A private story

I've now finished the third volume of the German-Swedish author Peter Weiss's long novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, and so have now read all 1787 pages of the 2005 Suhrkamp edition. It's a varied reading experience - something akin to a blend of fiction, documentary report, ideological tract, historical treatise and autobiographical reminiscence - and it's possible to see why if it were to be translated in its entirety, the book would probably have a limited readership, placing its author firmly in the category of a 1000 copy guy. Although the voice of the narrative is not directly Weiss's own, but that of the novel's youthful narrator, it's hard to swallow the illusion that the teenage chronicler and historian would in real life be capable of disgorging this stupendous volume of earnest, didactic oration.

On the other hand, the book does offer some unique insights into the history and psychology of the Germany of the immediate post World War 2 era. The sections in volume 3 that deal with the problem of why a country that was able during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce one of the most highly-evolved aesthetic cultures of Europe, and indeed of the world as a whole, proved at the same time to be an almost total failure in the art of state building and political endeavour, and ended by nearly destroying not only itself but much of the rest of the world as a well. Weiss appears to pin the blame on what he perceives to be an innate Germanic (not only German, for Sweden also comes in for a large dose of criticism) yearning for an ideal realm, a longing unaccompanied by any substantial practical ability that might have brought about its realization. The link between aesthetics and politics which forms the novel's principal thesis is only an abstract one - in practice, the link did not exist, and most of the writers, artists, filmmakers and composers who began by espousing the cause of a New Jerusalem built from Marxist revolutionism ultimately found themselves cast adrift in a murky sea of violence, war, totalitarianism and genocide.

Weiss extends his judgment to condemn not only Germany, but also most of Europe and America. The Soviet Union is seen as a deceptive friend and foe, which during the 1920s and 30s encouraged the aspirations and actions of radical idealists only to betray them, delivering them into the hands of their tormentors and destroyers. The parts of the novel which deal with this - such as the long passages of analysis and recrimination that precede the gory accounts of executions in the Nazi jails - are probably unlike anything else in postwar German literature, possessing the kind of clarity and frankness sought by W.G. Sebald in his book of essays On the Natural History of Destruction, but not found by him there.

The third volume stands apart from the other two by containing elements of a more conventional narrative kind. The long account of Charlotte Bischoff's voyage from Stockholm to Nazi-occupied Holland aboard a Swedish merchant vessel could be taken from a 1930s spy thriller, while the section describing the executions of German communists (including two of the novel's principal characters) in Plötzensee Prison have a lurid quality that is possibly at odds with the elevated style of much of the rest of the book. In the end, I found that the unyielding nature of the narrative technique, the unbroken yet breathless hammering of the syntax and diction, made it hard to be swept along by the flow of language and rhetoric as the author undoubtedly intended. By the last 100 pages or so there is a definite sense of exhaustion, with the clauses of the long sentences coming in shorter and shorter bursts - one literally feels that the narrator is almost at his last gasp.

Sebald called this a "genuinely catastrophic novel in which, with a shattering sense of system, Peter Weiss wrecked what he knew was the little life remaining to him", and it is hard not to concur with that judgment. For a work which aims to embrace the aspirations and sufferings of an entire generation, with only a few exceptions this is all too clearly a book of individual self-analysis and self-destruction. Perhaps, given the continued silence about the inner, intellectual reasons for the rise of Nazism in pre-war Germany (a silence that persists not only in Germany itself but also in the rest of Europe), there was no other way in which Peter Weiss could write his fascinating, cataclysmic but ultimately private book.

Boye

The third volume of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance opens with a tribute to the narrator's parents, who have succeeded in fleeing to Sweden. The tribute is also one of mourning for his mother - though still alive, she is ill and has withdrawn into a silence from which she cannot be recalled.

Imperceptibly, the image of the mother merges with the image and memory of another female character, that of her friend and colleague, the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye, who like other women in the novel is referred to solely by her last name. Boye's suicide, and her own rationale and explanation for it, form the subject of the early part of volume 3.

The novel's sharp focus on the life and work of Boye and the acute attention the narrator devotes to her indicate that for Weiss this author and poet had a more personal significance for Weiss than was the case with Brecht, for example. One wonders if Weiss had met Boye in Sweden - after all, in 1938 his family took up residence in Alingsås, West Gotland, where Boye herself moved in the following year in order to be close to Anita Nathorst. A meeting does not seem improbable.

