Peter Weiss

Biography

In October 1938 Germany annexed the Sudetenland, and Peter Weiss had nowhere to return to: his parents were living in Warnsdorf, a town in northern Bohemia, and he had not yet finished his second year at the Prague Academy. That same year his parents moved to Sweden; he joined them later.

He was born on 8 November 1916 in Nowawes, near Potsdam, the son of a Hungarian textile merchant, Jenö Weiss, and a Swiss actress, Frieda, née Hummel. After the First World War his father took Czechoslovak citizenship, and the son acquired it with him: Weiss was never a German citizen. When he was three the family moved to Bremen, and in 1929 they went back to Berlin. In the early 1930s he began drawing in the studio of Eugen Spiro, a member of the Berlin Secession; he admired Nolde, Klee and Feininger. His father, who had converted to Christianity in 1920, did not speak in the family about his Jewish origins, and Peter learned of them by chance, from a half-brother.

In 1935 the family left for England, settling in Chislehurst, near London. Weiss studied at the Polytechnic School of Photography and held his first exhibition in a room above a garage. In 1936 the family moved to Warnsdorf. From there he wrote to Hermann Hesse and in the summer of 1937 visited him in Montagnola; the writer encouraged him in his artistic ambitions. In the autumn of that year Weiss entered the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, under the painter Willi Nowak, and in 1938 he was awarded the academy prize for his paintings The Great Theatre of the World and The Garden Concert.

In the winter of 1939 he arrived in Sweden, where he lived for the rest of his life. He worked as a textile designer in his father’s factory in Alingsås and taught at private art schools; at the end of 1940 he moved to Stockholm. His first exhibition there, in March 1941, was a failure: the reviews were harsh, and Weiss fell into a creative crisis. In 1942 he entered the Stockholm art academy, and in 1943 he married a Swedish painter, Helga Henschen. In 1944 he took part in the exhibition Artists in Exile. He received Swedish citizenship on 8 November 1946. His first books, a collection of prose poems, From Island to Island (1947), and The Conquered, were written in Swedish.

From 1952 Weiss taught film theory and practice, as well as the theory of the Bauhaus, at Stockholm’s Högskola (now Stockholm University). He made a series of experimental shorts, the “Studies”, and then socially engaged documentaries: Faces in the Shadow, about the poor of Stockholm, and In the Name of the Law, about a youth prison in Uppsala. His only full-length film, Hägringen (The Mirage), came out in 1959. He published the book Avant-garde Film in 1956. In Stockholm he also decorated the sky bar on the top floor of the Wenner-Gren Center.

To my mind, the turning point came when it became clear that in Sweden almost nothing was working for him. The publisher Suhrkamp, on the recommendation of Walter Höllerer, accepted The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, a “micro-novel” of 1952, and in 1960 it appeared in an edition of a thousand copies, with the author’s own collages. Weiss gave up painting and film and wrote almost exclusively in German. Leavetaking (1961), a book about his childhood, was followed by Vanishing Point (1962), for which he received the Swiss Charles Veillon Prize. In October 1962 he was invited for the first time to a meeting of Gruppe 47, the circle of West German writers and critics who sought to renew German-language literature after the war. On 4 January 1964 he married Gunilla Palmstierna, a stage designer and sculptor.

On 29 April 1964, at the Schiller Theatre in West Berlin, the director Konrad Swinarski staged 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. In 1965 Peter Brook put the play on in London, and in 1967 he made a film of it; in 1966 the American production won a Tony Award. The next play, The Investigation, deals with the Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz staff; on 19 October 1965 it was staged simultaneously in theatres in both parts of Germany and by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. Later came Song of the Lusitanian Bogey (1967), about Angola, Viet Nam Discourse (1968), Trotsky in Exile (1970) and Hölderlin (1971). In 1967 Weiss took part in the Russell Tribunal in Stockholm; in 1968 he joined the Swedish Left Party – Communists and travelled to North Vietnam. Trotsky in Exile met with sharp disapproval from the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and productions of Weiss’s plays in the USSR were banned. In 1974, at the suggestion of Ingmar Bergman, he wrote a stage version of Kafka’s The Trial.

From 1972 Weiss worked on the novel The Aesthetics of Resistance; the volumes appeared in 1975, 1978 and 1981. West German critics received the first volume coldly; after the second and third, the reviews were mostly favourable.

In 1982 Weiss directed his own play The New Trial, after Kafka, at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. On 2 May he declined the honorary doctorates offered by the universities of Rostock and Marburg. He died on 10 May 1982 in Stockholm. A few days earlier he had learned that he was to be awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, which was presented posthumously. His archive has been held since 1986 by the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.