Dissidence and Resistance

Mitchell Abidor reviews Peter Weiss’s novel “The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III,” newly translated by Joel Scott.

By Mitchell AbidorMarch 26, 2025

• Fiction

FORTY-FOUR YEARS after the 1981 publication of the final installment in the original German, all three volumes of Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–81) are finally available in English translation. (For Duke University Press, Joachim Neugroschel translated the first volume, while Joel Scott handled the second and third.) Given its massive size and the difficulty involved in translating a work as formally complex as this, it is not surprising that it should have taken as long as it has; what is surprising is that we have it at all.

The Aesthetics of Resistance is a novel—and I’ll refer to it in the singular, not the plural, even though it was published in separate volumes—that demands much of its reader. The three volumes recount the activities of a group of characters, all of them leftist workers, as they resist Nazism and fascism in Germany, Spain, France, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. It’s a novel of political engagement and choices. But it is also, as its title indicates, about art and its role in society; about the messages art communicates; and, perhaps most importantly, about how viewers and readers should learn to become active readers of those messages. It is a novel and a philosophical tome, a history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and a rich treatise on art history. It’s not really appropriate or informative to say, “This is a novel about …” Ideas, not plot, are central to it. The Aesthetics of Resistance proves a claim Weiss makes in the first volume: “[T]here was no distinction between social and political materializations and the essence of art.” The Aesthetics of Resistance is an expression of the possibility of a revolutionary aesthetic.

Weiss was born in Germany 1916 but was a longtime resident of Sweden, where he died in 1982. He wrote in German and is best known for authoring one of the most radical plays of the 1960s, 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, commonly referred to as Marat/Sade. In his fiction and his theatrical work, Weiss constantly questioned genre conventions. In his 1965 play The Investigation, the very notion of authorship is put on trial. In that “oratorio,” as Weiss called it, the text of the play’s 11 “cantos” consists of words spoken by victims and perpetrators at the Auschwitz trials of 1963–65, the author reduced to the role of creative editor.

It’s useful to see The Aesthetics of Resistance as the literary equivalent of the films of Jean-Luc Godard. The constant thread throughout Godard’s career was his search for the answer to the question “What is cinema?” He sought to know what it is possible to film and what constitutes filmic language. Similarly, throughout the 1,000 pages of The Aesthetics of Resistance, 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.

For Godard and co-director Jean-Pierre Gorin in Letter to Jane (1972), a detailed analysis of a single image was a fit subject for a film; likewise, Weiss’s characters, young communists who view the understanding of art as part of their political struggle, closely examine Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) to see in the depiction of the survivors of a shipwreck that “the catastrophe that had been singled out had become the symbol of a life condition. Scornfully turning their backs on the conformists, the castaways on the raft represented the stragglers of a vulnerable and hapless generation that, in its youth, had experienced the fall of the Bastille.” History and class struggle are the very substance of art.

The question of what is portrayed in art, and who gets the opportunity to enjoy it and participate in it, is central to Weiss’s purpose. He lays out his foundational thesis in the first volume: “[F]rom Wilhelm Meister to Buddenbrooks the world that set the tone in literature was seen through the eyes of those who owned it.” This was not only the case when it came to literature; the novel’s characters examine classical works of art in order to understand the ways the oppression of the masses has been revealed or hidden by those who created them. Class is, in an aesthetics of resistance, integral to art; so, too, are the often-ignored signs of resistance to class oppression.

Every work the novel’s art-loving characters encounter is described in detail—the gestures, the colors used in the painting, the nature of the figures in the sculptures. The art, though, is read twice: first as the simple object of the spectator’s gaze, and then as an expression of the history from which it grew, the classes it presents, and the struggles it represents, consciously or not. In the battle scene in Angkor Wat, “the hallowed despots had overcome death from the very first, [while] the countless masses, whose fists were clenched around the grips of their swords, the shafts of their lances, stood before death in searing physicality.” Viewing the frieze on the altar at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the art-loving young communists see in the battle between the Giants and the Greek gods how “the sons and daughters of the Earth rise up against the ruling powers who were always trying to rob them of the hard-won fruits of their struggle.” Viewing art does not mean taking a break from resisting fascism; it is an integral part of that struggle. For Weiss, art critics and historians have failed to properly understand this frieze, which occupies an entire museum currently undergoing renovation:

The initiates, the specialists talked about art, praising the harmony of movement, the coordination of gestures; the others, however, who were not even familiar with the concept of “cultured,” stared furtively into the gaping maws [of a lion in the frieze, and] felt the swoop of the paw in their own flesh.

Literature, the creation of which is the artistic goal of the novel’s main character (partially based on Weiss himself), also receives a close and eccentric reading. The Kafka of The Castle (1926) is not a writer of despair. Instead, we are told that “what Kafka had written was a proletarian novel,” a guide to political action that “dealt not with an individual case but with all existence, which contained no hope, yet did contain action.” Kafka’s K., who never gives up pursuing his seemingly pointless task of gaining access to the castle, is in effect an exemplar of Antonio Gramsci’s famous “pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.”

However important becoming a writer is to the book’s anonymous main character, the struggle against fascism and for socialism is what matters most. The communist movement was the most important revolutionary force during this period, and the members of communist parties everywhere were faced with the twists and turns of the Soviet line. This required them to engage in feats of political tergiversation in an effort to stay not only on the right side of the party line but also among the living, for though activism could lead to death at the hands of the fascist authorities, dissent could lead to death at the hands of one’s comrades. The historic case of Willi Münzenberg, a faithful communist propagandist who met his death at Stalin’s hands when he began to doubt the correctness of the Soviet line, hovers over the pages of the novel, the mystery of his death a constant reminder of the dangers of being a communist.

Weiss depicts the neutral Swedes’ willingness to stay on the good side of Germany and how they are more than willing to arrest and deport German dissidents living in their country. But everyone, comrade or foe, is a potential enemy. The German communists who populate the novel live in fear not just of the Nazis but also of their comrades, who are ever eager to sniff out any sign of opposition to the party line: “Behind the struggle against injustice and exploitation was the struggle of the men against each other, and this struggle was carried out with the same intensity as the one against the enemy.” None would consider themselves motivated by ego, though. “All their actions were guided exclusively by the needs of the Party.”

The characters engage in lengthy political disputes, arguing over the positions taken by communist leadership, seeking ways to square the party line with the reality they live daily. As one of the communists says, “a dissident opinion is a criminal opinion.” They argue about the need for a united front with the social democrats and about the legitimacy of the Soviets’ 1939 pact with Nazi Germany. In Spain, as members of the International Brigades that fought alongside Spanish Republicans against Franco and his Italian and German allies, the communists argue over whether revolutionary measures should be carried out before final victory over fascism or if they should be delayed to ensure the support of the middle classes. The Moscow trials and the unlikeliness of the confessions of lifelong revolutionaries are dismissed by some, accepted by others. These historical events are among the central moments in Weiss’s interrogation of the novel form. Matters we are accustomed to reading about in history books are debated at length in the pages of this extraordinary novel.

Almost all the characters of The Aesthetics of Resistance are based on historical figures. These are men and women who resisted the rise of the Nazis in Germany and lost, who fought against fascism in Spain and lost. Some have rebelled against Stalin, and they, too, have lost. In the third volume, they are in the midst of a world war, still resisting by whatever means they can in their Swedish exile or returning clandestinely to Germany and setting up Communist Party cells in factories and neighborhoods, anxious to get into the thick of things despite the enormous risks. Weiss is precise in his description of their actions, careful to provide the actual names of these doomed militants of a battered cause in which they refuse to lose hope. Their heroism is owed at least that.

The best known of the historical characters in the novel is Bertolt Brecht, who briefly lived in Sweden before coming to the United States. While there, the novel’s Brecht plans to write a historical play about clashes among royal families in medieval Scandinavia. He sets his large crew of assistants and admirers to work assembling documentation for its composition. Weiss’s recounting of the plot of the proposed unfinished play is a master class in literature as a production process. We watch amazed as Brecht converts the royals of over 600 years ago into avatars of the class struggle of the present day. Weiss presents Brecht’s famously egocentric character in a simple image: the protagonist, who is part of the research team (and whom Brecht ignores as a nonentity) tells us, “I struggled against the thought that it should be enough of an honor to be allowed to enter into his house, and thought that he might at least have offered us a glass of water.”

As the novel nears its end, we learn that many of the characters we’ve been following were members of the German branch of the resistance group known as the Red Orchestra. This group, some of whom were communists, others anti-Nazi aristocrats and officers occupying high positions in German society, transmitted military information to the Soviets. Here is resistance in its most courageous form. The conduct of the members of this group after their capture was, with few exceptions, heroic. When led to their executions, most confronted death without flinching. The pages describing the fate of these resistance fighters form the climax of the entire novel, the definition of a politics and life of resistance.

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. Resistance is its own justification:

[F]or all their faults […] they had still been stronger than those who had done nothing. […] The enemy, who was busy plotting a new life in the coming peace, was already at work on diminishing, distorting, and deriding everything that could be passed on about them, branding it a trivial side note in the struggle between the great powers. […] They died doing what had to be done.

The Aesthetics of Resistance is a monument to their lives and sacrifices, to the possibilities of art and its role in resisting evil.