Some of Weiss's account of Boye's life and of her final months appears to be drawn at least in part from the biography by Margit Abenius (Drabbad av renhet, 1950)- yet there are also some details that may derive from actual contacts with the poet. In particular, Weiss is at pains to analyse Karin Boye's existential, political, artistic, sexual and personal situation in 1941, describing it through the words of the psychoanalytically-trained doctor Max Hodann. Hodann says that in her moment of surrender to Goering at a mass rally in 1932, Boye had made it impossible for her to forgive herself or receive forgiveness, and had consciously and unconsciously abandoned hope. Her novel Kallocain (1940), which depicts the merciless and inhuman conflict in a world that is divided into two opposing blocks, is the testament not only to her own despair but to the despair of a generation. Hodann sees a continuation of Boye's fatal inner and outer dilemma in the inability of the radical German youth of the 1930s and 40s to avoid either a collapse into Nazism or an embrace of Stalinist Communism:

Ich gab Boyes Schilderung wieder, wie sie sich hatte betören lassen dem Mann mit dem bleichen Hysterikergesicht auf der Tribüne in der überfüllten Sporthalle, und wie sie zu spät erst das Ruchlose seiner Reden begriffen habe. Viele von uns, sagte Hodann, immer noch, und oft grade, wenn es um Entscheidendes gehe, wie Kinder, wir ließen uns beherrschen von Hoffnungen, deren Ursprung eingebettet sei in der Erinnrung an das Ertasten der Mutterbrust, im Aufgehn in einer Harmonie, die es für uns nicht mehr gebe. Auch Boye müsse, wie wir alle, nach der Mutter, dem Vater in sich gesucht, und diese, in wachsendem Maß, und durch andre Gestalten ersetzt haben... Ich möchte behaupten, sagte er, daß unsre Generation mehr gezeichnet ist von dem Unheil, das die Sowjetunion ergriff, als von den Verheerungen durch den Faschismus, denn an dem Arbeiterstaat hingen wir mit unserm ganzen kindlichen Glauben, während uns von Anfang an bekannt war, was in Deutschland aufkam.

I'll return to this subject in another post.

The Pact and the Poet

I've found the remaining part of volume 2 of Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance something of a mixed bag, as it deliberately avoids settling down into one main stream of narrative. The sections on Engelbrekt seem a little contrived, as though the author were spinning material to fill out space, especially when one learns that Brecht himself has lost track of the project and the narrator is left alone with his research on the subject. Of more interest are the extensive deliberations on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is now providing all sorts of headaches for the various radicals, including Rosner, who continues to try to find some justification for the nefarious agreement, engaging in a Kafkaesque series of arguments in which the Pact becomes the basis for an "understanding" between the working classes of Germany and Russia. Weiss makes it perfectly clear that he regards the situation as patently absurd, and the characters of the novel appear trapped and helpless in the face of a historical conundrum that goes against all they have worked and fought for.

Brecht's preparations to leave for Finland, and the dismantling, disposal and transporting of his vast private library of world literature (the authors and titles are listed over several pages, take up most of the narrative. There is a nice concluding scene in which Brecht leans out as the Swedish secret police depart after searching the contents of the library for "subversive" literature. "You've forgotten the thrillers!" he shouts to them, and then throws his copies of books by Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, etc. out of the window down to the garden below.

Resisters - 2

I've now reached the second half of volume 2 of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance, and Bertolt Brecht is now the main focus of attention. In Stockholm the book's young narrator is seeking employment with the great exiled German radical playwright and poet. The personality of Brecht is sketched out fairly clearly - his self-absorption, his freedom to engage in his literary work full-time while many of his assistants, like the narrator, have to work in factories during the daytime, his manner of behaving, his short temper.Weiss characterizes him somewhat ironically as a "factory owner" - the "factory" being Brecht's own numerous projects and productions, which include not only plays for the theatre but also large-scale theoretical works like an Encyclopedia of Nazism and a Problematics of Exile.

