Peter Weiss and the Exilic Body

Peter Weiss and the Exilic Body

The odds were stacked against surrealism in Germany after May 1945. Immediately after the armistice, obituaries counted it as another avant-garde fatality. Dieter Wyss, for example, insisted in his surrealism primer from 1949/1950 that the 1947 Parisian surrealism retrospective confirmed his suspicions that "surrealism is practically dead, at least in its homeland." "This is not surprising," he continued, "for it anticipated what became horrifically real between the years 1933 to 1945."¹ Whether and when surrealism died remains uncertain. Did it expire in France with its political turn around 1929, the German invasion of Western Europe in 1939, Breton's American exile in 1940, the end of the war and the surrealist revival in Paris in 1945, or Breton's death in 1966? Posed solely within the German context, the question assumes entirely different dimensions. Did surrealism ever establish itself firmly enough in Germany before National Socialism eradicated so-called "degenerate art" such that a postwar appearance could be called a return? Was the negligible interest in surrealism in postwar Germany the result of a second failed attempt to transplant foreign goods onto German soil? Was surrealism, over twenty years old, dead on arrival? In 1956, Theodor Adorno answered the last of these questions in the affirmative: "After the European catastrophe," he insisted, "the Surrealist shocks lost their force."² Adorno's emphasis on the mitigated shocks of surrealism suggested that, in the shadow of Auschwitz, surrealism became unable to trump the dialectic of enlightenment.

Surrealist literature did germinate, however, in war-torn Germany. In poems written in Nazi Germany, Karl Krolow employed surrealist metaphor, which continued well after his first postwar collection, Gedichte from 1948. In September 1947 at the first meeting of what would become West Germany's leading literary salon, Gruppe 47, hostess Ilse Schneider-Lengyel was invited to read "her surrealist poems and with them introduced a peculiar element into the working group."³ Alfred Andersch declared at the group's second meeting that surrealism (among other aesthetic approaches) had already proven capable, albeit with varying degrees of success, of paving the way for a renewed German literature intimately committed to freedom.⁴ One year later, Berlin poet Johannes Hübner took stock of surrealism and concluded that it adequately captured the paradoxes at work in the concept of the beautiful in the atomic age.⁵ In spite of these early attempts to rehabilitate it, the surrealist impulse, unspeakably too "peculiar" for German readers and writers, failed to take root in West Germany.⁶ Some critics even lambasted it as a "curse of morbid decadence."⁷ The solitary pursuit of surrealism in the fifties garnered, unsurprisingly, confusion and even rejection. Paul Celan, Unica Zürn, and Peter Weiss, three now canonized German writers, are exceptional cases among young West Germany's coterie of surrealists. While their work explored markedly different forms and themes, their interest in surrealism developed in response to surviving Germany's hellish past. Neither borne out of nostalgia for the interwar avant-garde nor grounded in an ideology of postwar cultural renewal, their surrealisms grew out of personal experiences of being elsewhere, as an exile, an émigré, or somewhere in between. For all three, the specters of violence from the fascist past not only shaped their individual sense of displacement but also brought them to modify surrealism in order to give voice to the realities of this interminable condition after war and genocide. If, according to Edward Said, literature plays a pivotal role in the exile's quest to "overcome . . . the crippling sorrow of estrangement," surrealism enabled these writers to illuminate the brokenness endemic to the exilic experience.⁸

For the German-Jewish Weiss, the brokenness of exile persisted as a central theme in his work and his personal life well after 1945. Weiss makes clear that the circumstances responsible for his unending sense of estrangement originated in 1938 with his flight from fascism, which landed him in Sweden the following...