The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III: A Novel (Volume 3)

A major literary event, the publication of the final volume of Peter Weiss’s three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. Weiss’s crowning achievement, The Aesthetics of Resistance spans the period from the late 1930s to the end of World War II, dramatizing antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Volume III, initially published in 1981, teems with characters, many of whom are based on historical figures. It commences in May of 1940, as the narrator’s parents flee Nazi forces in Eastern Europe and reunite with their son in Sweden. While in Stockholm, the narrator and other Communist activists living in exile struggle to build structures in the German underground. The story then follows Communist resistance fighter Charlotte Bischoff as she is smuggled to Bremen on a freighter. In Berlin, she contacts the narrator’s friends and joins the Red Orchestra resistance group. Soon, the Gestapo cracks the underground group’s code, arrests a number of its members, and takes them to Plötzensee Prison, where most of them are executed. Featuring the narrator’s meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature throughout, The Aesthetics of Resistance demonstrates the affinity between political resistance and art. Ultimately, Weiss argues that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. “One of the most significant works of postwar German literature. . . . Exhilaratingly strange, compelling, and original. Readers who dare to enter this demanding verbal landscape will not come away empty-handed.” - Mark M. Anderson, Bookforum “For the right reader, The Aesthetics of Resistance offers unique rewards. . . . The book is a search for the ideal named in its title: an art that equals the masterpieces of the past in complexity and power, while standing up against the unjust order that created those masterpieces.” - Adam Kirsch, New York Review of Books “[The Aesthetics of Resistance,] which [Peter Weiss] began when he was well over fifty, making a pilgrimage over the arid slopes of cultural and contemporary history in the company of pavor nocturnus, the terror of the night, and laden with a monstrous weight of ideological ballast, is a magnum opus which sees itself . . . 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.” - W. G. Sebald "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." - Tom Allen, e-flux "There are dozens, if not hundreds, of novels about World War Two. . . . Having not read them all, I do not dare to rank these works. However, after finishing up the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance, I am secure in writing that it is certainly one of the best." - Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch "Weiss pushes the boundaries of the novel in bold and revolutionary—in all senses of the word—directions. In the end, the walls separating the novel from history, philosophy, and aesthetics are demolished. . . . There are historians who have not been kind to resistance groups, asserting that their effectiveness was more symbolic than real. Weiss will have none of that. . . . The Aesthetics of Resistance is a monument to their lives and sacrifices, to the possibilities of art and its role in resisting evil." - Mitchell Abidor, Los Angeles Review of Books “Resistance is centrally important to any kind of assessment of twentieth-century German history.” —James Rolleston, editor of A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka "Some of the most gripping -and most beautiful passages of Weiss's novel appear in detailed examinations of classic paintings by Delacroix, Goya, Brueghel, Géricault, Munch and others, and their bearing on con- temporary struggles. ... Weiss's project has another, deeper aim than advancing the socialist revolution, namely to give voice to fascism's victims, and to preserve the memory of their lives and example-hence the archival nature of his work, with its painstaking attention to the names of fallen comrades." -Noah Isenberg, The Nation Peter Weiss (1916–1982) was a German playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and painter. His works include the plays The New Trial, also published by Duke University Press, and Marat/Sade, and the novels The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman and The Conversation of the Three Walkers. He received West Germany’s most important literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize, posthumously in 1982. Joel Scott is a translator, editor, and writer. He is the translator of volume II of The Aesthetics of Resistance and the author of several poetry chapbooks, the most recent being Bildverbot and Diary Farm. Translator's Acknowledgments vii The Aesthetics of Resistance, volume III 1 Glossary 269