Biography of Weiss with brief production history

A Short Biography of Peter Weiss
With special focus on the writing, revision, and early productions of Marat/Sade
Prepared by Joanna Maselli

Familial Life

Peter Weiss was born in a small town outside of Berlin on November 8, 1916. He lived in Berlin until he was 18, when his family went into a self-imposed exile (which took them first to England, then to Czechoslovakia, and finally to Sweden by 1938) due to the threat posed to all Jewish Europeans when the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933. Notions of exile, imprisonment, and alienation from society, likely derived from Weiss’s experience of life as an “exile,” were to eventually become prominent themes in Weiss’s work.

Early Artistic Exploration and Development

Weiss began his artistic career with some experimentation in painting when he was 16, and soon took up writing. In 1938 he moved to Switzerland for a short period of time, where he made important connections with other writers and artists, and he continued to write steadily. Weiss was forced to move back in with his parents in Sweden in 1939 in order to work and help support his family and their business (his father owned a textile factory) and went on to brief stints in other labour jobs, including farming and lumberjack work. In 1944, Weiss left home for a final time to live in Stockholm, where he was able to focus on his artistic pursuits. He held several exhibitions of his paintings, published his first book (a collection of “prose poetry”) and then landed a job as a newspaper correspondent in 1947, which gave him the oppourtunity to return to Berlin for the first time since his family’s exile. Many biographers and critics suggest that this visit to Berlin prompted Weiss to come to terms with the outside world, instead of fleeing into his own imagination through his art work. In 1948 Weiss wrote his first dramatic piece, a semi-autobiographical radio play about a young boy trapped in isolation his whole life; upon escape from his prison, the boy struggles to cope with the strange, new outside world. In 1952, Weiss began to experiment with avante-garde film while he continued to write several novels. By 1962, Weiss decided that he would be able to blend his interests in visual arts, film, and writing into playwrighting and theatre production. He became a member of a West German writers’ group, Gruppe 47, and began to study the theory and work of Swedish playwright August Strindberg. In the same year, Weiss also began to work on three different plays, including Marat/Sade.

Coming to Terms with the Outside World: The Writing, Revising, and Early Productions of Marat/Sade

Most of Weiss’s work up until Marat/Sade can be characterized as autobiographical, introspective, or generally detached from any concern with themes or subject matter beyond the immediate, interpersonal relationships of individuals. Marat/Sade is in some ways very different than Weiss’s earlier works, but does share the introspective qualities of these pieces (the Marquis de Sade’s debates with Marat are really debates with himself, since Marat is a fictional character created out of de Sade’s imagination), though these qualities are slightly masked by the “play-within-a-play” structure (as we are watching de Sade’s play, we often forget that Marat and the other characters are not real, but are part of de Sade’s imagination). The metatheatrical
elements of the play also suggest that the relationship between de Sade and Marat (between the playwright and his creation) may reflect the relationship between Weiss and de Sade.

Many of Weiss’s biographers and critics have noted that after Weiss’s visit to Berlin in 1948, he became more aware of the political, social, cultural, and historical environment of which he was a part. Prior to this, Weiss was, in many ways, in a state of self-exile from the outside world; he was not concerned with it, or at least showed evidence of the desire to shut it out, and with good reason. His family spent the wartime years and the years leading up to it fleeing from the Nazi’s far-reaching genocide, and Weiss seems to have spent these years attempting to distract himself from the horrors that were going on around him, and which at any point could come knocking at his door. After 1948, Weiss’s new and growing awareness of the outside world caused him to reflect on his relationship to that world. Weiss began to question what role he played in society, and what role he, as an artist, a writer, and an intellectual, should play. Here we find the seeds of de Sade’s debates with Marat. Marat argues that in times of social crisis, especially when a society is seeking radical change (as was the situation during both the French Revolution and WWII), certain individuals (particularly writers and intellectuals) should attempt to influence positive change in their society. De Sade, on the other hand, believes that the individual can only be responsible for his- or herself, and he questions whether or not it is even possible for a person to change his or her environment. Marat and de Sade’s arguments, though they are based on the specific situation of the French Revolution, almost echo the debates heard before, during, and after WWII. It is possible that Weiss wrote Marat/Sade as a delayed response to WWII, and to the complex debates which were still occurring in the 1960s about the actions and attitudes taken in that war, and about how individuals should react to social crises of the present and future. By addressing these debates and having them played out by his characters onstage, Weiss is not only addressing the inner debate he likely had within himself, but also the debates which were going on in his society at the time.

