Peter Weiss

born Nov. 8, 1916, Nowawes, near Potsdam, Ger.
died May 10, 1982, Stockholm, Swed.

German dramatist and novelist whose plays achieved widespread success in both Europe and the United States in the 1960s.

The son of a textile manufacturer who was Jewish by origin but Christian by conversion, Weiss was brought up a Lutheran. In 1934 he and his family were forced into exile by Nazi persecution. He lived in England, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia before settling, in 1939, in Sweden. He painted and made films (which showed the influence of the Surrealists) and also illustrated a Swedish edition of the Thousand and One Nights. Later he turned to fiction and drama. His early works were in Swedish, but by 1950 he had decided to publish in German. His initial literary influence was the novelist Franz Kafka, whose dreamlike world of subtle menace and frustration impressed Weiss. An important later influence was the American writer Henry Miller.

Weiss’s Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats, dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (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, usually referred to as Marat/Sade) pits the ideals of individualism and of revolution against each other in a setting in which madness and reason seem inseparable. The play was first performed in West Berlin in 1964 and received a celebrated staging in New York City in 1965 by Peter Brook, who filmed it in 1967. Die Ermittlung (1965; The Investigation) is a documentary drama re-creating the Frankfurt trials of the men who carried out mass murders at Auschwitz; at the same time, it attacks later German hypocrisy over the existence of concentration camps and investigates the root causes of aggression. Weiss’s other plays include documentary dramas attacking Portuguese imperialism in Angola, Gesang vom lusitanischen Popanz (1967; The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey); and American policy in the Vietnam War, Viet Nam Diskurs (1968; Discourse on Viet Nam).

Weiss wrote three autobiographical novels: Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers (1960; “The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman”), Abschied von den Eltern (1961; The Leavetaking), and Fluchtpunkt (1962; Exile). He won a number of literary awards, including the Charles Veillon Prize for Fluchtpunkt in 1963 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1982. He was also a member of Gruppe 47, an association of German-speaking writers formed after World War II.