50 Jahre “Die Ästhetik des Widerstands”

Literary talk with Birgit Müller-Wieland and Ingo Schulze
Moderation: Arnd Beise and Michael Hofmann

“How can we still write novels when such atrocities are arising all around us?”

50 years ago, in fall of 1975, Peter Weiss (1916–1982) published the first volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance. After first being ambivalently received by critics, it soon became apparent that this literary project between historiography and invigorating fiction is a work of the century. As Wolfgang Koeppen put it, the novel was “one of the most exciting, courageous, and sad books” of its time.

In The Aesthetics of Resistance, Weiss interweaves the history of the resistance against oppression with the question for the role of art and literature for the consciousness of those resisting—as exemplarily represented by the history of those who fought against fascism between 1937 and 1945.

For many contemporary writers, reading these three volumes was a truly unique experience. The Internationale Peter Weiss-Gesellschaft (IPWG) invites you to a talk on the importance of Peter Weiss’s monumental project for contemporary writers’ own literary development. IPWG’s Arnd Beise and Michael Hofmann talk to Austrian writer Birgit Müller-Wieland and Berlin-based author Ingo Schulze. They were both 19 when Peter Weiss completed his “Aesthetics of Resistance.”

“Hope would endure. The utopia would be necessary.”

Birgit Müller-Wieland is an Austrian writer living in Munich. In 1989, she received her doctorate for her dissertation Spurensuche weiblich. Über Sprache, Mythos und Erinnerungsvermögen in der »Ästhetik des Widerstands« von Peter Weiss. [Search for Traces Female. On Language, Myth, and Memory in Peter Weiss’s “Aesthetics of Resistance”]. In addition to contributions to literary magazines and anthologies, she has published seven books (prose, poetry, novel, story collections), audio plays, as well as libretti.

Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden. Today, the author lives in Berlin. His Simple Storys (1998), a “novel from the East German province,” made him internationally famous. In 2006, he received the Peter Weiss Prize. His novel Peter Holtz – Sein glückliches Leben erzählt von ihm selbst [Peter Holtz – His Own Account of a Happy Life] (2017) was nominated for the German Book Prize. Since 2023, he is the president of the German Academy for Language and Literature, Darmstadt.

 

Fig. above: © Dirk Naguschewski