The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I: A Novel, Volume 1A major literary event, the publication of this masterly translation makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is the crowning achievement of Peter Weiss, the internationally renowned dramatist best known for his play Marat/Sade. The first volume, presented here, was initially published in Germany in 1975; the third and final volume appeared in 1981, just six months before Weiss’s death. Spanning the period from the late 1930s to World War II, this historical novel dramatizes antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Living in Berlin in 1937, the unnamed narrator and his peers—sixteen- and seventeen-year-old working-class students—seek ways to express their hatred for the Nazi regime. They meet in museums and galleries, and in their discussions they explore the affinity between political resistance and art, the connection at the heart of Weiss’s novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The novel includes extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature. Moving from the Berlin underground to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and on to other parts of Europe, the story teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history. |
From inside the book
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... Hodann ) , to construct a new education for himself and for them . Politically and theoretically , of course , this pedagogical frame- work takes a philosophical position , which is recognizably that of certain new or oppositional ...
... Hodann, the Reichian psychia- trist, who insists on the place of sexuality and the transformation of daily life in the midst of any committed politics, offers a realist and approach- able analogue in the personal experience of the ...
... Hodann begins the work and ends it: he summons the narrator to Spain to work in his clinic at the front, and the work closes, not so much with his death in Norway in 1946, after his break with the Party, as with his great speech at the ...
... Hodann's program embodies. As a doctor and a psychiatrist, Hodann allows the fundamental con- cern with healing to be introduced into the twin dynamics of civil war and class struggle. Following Reich, he insists on the ideologically ...
... Hodann staked everything on the bringing into reality of that democracy whose seeds had been laid in the German underground , he was also a seer , and an adept of human weaknesses and confusions , and it was this that sud- denly brought ...
Contents
The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 1 Part I | |
The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 1 Part II | |
Glossary by Robert Cohen | |