The narrator becomes involved in one of these projects, working as a lowly researcher for a new play Brecht wants to write about Engelbrekt, the leader of a 15th century peasant revolt in Sweden. Weiss devotes a large number of pages to giving an exhaustive account of this. In fact, it becomes another of the novel's "set pieces", like Heracles and the Pergamon frieze, or the paintings by Delacroix, Goya, Brueghel, Gericault and others. There is also a long discussion about Swedish politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weakness of Sweden's parliamentary democracy, and the significance of mineral ore for the country's industry, with particular reference to the period of the Second World War.

Interestingly, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is discussed in some detail, with the characters, including Brecht, giving their various interpretations of it. Although it's sometimes difficult to extrapolate the author's point of view from that of the narrator and other figures in the book, Weiss appears to take a highly critical view of the Pact, seeing it as a major enigma and obstacle for the European left. At all events, the issue is hardly swept under the carpet, as might have been expected in a work by a less complex radical author. One of the characters, the Comintern official, political journalist and editor Jakob Rosner tries to compose a justification for the agreement, which he plans to circulate in his newspaper Ny Dag to likely subscribers in Stockholm:

He asked me to search the phonebook for Jewish names, and enter them in the register of people who were to be sent sample issues of the paper. He refused to believe that the Jacobssons, Danielssons and Rosengrens were of old-Swedish origin. Jakobsohn, Danielsohn and Rosenzweig, he said, shaking his head with its rumpled hair, and so the Lewins and Blumenbergs are also Christians in this country... (p. 664)

In a bitter conversation with Rosalinde Ossietzky, the narrator questions her "Marxist" argument that the cause of the impending world war is the conflict between the capitalist nations of the world. At the end of November 1939 the signs that an armed confrontation is about to break out between Finland and the Soviet Union leads the Sweden-based radicals (most of whom are in Sweden illegally)  to speculate on the outcome.

Resisters

In the second volume of Peter Weiss's long novel - I'm now in the section between pp. 553 and 627 - I notice a sudden change in the narrative technique. For one thing, the sense of "paragraph-lessness" is receding. There are more frequent breaks in the blocks of text, and one is now reading what are almost long but clearly demarcated paragraphs. For another, the specific locale - in this case Sweden and Stockholm - is being described and invoked in a much more concrete and realistic manner than was characteristic of the section devoted to Spain (the second half of volume one). One supposes that a reason for this may be that the author has a greater degree of immediate and long-term familiarity with the places he is describing, The need to insert chunks of art history and Greek mythology into the text seems for the present to have lost its urgency, and the story is developing in a manner that is almost that of traditional nineteenth century fiction - one almost could be reading a story or novel by Tolstoy. The characters converse, they eat and drink, they laugh, they are becoming almost human.

The analogy with Tolstoy also comes to mind in the fact that the characters now being developed and described are historical figures. This is a historical novel, after all. Just as in War and Peace Tolstoy introduces military figures and political leaders into the narrative, Weiss now brings in not only Max Hodann, but a number of other real-life people who worked as political activists in the exiled German Communist anti-Nazi resistance movement. We meet Charlotte Bischoff, who having fled the Third Reich is now in Sweden preparing to return to Germany in order to carry out undergound resistance work there. "Lindner" appears to be the German-Czech resistance worker Hertha Lindner, though from a historical point of view it isn't clear that she was in Sweden during 1939. Weiss now also introduces Rosalinde Ossietzky, daughter of the radical German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1889-1938), who in Stockholm tells the narrator and Max Hodann about the torture and murder of her father by the Nazi authorities. She also recalls the actions of some pro-Nazi Norwegian cultural figures, including the novelist Knut Hamsun, who took part in an active campaign to discredit her father and to deny him the award of the Nobel Prize which he received in 1935.

It has to be said that Weiss succeeds in leading these new characters onto the stage quite naturally, without much ideological ballast - they act and talk like real people, and above all one can believe in them. It is only a pity that the author forgot (or perhaps decided not) to include explanatory notes on these figures, who will  probably be unfamiliar to many of his readers, even - or especially - in Germany. There the affinity to Tolstoy breaks down, for Tolstoy's historical characters were all well-known to his readership. However, with the advent of Wikipedia, it's not too hard to keep abreast of the historical and biographical background as one reads - this was hardly the situation of readers of this challenging novel three decades ago.

Although Sweden in 1939 is now a temporary home for many of the political activists being brought to life, most of them are there illegally. Weiss is scathing about the country's Aliens Act of 1938, which in a response to antisemitic protests (among others, by students at Lund and Upsala universities) virtually closed the door to Jewish refugees altogether. As is consistently the case throughout the whole of the Aesthetics, Weiss groups Jewish and Communist refugees together - for him the Holocaust has two elements, a racial one and a political one. Sometimes they overlap, but they are distinct, separate and of equal validity. The reader is left unaided to deal with this debatable historical construct.

Another problem is the account of the international political events of 1939 which led up to the outbreak of war. The account is heavily influenced by Stalinist versions of history, with the Baltic States, for example, being stigmatized as "semi-fascist" and standing in the way of a successful Soviet defence - part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy being cooked up by Great Britain, France and the United States. One feels that, although this Tolstoyan historical digression is put, somewhat unconvincingly, into the mouth of the youthful narrator, who is only in his teens, one can't help feeling that it would have been better if Weiss had left it out, for it leaves an unpleasant taste, even as fiction. The bewilderment of the narrator and his friends as the German-Soviet Credit Agreement of 1939 is signed is well-described, but again there need to be some notes or other signposts for the reader.

I'm now moving on into the closing section of the first part of volume two, in which the narrator visits the island of Lidingö near Stockholm where the Swedish sculptress Ninnan Santesson has put her home at the disposal of the German writer and dramatist Bertolt Brecht and his family. 

Shipwrecked

Reading on into the second volume of Peter Weiss's vast and strange novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, my principal impression so far is of how loose and episodic the construction of the work appears to be. The forbidding slabs of text and the absence of paragraph breaks are not alleviated by the way in which memory, reflection, dream and commentary are interchanged within the narrative, so that the reader has to steer through the flow of words as if it were a tide, picking up the interconnected strands of association and taking navigational bearings from the rising blocks of thematic emphasis which dominate the horizon in shifting succession.

So far in Volume Two I've crossed three of these blocks: the first was the long introductory sequence devoted to an analysis of Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), in which the narrator seems to be draw an analogy between the situation of the people on the raft and the oppressed working class of 19th century Europe, but then begins to analyse the scene in terms of a personal shipwreck, a disillusionment and abandonment of hope. This shift is discussed by W.G. Sebald in his essay on Weiss as a "transfer" - I would even go so far as to use the psychoanalytical term "transference", as it does not seem out of place here. The reflections and musings on Géricault’s aesthetic intentions melt almost imperceptibly into a second block of narration centered on the narrator's political exile with Max Hodann in Paris. There are Walter Benjamin-like street scenes of the city during the years immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War, and then gradually we enter a third block, which gives a vivid account of the narrator's mother's political exile in Sweden and her efforts to evade the clutches of the German secret police.

The writing is at times inspired, with a particularly memorable description of Stockholm during a blizzard:

Durch die schwebenden Flocken gingen sie die enge Straße entlang. Ab und zu erschallten Rufe von den Dächern, ein Posten hielt die Fußgänger auf, heruntergeschaufelter Schnee fiel in die Haufen am Gassenrand. Zwischen Schneewällen gingen sie hindurch, auf den Hafenkai zu, im milchigen Gestöber waren Kräne und die Rümpfe einiger großer Schiffe zu erkennen. Weit wird die Aussicht nicht reichen, sagte die Schwester, sie fuhren aber trotzdem im Fahrstuhl hinauf, das Verkehrsrondell an der Schleuse sank zurück, die Querbalken des Eisenturms glitten vorbei, zuerst waren unten noch Straßenbahnen, Automobile, Omnibusse, auf hohem Sockel ein Reiter mit vorgestreckter Hand zu sehn, dan verschoben such im Flimmern nur noch formlose Schatten. (p. 550)

Yet one has the sense that the narrative is constantly being eaten away by Weiss's need to engage in didactic pedagogy, with homilies drawn from contemporary Communist Party texts (mostly Swedish, one gathers) which follow the Soviet line of the time, casting Nazism as a result and product of Western capitalist greed and intrigue, and the Soviet Union as the only hope for the future not only of the working class but of the whole of mankind.

Somehow these political sections, with often stretch for pages, have a curiously desperate ring, and suggest that Weiss himself is not convinced by their content and message. This tension, which was already noticeable in the first volume of the novel, is becoming harder and harder to ignore as I continue to read.