A01=Peter Weiss
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
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antifascism
Author_Peter Weiss
automatic-update
B06=Joel Scott
Berlin
Category1=Fiction
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FB
Category=HBJD
Category=NHD
communism
COP=United States
Delivery_Pre-order
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
German underground
Language_English
modernism
PA=Not yet available
post-Nazi Germany
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Forthcoming
softlaunch
Stockholm
The Red Orchestra
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031185
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 25 Mar 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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.
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.
Peter Weiss (1916–1982) was a German playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and painter. His works include the plays The New Trial, also published by Duke University Press, and Marat/Sade, and the novels The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman and The Conversation of the Three Walkers. He received West Germany’s most important literary award, the Georg BÜchner Prize, posthumously in 1982.
Joel Scott is a translator, editor, and writer. He is the translator of volume II of The Aesthetics of Resistance and the author of several poetry chapbooks, the most recent being Bildverbot and Diary Farm.
Joel Scott is a translator, editor, and writer. He is the translator of volume II of The Aesthetics of Resistance and the author of several poetry chapbooks, the most recent being Bildverbot and Diary Farm.
