The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III

A Novel

Peter Weiss author Joel Scott translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Publishing:28th Jan '25

£22.99

This title is due to be published on 28th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in another edition too:

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III cover

A major literary event, the publication of the final volume of Peter Weiss’s three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. Weiss’s crowning achievement, The Aesthetics of Resistance spans the period from the late 1930s to the end of World War II, dramatizing antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe.

Volume III, initially published in 1981, teems with characters, many of whom are based on historical figures. It commences in May of 1940, as the narrator’s parents flee Nazi forces in Eastern Europe and reunite with their son in Sweden. While in Stockholm, the narrator and other Communist activists living in exile struggle to build structures in the German underground. The story then follows Communist resistance fighter Charlotte Bischoff, as she is smuggled to Bremen on a freighter. In Berlin, she contacts the narrator’s friends and joins the Red Orchestra resistance group. Soon, the Gestapo cracks the underground workers’ code, arrests a number of its members, and takes them to Plötzensee Prison, where most of them are executed. Featuring the narrator’s meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature throughout, The Aesthetics of Resistance demonstrates the affinity between political resistance and art. Ultimately, Weiss argues that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding.

“One of the most significant works of postwar German literature. . . . Exhilaratingly strange, compelling, and original. Readers who dare to enter this demanding verbal landscape will not come away empty-handed.” -- Mark M. Anderson, * Bookforum *
“For the right reader, The Aesthetics of Resistance offers unique rewards. . . . The book is a search for the ideal named in its title: an art that equals the masterpieces of the past in complexity and power, while standing up against the unjust order that created those masterpieces.”— -- Adam Kirsch, * New York Review of Books *
“[The Aesthetics of Resistance,] which [Peter Weiss] began when he was well over fifty, making a pilgrimage over the arid slopes of cultural and contemporary history in the company of pavor nocturnus, the terror of the night, and laden with a monstrous weight of ideological ballast, is a magnum opus which sees itself . . . not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.” -- W. G. Sebald

ISBN: 9781478031185

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 445g

296 pages

Translated from the German