Peter Weiss

Peter Ulrich Weiss (8 November 1916 – 10 May 1982) was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his plays Marat/Sade and The Investigation and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Weiss was born in Nowawes (now part of Potsdam-Babelsberg), Brandenburg, to a Hungarian Jewish father and Christian mother. At age three he moved with his family to Bremen, and then during his adolescence to Berlin where Weiss began training for a career as a visual artist. In 1934 he emigrated with his family to Chislehurst, near London, England, where he studied photography at the Polytechnic School of Photography, and then in 1937-1938 attended the Prague Art Academy. After the German occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, his family moved to Sweden, and Weiss himself removed to Switzerland. In 1939 he again emigrated to Stockholm, Sweden, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became a Swedish citizen in 1946.

Weiss was married three times: to the painter Helga Henschen, 1943; to Carlota Dethorey, 1949; and to the hereditary baroness Gunilla Palmstierna, 1964. He was politically active as a member of the Communist Party of Sweden, and in 1967 participated in Bertrand Russell’s tribunal against the Vietnam War in Stockholm.

In 1970 Weiss suffered a heart attack. During the following decade his writing turned away from plays and focused on his three part novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance. He died in Stockholm in 1982.

Weiss’ first art exhibition took place in 1936. His first produced play was Der Turm in 1950. In 1952 he joined the Swedish Experimental Film Studio, where he made films for several years. During this period, he also taught painting at Stockholm’s People’s University, and illustrated a Swedish edition of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Since the early 1950s, Weiss also wrote prose. His work consists of short and intense novels with Kafkaesque details and feelings, often with autobiographical background. Among the short films by Weiss The Studio of Doctor Faust (1956) shows a persisting link of the emigrant Weiss to a German cultural background. One of the better known films made by Peter Weiss is the experimental production The Mirage (1959). In Paris, Weiss directed another film together with Barbro Boman called Play Girls or The Flamboyant Sex (Schwedische Mädchen in Paris or Verlockung in German) in 1960.

Weiss’ best-known work is the play Marat/Sade (1963), first performed in West Berlin in 1964, which brought him widespread international attention. The following year, the legendary director Peter Brook staged a famous production in London which subsequently transferred to New York City. The play examines the power in society through two extremely different historical persons, Jean-Paul Marat, a brutal hero of the French Revolution, and the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism was named. In Marat/Sade, Weiss uses the technique of presenting a play within a play: “Our play’s chief aim has been to take to bits great propositions and their opposites, see how they work, and let them fight it out.”

In 1965, Weiss wrote the documentary play The Investigation (Die Ermittlung) on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. A translation of Weiss’ The Investigation was performed at London’s Young Vic theater by a Rwandan company in November 2007. The production presented a dramatic contrast between the play’s view on the Holocaust and the Rwandan actors’ own experience with their nation’s genocide.

Between 1971 and 1981 Weiss was working on his three part novel on the European resistance against Nazi Germany, The Aesthetics of Resistance.
Weiss was honored with the Charles Veillon Award, 1963; the Lessing Prize, 1965; the Heinrich Mann Prize, 1966; the Carl Albert Anderson Prize, 1967; the Thomas Dehler Prize, 1978; the Cologne Literature Prize, 1981; the Bremen Literature Prize, 1982; the De Nios Prize, 1982; the Swedish Theatre Critics Prize, 1982; and the Georg Büchner Prize, 1982. —Wikipedia