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2. Peter Weiss’s Skeptical Cosmopolitanism
- Wayne State University Press
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2 Peter Weiss’s Skeptical Cosmopolitanism Written in 1961, these sentences capture a crucial moment in Peter Weiss’s literary career, the moment when he became a German-language author. 1 Weiss had, in fact, written in German before, but it was only after the publication of Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers [The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body] in 1960 2 that he gained that public recognition as a “German-language author,” a label to which he refers here, as his use of quotation marks suggests, with some uneasiness. At first glance, the success of Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers ended Weiss’s tenuous existence as a displaced, or more accurately placeless, artist. The son of a Christian mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Protestantism after his marriage, Weiss left Nazi Germany with his family in 1934, stayed for brief periods in England, Czechoslovakia , and Switzerland, and finally arrived in Sweden in 1939. For more than ten years, he vacillated between writing and painting, and between German and Swedish, and finally gave up writing for a period in favor of filmmaking. In the early 1960s, however, he experienced an outburst of literary productivity and a rapid integration into the German cultural scene, promoted by postwar West Germany’s leading literary institution , the Gruppe 47. Yet even when Weiss’s existence as an artist without an audience ceased, his exile did not. While he paid frequent visits 55 Have meanwhile become a “German-language author.” Sit in Stockholm . . . at the drafting table where a few years ago I produced my films and collages. Write in the language which I learned as a child and lost when I was 17. —Peter Weiss CHAPTER 2 56 to Germany and even considered moving back there, he ultimately decided to stay in Stockholm and observe Germany from the distant perspective captured by his image of the watcher through the window. This chapter explores the paradox inherent in Weiss’s entry into the German public sphere, the fact that he claimed a diasporic position at the very moment when he became a recognized exponent of German culture. Weiss’s writings from the early to mid-1960s have thus far been researched mostly under the aspect of his politicization as a Marxist, a focus that was sustained by Weiss’s own representation of his transformation from an idiosyncratic, self-centered surrealist into a politically engaged writer. From this perspective, Weiss’s experimental prose texts of the time appear to be mere relapses into apolitical subjectivism and aestheticism. 3 At the same time, critics who address questions of displacement in Weiss’s work often rely on the opposition between the self-expansive cosmopolitan and the victimized exile. In her analysis of representations of the Third World in postwar German literature, Arlene Teraoka recognizes that Weiss’s interest in colonialism and its aftermath derived from his belated confrontation with the horrors of Auschwitz and interprets his political commitment after 1965 as a reversal of his political passivity during the Second World War. 4 Her conclusion that his political engagement with the victims of colonialism served primarily to mitigate his own sense of guilt recalls contemporary critiques of cosmopolitanism as an endless expansion of the self through projection. In contrast, Alfons Söllner emphasizes in Peter Weiss und die Deutschen Weiss’s own victimization during the Third Reich and reads his early, pre-1953 work as an aesthetically and politically intricate expression of his “exile after exile.” 5 Weiss’s abiding exclusion after 1945 from the cultural sphere of the country that had forced him into exile—Germany—singularly positioned him to lend a voice to the victims of Holocaust. The following chapter aims to go beyond the dichotomy between self-assertive cosmopolitanism and catastrophic exile by showing that both operate in Weiss’s texts in a productive tension that marks his work as diasporic. During his belated integration into the German public sphere, Weiss engages in reflections on exile that are attuned to the diasporic consciousness as defined above, an attempt to render livable and productive an irreparable rupture between the subject and its place of origin. I trace a tension in his work between the development of a cosmopolitan view, which establishes exile as a site of subjective [18.207.98.249] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:40 GMT) PETER WEISS’S SKEPTICAL COSMOPOLITANISM 57 empowerment and critical consciousness, and the instability of this model in view of other...