Peter Weiss

The painter, graphic artist, writer and filmmaker Peter Weiss was born on November 8, 1916 in Nowawes near Berlin. After a childhood and youth spent in Bremen and Berlin, his father’s Jewish background became significant starting in 1933, which resulted in the family immigrating, first to London and then in 1936 to Warnsdorf (Czechoslavakia). Already at this time Peter Weiss was writing and painting. Starting in 1937 he studied painting at the Prague Art Academy, and from there the family made their third move to Sweden in 1939. After the end of the war Weiss wrote his first reportages, prose poems, and dramas in Sweden, where he survived primarily doing various odd jobs. At the end of the fifties he began to write in German, “The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman” (1952) is Weiss’s first book published in Germany, in 1960. He also developed his film work during the fifties, creating several surrealist and documentary films. Topics from his artistic work, which is often marked by autobiography, are the experiences of life in exile, violence, struggle, and family, all of which attracted little attention among the literary public. From 1964 to the beginning of the 1907s Weiss wrote a variety of dramas such as “Marat/Sade” (1962 – 65), "The Investigation" (1965) or "Vietnam Discourse" (1966-68), which created a new social explosiveness in the contemporary theatre and which in part led to controversial conflicts about past politics in Germany. It is through these works that he ultimately gained worldwide familiarity and recognition. Starting in 1971 Peter Weiss was working on the three-volume novel “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, now considered his main work, and which was published between 1975 and 1981. The last volume was accompanied by the “Notebooks 1971-1980”. Peter Weiss died on May 10, 1982 in Stockholm. He was posthumously awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1982.