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.