Painting, Writing, and Exile: Peter Weiss in Sweden

Join Frederic Schwartz as he examines the little-known early ventures of major German author Peter Weiss. Although he is celebrated today for his radical plays and monumental novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, which uses the Pergamon Altar as a starting point for its narrative, Weiss began his professional career as a painter, not a writer. Furthermore, he wrote his first literary works in Swedish, the language of the country to which he fled from Germany in 1938 and which remained his home for the rest of his life. In this lecture, Professor Schwartz argues that the Swedish writings provide a new context for Weiss’s later, politically committed German work, and that considering his training as a painter at the Academy of Art in Prague reveals that the visual arts were always fundamental to his conception of both literature and politics.