Weiss in the Cold War

I WAS REFERRED TO THIS PHD THESIS IN OPFERMANN'S ART OF DARKNESS:

Auschwitz in der geteilten Welt: Peter Weiss und ‘Die Ermittlung’ im Kalten Krieg. By Christopher Weiss. (Literatur im historischen Kontext) St Ingbert: Roehrig. 2000. 2 vols. 1380 pp.; 55 ill. 984. ISBN 3–86110–245–5 (pbk).

If any German-language drama of the post-war period warrants over 1300 pages of analysis and documentation, then it is Peter Weiss’s spoken oratorio Die Ermittlung. Inspired by the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65) and premiered on 19 October 1965, in a unique Ringurauffuehrung taking in more than a dozen cities in both Germanies, the play prompted a major political and aesthetic debate: not only had Weiss dared, through the speeches of witnesses and defendants, to put Auschwitz on stage, he also used the play to criticize the Federal Republic. Exploiting much previously unknown archival material, the present study by Christoph Weiss examines both the place of Die Ermittlung in Peter Weiss’s literary oeuvre and the impact of Cold War antagonisms on its reception.

The first, analytical volume begins by surveying Peter Weiss’s literary output in the six years following his West German breakthrough in 1959, attributing its gradual politicization to the traumatic past of the German-Jewish exile and his growing unease with aspects of the Federal Republic. A key text here is the Inferno, the unpublished first part of a planned triptych based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Arguing that the typescript preserved in Weiss’s Nachlass is ‘ein vollstaendiges, ohne Zweifel auffuehrbaresTheaterstueck’ and ‘ein in vieler Hinsicht erstaunliches Kunstwerk’ (p. 56), Weiss identifies stylistic similarities with the enormously successful Marat/Sade (1964) and an anti-capitalism that anticipates Die Ermittlung, originally conceived as a dystopic Paradiso.

Peter Weiss was so productive in 1964–65, and also the subject of such intense media attention, that Christoph Weiss has split his account of this period into several strands, devoting separate sections to the writing of the Inferno, the latter stages of which overlapped with the writer’s attendance at the Frankfurt trial, to the genesis of Die Ermittlung, begun several months before the Inferno was shelved, and to the reception of Marat/Sade, which was an international hit but also the subject of repeated revisions. However, since the issue of concurrence is vital to Weiss’s argument, some form of time-line might usefully have been included.

A second section considers the genesis of Die Ermittlung and points out that practically all the politically contentious elements in the play—including the explicit references to IG Farben, the section on industrial exploitation of prisoners placed in the middle of the ‘Gesang vom Ende der Lili Tofler’, and the repeated mention of Soviet prisoners of war (alongside the total omission of the word Jude)—were added after the typescript had been distributed to theatres, under the influence, it is argued, of the Rostock production of Marat/Sade and of the testimony in Frankfurt of former IG Farben employees. That theatres were initially presented with a play far less tendentious than the final text helps to explain why the idea of a simultaneous premiere was taken up with such alacrity. This section also assesses the impact of the many political statements made by Peter Weiss in 1964–65. Culminating in the ‘10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt’, published in September 1965, these helped to polarize attitudes towards Die Ermittlung.

The third section of Weiss’s study is devoted to the organization and reception of the Ringurauffuehrung. It provides a selective commentary on the 410 articles, all published in the German press in 1965, that are assembled in the second volume. Concerning himself primarily with the politicization of the cultural event, Weiss demonstrates that, whereas most East German papers crowed with officially sanctioned delight both before and after the premiere, in the Federal Republic there was genuine debate, with reviews of Die Ermittlung generally being far less ideologically freighted and prone to unsubstantiated criticism than the previews. Whether so much documentation was necessary is questionable. However, the chronological ordering and inclusion of much that is concerned with Marat/Sade and with its author’s political statements serve to re-entwine the threads which Weiss has teased out in his narrative, while the decision not to abridge material makes it fully available to other scholars who may wish to explore different questions, such as how readily early commentators compared Die Ermittlung with other documentary dramas.

Peter Weiss himself does not come out of this account well. Christoph Weiss not only criticizes last-minute changes to Die Ermittlung but also repeatedly draws attention to the writer’s political naivety. Although one can appreciate that a guilt complex regarding his failure to participate actively in the Second World War perhaps made Weiss feel obliged to speak out against what he saw as dangerous continuities, this reader concurred with his publisher Siegfried Unseld, who advised ‘daß es doch richtiger waere, Du schriebest Deine Arbeiten, und ueberließest das Reden einfach anderen’ (p. 221).

In its meticulous attention to detail this study will provide both a model and a resource for other scholars. Christoph Weiss shows how much can be achieved by thorough archival research, not only presenting an authoritative account of Peter Weiss’s emergence onto the German literary scene but also laying bare the forces that shaped that scene at the height of the Cold War.

University College London Judith Beniston

(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn