible to read the documents; I barely had the strength to do it.”

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1.

A partial list of failures of the European revolutionary left, as enumerated in Peter Weiss’s three-volume semi-autobiographical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance:

1. the failure of Germany’s Social Democrat and Communist parties to form a united front in the aftermath of World War I and foment a successful worker’s revolution;

2. the failure of the feeble Weimar Republic, whose centrist leadership and left-wing minority could have joined forces to avert Germany’s slide into fascism;

3. the failure of international Communists to denounce Stalin’s purges, or to recognize the Moscow Trials as evidence of the Soviet Union’s degeneration into a totalitarian catastrophe;

4. the failure of the International Brigades to preserve Spain’s Popular Front government during the country’s civil war, precipitating the regime’s isolation and collapse;

5. the failure of exiled German socialists to unify their strategies and build a meaningful anti-Nazi movement from abroad; and

6. the failure, upon the defeat of Nazi Germany, to prevent Europe’s split into two zones of hegemonic state power—one for Stalin’s cruel distortion of communism, and one for the American-backed forces of international capital.

So OK, failures of strategy, failures of resolve, failures of imagination, failures of circumstance. Check, check, check, check. The litany of defeats is long, the postmortem exhaustive; The Aesthetics of Resistance is, after all, a minutely detailed account of the resistance to fascism from 1937 to 1945. Taken together its three parts run to 900 pages of unbroken block paragraphs, delivered by a nameless narrator in prose dense with description and undifferentiated dialogue. The books have loomed large in the German imagination, and that of the international left, since they were first published between 1975 and 1981, but it’s only now, upon this spring’s release of Joel Scott’s heroic translation of the third volume, that English readers can finally absorb the project’s full impact, and not a moment too soon.¹ Though The Aesthetics of Resistance is a tough read in any language—historically arcane, formally unforgiving, and studded with tragedy—it is also one profoundly keyed to our current crisis. And those of us who manage its demands will find that even here, deep in the book’s bloodsoaked final volume, there’s still a throughline, a kind of final takeaway with undeniable present-day relevance. It arrives late in part three, on a scrap of paper left behind in a prison cell by Wilhelm Leuschner, one of dozens of real-world anti-fascists that Weiss enlisted in the book’s revivifying project. “Build unity,” the note says—firmly urging a generation of isolated and decimated comrades forward, together, even as its own writer is led to the gallows.²

Does this book sound like, I don’t know, a colossal bummer? A willfully difficult, stylistically brutal leveraging of research and documentation over the requirements of narrative? A bone-dry litany of names and dates and debates over the fine points of revolutionary tactics, all rooted in political conditions so fundamentally different from our own as to make any direct comparison seem, at best, painfully strained? The answer is yes, yes, 900 times yes. And yet, let me be emphatic: The Aesthetics of Resistance blasted my heart open. I found it transformative, exhilaratingly relevant, and messily alive, sometimes in ways it seemed scarcely to intend. Reading it now—across a fall and winter of generalized despair and resignation, with the global picture bleakening every day and countervailing options at an eerie impasse—has been an experience of a very specific, all but unnameable kind of sustenance: not instruction, because surely we’re not gonna reason our way out of the present hell; not consolation, because what about this history could possibly console?

Probably it has to do with Weiss’s twinned focus. Alongside its granular examination of underground politics, the book hinges on the examination of art—the “aesthetics” of the book’s title (which was originally gonna be just Der Widerstand, or The Resistance; what luck we got this cumbersome, representatively weird one instead). The text’s three volumes contain numerous lengthy inquiries into artworks encountered by the characters, elaborate set pieces in which debates of aesthetic interpretation complicate and enrich the surrounding questions of strategy.³ There are sections on “canonical” works with well-known radical content (Picasso’s Guernica, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa); realist depictions of labor and proletarian life (Russians, Courbets, prints, postcards); and, crucially, ancient monuments and statues—shrines to empire and spoils of war that the characters reframe as secret testaments to the revolutionary impulse. The best-known of these sections is the opening of the first volume, in which the reconstructed Pergamon Altar (a temple complex decorated with friezes showing the battle between the Greek gods and the mythological Giants) is transformed, over some 40 pages, into a depiction of the ongoing oppression of the underclass, with the lion’s paw of Heracles recast as symbol of a long-deferred future redemption. Like the trilogy’s other art-historical deep dives, the Pergamon sequence risks feeling like an overreach, a presumptuous co-option of multiple, vastly different disciplines; certainly, it risks alienating the reader who’s shown up looking for plot and character. But it’s actually these big swings and appeals to eternity that clarify The Aesthetics of Resistance’s function as a document of the ruinous moment it reanimates. In indexing the political struggles and defeats of its author’s youth beside those of past (and future) generations, the text offers up glimpses of a totality, a unified front, holding across time and space and oriented, unfailingly, toward liberation.⁴ As the bad news continues to roll in, this is the type of sustenance the book provides. Call it communion.

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Peter Weiss as he appeared in Harun Farocki’s 1979 film Zur Ansicht: Peter Weiss, for which the filmmaker visited the author during the composition of the third volume of Aesthetics. Weiss: “If I were to analyze myself, maybe I could explain it this way: I try to overcome this coming to a halt, this breaking off that happens so often in a writer's private life, when one grows tired and wants to give up again and again, when one has this sense of doubt--all this I try to overcome by uniting what I’ve written and by making it as dense as possible.”

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2.

Peter Weiss worked on The Aesthetics of Resistance over the course of a decade, and when he died in May 1982, it was six months after the appearance of the third volume—making a diagnosis of “magnum opus” hard to avoid. But though its scale and ambition mark it as an outlier even among Weiss’s works, the book’s heavy thematic burden is an elaboration of subjects and concerns that he’d long been exploring across a career that never shrank from divergent styles, strategies, and mediums. Indeed, Weiss had been a painter and experimental filmmaker prior to finding relatively late success in novels, essays, and especially theater, but even this latter written work veers wildly, from post-Surrealist grotesque (1960’s The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body) to abstracted autobiography (1961’s Leavetaking) to unadorned historical transcription (1965’s The Investigation), all modes which show up again in Aesthetics.

Weiss’s best-known work in the Anglosphere, though, is undoubtedly the 1963 play Marat/Sade, a work of confrontational Brechtian agitprop which somehow also became a huge hit, won Tony Awards, and was turned into a (really sick) British movie with Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday, Ian Richardson as Jean-Paul Marat, and Patrick Magee from A Clockwork Orange as the Marquis de Sade.⁵ Here, too, the setting (the mental asylum at Charenton where, in 1808, Sade and his fellow subjugated inmates put on a play dramatizing the death of Marat and the excesses of the French Revolution) and the style (a crude defamiliarization of history, delivered via gleefully transgressive speeches and cartoonish violence) would seem to represent an extreme deviation from the solemn forms employed in The Aesthetics of Resistance. But again, there are unmistakable overlaps: an emphasis on the experiences of a voiceless underclass; a dialectical structure, in which ideas and political positions are expressed as a relentless clash of oppositions; and a brazen willingness to dramatize and comment on *big* events, recruiting real historical figures as mouthpieces to do so.

The last puzzle piece here, I think, is Weiss’s own story, which in addition to furnishing the broad strokes of the life of The Aesthetics of Resistance’s narrator (a clear stand-in for the author) also clarifies the conditions and contexts that drove him to write. Born outside of Berlin in 1916 to a Swiss mother and a father with a complicated official status—he was a Hungarian Jew whose citizenship would revert to Czechoslovakian after World War I—Weiss developed an early acquaintance with statelessness. In spite of his family’s comfortably bourgeois milieu, the era’s upheavals saw him shunted among European outposts and civic arrangements: from Berlin to Bremen to Berlin again, then to London, Prague, and Stockholm. In Sweden, where Weiss landed at 23 and would live out the rest of his life, he encountered several of the fellow refugees and radical standard-bearers who’d eventually populate his novel, most notably Max Hodann, the psychiatrist and sex researcher who’d served as a military doctor during the Spanish Civil War.⁶ Alongside all the jockeying and infighting, the drama of exile among the international leftist groups in Sweden, the convolutions and crises befalling his home country (or the closest thing to it), and the looming division of that country and its continent into two spheres with diametrically opposed social structures, Weiss found the basis for a political education, and his artistic life began in earnest.

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Page from a 1945 OSS report on the recruitment of antifascists from the ranks of exiled German communists. Weiss: “Exile to me and many other emigrants was an experience of being propelled out of one’s original milieu--in my case a bourgeois milieu--and of no longer belonging to any social group at all... if you’ve been in exile once, you will always remain in exile.”

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3.

The Aesthetics of Resistance dramatizes this process, but it doesn’t do so cleanly. Instead of opting for a simple “thinly-veiled” approach, Weiss takes the bare facts of his life and adds on, freely interpolating firsthand events with ones experienced by others or lifted from research. The first volume, for example, begins with its narrator’s youth in Bremen and Berlin, although contrary to Weiss’s own experience, this character grows up steeped in working-class Marxism and is identified as a childhood friend of real-life underground organizers Hans Coppi and Horst Heilmann and the son of a proletarian (but still Czech) father who’d participated in the revolt that installed the short-lived Bremen Council Republic in 1919. In the volume’s latter half, this same narrator has shipped out with the International Brigades in Spain, where he’s serving under Max Hodann and experiencing the internecine squabbles that attended the dismantling of the popular front, again mixing with notable historical figures along the way. By the second and third volumes, this mildly Forrest Gumpian construction sees the narrator marooned in Sweden, uncovering his own capacities as a writer while working as a researcher for fellow refugee Bertolt Brecht and delivering messages for members of the KPD, the exiled German Communist Party, a narrative thread which sends the book’s climactic action back to Berlin, where Coppi and Heilmann reappear as fighters in the Rote Kapelle, the so-called “Red Orchestra” anti-fascist spy ring.

To state the fairly obvious: It’s a risky move, the author’s recasting of his textual stand-in as a party to (if never a central participant in) some of the era’s defining acts of resistance heroism. It’s a technique for which Weiss, on the book’s original release, caught a lot of flak from establishment critics in capitalist Western Europe, who accused him of exaggerating his own revolutionary bona fides and painting “a red halo around his head” (not to mention papering over what we’d now term his “privilege”).⁷ Weiss himself, who admitted to the book’s being something of a “wishful autobiography,” was quick to point to the extraordinary wealth of research and interviews he’d compiled as the basis for scenes he hadn’t observed firsthand, and also noted that he had met Brecht in Sweden, among other qualifications.⁸ Still, if you’re inclined to look on the book’s brushes with revolutionary fame this way, it’s a reading that’s hard to dispute.

But also, it’s more complicated than that. And also, who cares? The path of Weiss’s narrator is a means of guiding the reader from scene to scene, no more artificial or less forgivable than any other structural mechanism would have been. What’s more, it’s an expression of the author’s stated goal of centering the lives of subjugated individuals under large-scale historical processes. (From one of Weiss’s notebooks: “My concept of socialism/communism… can never be determined by those who give guidelines from their positions of power, but only by the perspectives of those who are at rock bottom.”) Most of the men and women in question may be people who really lived—some commentators have stated that every character in The Aesthetics of Resistance with the exception of the narrator, his mother, and his father is a genuine historical figure—but they are also largely functionaries and middlemen, if not actual grunts and foot soldiers, individuals of broad class backgrounds, ages, and nationalities.⁹ The second volume’s Brecht cameo aside, Weiss’s emphasis is on small-time, half-forgotten participants in the revolutionary project; he even goes through some pretty conspicuous textual contortions to avoid naming Hitler and Stalin, which tells you where his head is at. From the nameless narrator through to the lower ranks of the Red Orchestra, this is decidedly a bottom-up approach, in which the dictators, generals, and decision-makers remain offstage while the world-shaking events of the era, such as the annexation of Austria, the start of the war, or the dropping of the atomic bomb, are absorbed secondhand or over the radio. As these accounts filter in, the real scenes (almost invariably arguments between partisans of one left faction and those of another) proceed in the book’s customary style—the unbroken discourse of a people’s chorus, its speakers named or unnamed, endlessly trying to salvage a coherent politics out of an endlessly crumbling situation.

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A handwritten endpage glossary in my secondhand copy of the German edition, a document of the breadth of art-historical references in the text but also an intergenerational echo of all the notating and highlighting I did on my English readthrough and a validation of the work it takes to read this book. A very melodramatic image that nonetheless comes to mind: imagine if Sisyphus was rolling the boulder and came upon an inscription from another, previous Sisyphus, that says “I was here, and I rolled the boulder too.” Ridiculous? Of course, but I still could have cried. Weiss: “[The novel is connected with] a concept of work as enormously strenuous. This is due to my own experience and due to an insight into the difficulties the characters in the novel had in arriving at their interpretations. The readers, who are confronted with those people, have to go through the same exertion at any rate, make the same efforts the second time around. Nothing is made easy for them, just as things weren’t made easy for the characters in the novel.”

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4.

About that style: In case it’s not sufficiently clear, the process of actually reading The Aesthetics of Resistance can sometimes be sort of a nightmare. On a page-by-page, graf-by-graf, sentence-by-runon-sentence level, the book makes demands of the reader that frequently feel excessive, unjustified except as requirements of the airlessly strict parameters it has set for itself. When Weiss employs the earmarks and basic rhetorical devices of traditional narrative—character description, dialogue tags, temporal or geographical markers—it can come across as perfunctory or grudging, to the extent that these elements stick out where they might have just quietly gone about their useful business. And of course, there are the paragraphs themselves, those undifferentiated onrushes of prose extending to ten or twenty pages, “solid blocks” that Weiss, in interviews, rather resignedly related to his onetime painting practice.¹⁰ (“Sure, I make it difficult for my readers… well, you can’t escape from your own notions of form.”) A friend likened the book’s writing style to “an endless handkerchief being pulled out of a hat”; more to the point, everyone except me quiet-quit the reading group. Myself, I blew through multiple highlighters creating breaks and separating out ideas, and while I did eventually get into a semi-masochistic rhythm with all this extended technique, the work was obviously super burdensome—an effort to mitigate the text’s relentless austerity to which not every reader will want to commit.¹¹ So consider this is a “your mileage may vary” warning, and know, like, I’m not just saying that.

Unsurprisingly, this issue—the kind of straitjacketing of the book by its own formal demands—extends into the plot as well. The story’s need, for example, to hew to the beats of the author’s own life path results in multiple awkward narrative contrivances and extended lulls, most notably in the Stockholm sections of the second and third volumes. While you might find it illuminating to see Weiss place the era’s left factionalisms against the backdrop of a nominally liberal welfare state like Sweden (which is also really useful for readers in the U.S., who will see lots of parallels with the chickenshit apologists in the present-day Democratic Party), you’d be forgiven for losing some steam when, for example, Weiss spends eightyish pages on the research for a never-written Brecht play about the fifteenth-century Swedish revolutionary Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson. It is also palpably difficult for the author to retain a sense of urgency relative to the Nazi war machine’s increasing brutality and the extent of its atrocities while his narrator is trapped in (again, nominally) neutral Sweden, and the glancing references to the Holocaust in volume three draw attention to this major imbalance as much as they address it. And when, midway through this last volume, the narrative requires a return to Berlin, Weiss pulls an even stranger move and shifts protagonists; after some 600 pages embedded with our nameless authorial stand-in, we are suddenly following Charlotte Bischoff—a previously seen Communist exile—as she is smuggled back into Germany as a Soviet spy, setting the reader up for a gutting third-person denouement among the members of the capital’s antifascist underground. It’s a POV switch which yields some of the most affecting material of the whole novel, but coming five-sixths of the way through such a rigorously rule-bound work, it also stands as a rare structural inconsistency.¹² The reader gets the sense that Weiss, having unnecessarily boxed himself in with the “wishful autobiography” conceit, ended up having no choice but to break his own precedent.

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Detail of the eastern frieze of the Pergamon Altar, including the missing Herakles, identifiable only by a bit of lion pelt over the body of a Giant felled by Zeus. Weiss: “Among those who create works of art there is hardly anyone who has not experienced the external defeats in his own flesh, as it were, and who did not carry on all the same.”

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5.

But enough nitpicking. If The Aesthetics of Resistance is hard and unwieldy, it’s because what it’s trying to do is hard and unwieldy. If its stylistic and structural idiosyncrasies feel unresolved, it’s because to claim to resolve them would be to falsely suggest that the novel’s redemptive project has already been achieved. And if, as some critics have contended, the political and artistic debates the book takes up (incremental reformism versus popular revolution, social realist aesthetics versus avant-garde modernisms) seem outdated and scarcely relevant to our situation, it’s because in setting those questions down and interrogating them fully, the book honors the hold they had on the revolutionary imagination even as it takes a first step toward enabling us to transcend them.

And anyway, it’s not as if a single solitary thing has actually changed—a fact that, even if it seems pretty obvious in the abstract, will still shouldercheck you with devastatingly pertinent specifics approximately once a page. After all, the state of our radical politics is no less riddled with internecine disputes and mutually disfiguring purity tests than it was in the era Weiss examined; reform and revolution are just as confidently treated as incompatible absolutisms, with necessary suckers on each side (either sellouts who think they’re pragmatists or deluded utopians who think they’re uncompromising, all depending on whom you ask). And that notion of unity, that path of cross-faction compromise that Weiss occasionally allows to be voiced by those scant few characters, Wilhelm Leuschner and Max Hodann and Willi Münzenberg and the other variously doomed advocates of a middle path? It’s still a long fucking way off.¹³

Meanwhile, our art, though comparatively freer in its engagements with political reality, feels just as stuck: bound up in discursive loops and shallow squabbles, prone to loud but limp gestures at resistance or, worse, happily accommodating itself to the ugly requirements of the current order and pretending that that’s what radicalism means. The whole thing is gross, and if Weiss can be read as suggesting a solution, it is to not be fooled. Indeed, just as one of the great gifts and curses of this book is to train the reader to see supposedly straightforward political positions as insolubly bound up in elaborate multi-front power relations, the same analysis can be applied to culture and the way it variously undermines or reifies those relations. Which is to say that when an artwork claims to be something—whether a grand monument to state power, or a paean to the noble worker, or whatever the present-day jargony artist’s statement equivalent is—we don’t have to take its word for it. A given artwork’s ultimate utility is unknown, because it’s up to us.

That this reinterpretive capacity can be fruitfully applied to The Aesthetics of Resistance itself is perhaps the book’s essential contribution. Across these volumes, Weiss provides a framework for radical activity that, though patently imperfect, is born of rigor and a clear commitment, resists simple takeaways and direct injunctions, bears unflinching witness to a generation of nameless or lesser-known comrades, and functions as proof of the emancipatory possibilities of analysis demonstrated, over and over again, in the text itself. In this way, the book can be situated alongside the many artworks examined by its own characters, creations that the narrator and Heilmann and Coppi ponder along classically materialist lines, so that the story of a piece of statuary is also the story of its constituent stone, where it was mined, and the workers who mined it, with all of that effort and complexity ending up imbued in the “finished” artwork, charging it up for future use. The Aesthetics of Resistance is not just a representation of and memorial to human toil and revolutionary hopes; it is a living container for them, and an engine for their eventual actualization.

The book’s final volume ends where its first began: at the foot of the Pergamon Altar, to which the narrator has returned in an imaginary future, some projected moment of transcendence, when the promise preserved in the sculpture is on the precipice of being realized and the oppressed are about to throw off their yoke. Weiss renders the passage in the subjunctive, the mode of hypotheticals and doubt, of the possible admission of an ultimate failure.¹⁴ But this, we know, is something different, and as the text unfurls it becomes clear that we’re in a space of paradox—of an action simultaneously unattainable and attained, a final effort uniting the revolutionary project’s distant historical dimension, its far-flung posterity, and its inescapable, eternal now. “I would go to see the frieze, in which the sons and daughters of the earth rise up against the ruling powers… there would be whistles and rumbling coming from the factories, the dockyards, the mines… and there would be a spot free among the melee, where the lion’s paw would hang, in reach of everyone…” Now, against the drumbeat of ongoing defeat, the brutalizing march of the real, there it is, up on the altar: the instant of liberation. Impossible, impossible, and yet—

                  ::::::::  :::    ::: :::::::::   
                 :+:    :+: :+:    :+: :+:    :+:   
                +:+        +:+    +:+ +:+    +:+    
               +#++:++#++ +#+    +:+ +#++:++#+      
                     +#+ +#+    +#+ +#+    +#+      
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             ########   ########  #########         
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                +:+        +:+        +:+    +:+    
               +#++:++#++ +#+        +#++:++#:      
                     +#+ +#+        +#+    +#+      
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             ########   ########  ###    ###        
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                    +#+     +#++:++#+  +#++:++#     
                   +#+     +#+    +#+ +#+           
                  #+#     #+#    #+# #+#            
             ########### #########  ########## 

1. The release of the third volume in English this past March was accompanied by a pair of events with Joel Scott at The CUNY Graduate Center and The Poetry Project, the latter of which was livestreamed and archived here. I really recommend watching the video, particularly Scott’s reading of two key sections of the book, which starts at 32:50.

2. Weiss, 1981: “This piece of paper [by Leuschner] does exist, it is in some archive somewhere. It is a document from a very brief period of time, the time of the Cultural Federation (‘Kulturbund’); a document of the possibility that existed right up to the end, of a unification of Social Democrats and Communists.”

3. These art-historical entanglements are catalogued on an improbably tricked-out Wikipedia page—by far the best resource on this I’ve been able to find online or in print—which seems to have been built by a handful of German power-users. Thank you “Emma7stern”!

4. Fwiw, because Walter Benjamin cannot be ignored here: Weiss was asked about the degree to which the novel and its art-historical reframings were influenced by Benjamin’s “On the Philosophy of History” and its injunction to “brush history against the grain,” and gave this (not entirely convincing) response: “I didn't directly allow myself to be influenced by specific writings of Benjamin. Things just turned out this way. If you have the same basic attitude, you arrive at similar results.”

5. The play’s full title—The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade—is itself a testament to its madcap logorrheic style.

6. Weiss, 1981:

There are many autobiographical elements in [the book’s depiction of] Hodann… Hodann was the one who took care of me when I came to Stockholm as a young emigrant, where I lived under difficult circumstances trying to become active as a painter… When one is without any prospects for the future whatsoever, and when one hardly knows how to survive the next week, that's when one meets people who lend support. They do it again and again because of what they've gone through themselves, out of a kind of great humanism. This is why I put such great emphasis on a figure like Hodann.

7. It’s important to note that Weiss also caught plenty of shit from thinkers in East Germany, who quibbled with the novel’s departures from the era’s Party orthodoxy. From Klaus R. Scherpe’s “Reading The Aesthetics of Resistance: Ten Working Theses”:

Weiss depicts precisely the challenging of a political party-program. The so-called dissenters and renegades, Münzenberg, Wehner, Brecht, the physician Hodann along with the entire problematics of cultural revolution, are removed from the periphery and placed on center stage. Precisely this emphasis was then decried by the East German critics.

As for beating the “privilege” charges: Weiss seems to have claimed or tried to claim greater closeness with his proletarian narrator than was apparent to the West German critics, telling Scherpe around 1975 that “ever since the dissolution of his family… and the disruption of a ‘normal life’ in Hitler's Germany in 1934, when [Weiss] began a life in exile as a starving artist subsisting on odd jobs, he had actually experienced his life as ‘proletarian.’”

8. Weiss, 1981:

I was only marginally involved with Brecht at that time. I didn't have anything to show him, no finished works; my position was that of a meager beginner, and he was the master. In our short encounters this role of master became evident immediately… Brecht in his private life ultimately was an authoritarian person, guided by a sort of patriarchal attitude. But, although he was caught up in the conventions of patriarchal upbringing, his ideas about change were incomparable. I wanted to make this clear. This is what I've learnt from Brecht in spite of everything.

