The Aesthetics of Resistance

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 BUEchner Prize, posthumously in 1982. Volume I was translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Volumes II and III were translated by Joel Scott.

"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) "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) "Some of the most gripping-and most beautiful-passages of Weiss's novel appear in detailed examinations of classic paintings by Delacroix, Goya, Brueghel, GEricault, Munch and others, and their bearing on contemporary 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) "At once a compelling tale of that resistance and an informative leftist history of the period it is situated in, Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance is not just his piEce de rEsistance, but a piEce de rEsistance of the twentieth century." - Ron Jacobs (Counterpunch) "The Aesthetics of 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) "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, author of (On the Natural History of Destruction)