The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III

A Novel

Peter Weiss author Joel Scott translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:25th Mar '25

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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 group’s 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 *
“[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
"It is worth noting off the bat just how good these translations are. Each volume consists of roughly thirty-three—the formal echo of Dante is deliberate—prose blocks of an average of around ten pages each. Within these blocks, sentences regularly cover half a page or more, and syntax is twisted to a point that makes even a language as notoriously malleable as German come close to collapse. To have rendered this into a precise, complex, and still-readable English is a massive achievement." -- Tom Allen * e-flux *
"There are dozens, if not hundreds, of novels about World War Two. . . .  Having not read them all, I do not dare to rank these works. However, after finishing up the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance, I am secure in writing that it is certainly one of the best." -- Ron Jacobs * Counterpunch *
"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. . . . 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. . . . The Aesthetics of Resistance is a monument to their lives and sacrifices, to the possibilities of art and its role in resisting evil." -- Mitchell Abidor * Los Angeles Review of Books *

ISBN: 9781478031185

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 408g

296 pages

Translated from the German