9. Among the many cast members I wish I’d had the space to discuss in greater detail are several central female characters:

• Charlotte Bischoff, the exiled KPD member and spy whose fearless reinfiltration of Germany (hidden in the bowels of a ship) constitutes the book’s most straightforwardly heroic account of Resistance action;

• Karin Boye, a Swedish author whom the narrator encounters in Stockholm as a confidante and correlative to his own war-traumatized mother, and whose dystopian novel Kallocain predicts a world cleaved in two by opposing totalitarian states;

• Rosalinde Ossietzky, exiled daughter of the celebrated/doomed German pacifist with whom it seems—very fleetingly—there might be a bit of a romantic vibe with the narrator (before Weiss quickly scuttles it);

Weiss, for his part, attributed his gender consciousness as a writer—such as it was—to the influence of Hodann:

Hodann was not only someone who fought politically, but in his entire attitude he was someone who analyzed gender roles like a psychologist and a psychoanalyst. Even at that time he was quite aware that women not only had to take up political struggle, but a completely new struggle as well, a struggle against the dominance of the masculine world.

Also: nobody seems to ever acknowledge this, but it feels important to note that there are several characters featured in the book who have no real historical referent. An important one is “Marcauer,” a female comrade in the Spanish Civil War sections in Volume 1 whose brave refusal to fall in line with Stalinist International Brigade directives leads to her execution.

And also also: while I’m here, it bears real examination that, for all its emphasis on a kind of proletarian gender parity, The Aesthetics of Resistance rigorously avoids any mentions of love or sex of any kind: whenever you think Weiss is gonna chill out and let the characters kiss or whatever, he runs the other way. It’s there, it’s weird, and someone should write about it!

10. Here’s a representative spread from the ARC, chosen at basically random cuz they’re all shaped the same:

11. Weiss’s quote is worth reproducing in, as it were, a solid block:

These massive erratic “solid blocks” came about even when I was working on the first volume. By the way, it is the form I have sought in all of my prose works. It is something inherited from my time as a painter: I want to see a complete picture. These “solid blocks” actually correspond to the content. Everything is so intertwined in such an enormously condensed way that a single dash would amount to a deviation from what is spellbound in there. Sure, I make it difficult for my readers insofar as they frequently have problems at the beginning to get into the novel at all. Well, you can't escape from your own notions of form. I try to write what I can definitely answer for. The form is part of that as well.

12. Strange as this POV pivot is, I tried not to overdo this critique because, surprise, it’s all quite a bit more complicated. For one thing, there is a briefer narrative switchover to Bischoff’s perspective in Volume 2, which serves to alert the reader to at least the possibility of such moves coming down the line. There are also further deviations from the nameless narrator in Volume 3, including an ending section in Hodann’s voice and a sorta “found text” moment in the form of a (gut-wrenching) prison letter, addressed as coming from “Heilmann to Unknown,” which is maybe the most beautiful, affecting section across all three books.

13. This feels crazy to say and crazier to read, particularly as a myopic New Yorker during the present Zohran interregnum, but oh well.

14. On the topic of failure, here’s one last check-in from Weiss, on the ending’s use of the subjunctive, in his 1981 interview with Burkhardt Lindner:

Lindner: This conclusion, it seems to me, tries to capture the absolute disruption of 1945 by mingling different times in an imaginary way: there was no real new beginning, but spheres of power were divided amongst the victors and the expectations associated with exile and resistance were devastated.

Weiss: Yes, this is what the book points to. That's why the subjunctive mode is used on the last pages. The first-person narrator suddenly steps back into the present, the present he left in writing. At the same time he has to turn and try to get out of the novel’s inner temporal level and walk into the future. I wasn’t interested in trivial retrospection. Things had to remain on the same time level: where will it lead us, now that what all of us fought for and what many of us died for has been disrupted? Why didn’t it go on?