Weiss was also torn when it came to creating a final version of his play. He continued to revise Marat/Sade until his death, but there are three early versions of the play, all created between 1964-65, which are the most notable and most talked about — they are also the only three versions known to be performed and reproduced. The first version is the one which premiered in West Berlin in 1964. Weiss finished the first version of Marat/Sade while it was in still in rehearsal, with most of the changes being made to his stage directions in order to best-suit the direction of this first production (during the rehearsal of this production, Weiss continually revised the stage directions, technically creating many other un-produced versions of the play). The second version is the English version which Weiss created for (and to some degree, with) Peter Brook, who directed the London premier of the play and also made a film version of the play, in collaboration with Weiss. The main changes made during this revision process were again to the stage directions, which were changed in collaboration with Brook, and the music, which was written by a different composer. The third version of the script was created for the play’s premier in East Berlin (in the German Democratic Republic), and this revision included yet more changes to stage direction, as well as cuts to many of de Sade’s lines. Weiss was not directly involved in most of these revisions, which were made by the director in order to create a play which was more in-line with socialist values, beliefs, and politics, but he praised this production and adopted the changes which were made into a third version of Marat/Sade. The main difference between this third version and those produced for Western European audiences is that it posited Marat as the hero of the play and de Sade as the antagonist, whereas the Western European productions tended towards neutrality or towards favouring de Sade as the intellectual “victor” of the play. Weiss’s choice to favour the socialist reading of his play (despite the fact that this reading is not really supported by evidence from the original version) signals a change in his political viewpoints which results in a change in the direction of his career, specifically in terms of the subject matter which he studies and writes about.

Taking Sides

In 1964, just before Marat/Sade premiered in West Berlin, Weiss went to Frankfurt to see the war crimes trials, and visits Auschwitz. Weiss’s trip to Frankfurt and Auschwitz prompted a change in the subject-matter of his literature (a change which seems to have begun taking place when he wrote Marat/Sade -- or at least the reflection and inner-struggle that bore this change began with and is reflected by Marat/Sade) from personal or introspective themes to politically concerned themes and messages. Weiss’s career took a permanent turn in this direction with his play The Investigation, written about the Auschwitz trials. Weiss soon became particularly concerned with the oppression of the poor, especially in third-world countries experiencing political strife, and most of his later work is centered around this subject. Weiss continued to write plays, novels, and criticism, and even went back to revise a number of his earlier works (including Marat/Sade, though these revisions were never published or performed) until his death in 1982.


Bibliography

Berwald, Olaf. An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss. Rochester: Camden House, 2003.

Blomster, Wesley V., and Leon J. Gilbert. "Textual Revision in Peter Weiss's Marat." Symposium 25 (1971): 5-26.
Cohen, Robert. Understanding Peter Weiss. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993.

Ellis, Roger. Peter Weiss in Exile. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1987.

Fleissner, E. M. "Revolution as Theatre: Danton's Death and Marat." Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 7 (1966): 543-56.

Kirshner, Sumner. "Marat Or Sade? Peter Weiss and His Play in London and Rostock." To Find Something New: Studies in Contemporary Literature. Ed. Henry Grosshans. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1969. 90-101.

Roberts, David. "Peter Weiss, Marat." Komos: A Quarterly of Drama and Arts of the Theatre 2 (1969): 1-8.

Sontag, Susan. "Marat/Sade." Partisan Review 32 (1965): 210-9.
Weiss, Samuel A. "Peter Weiss's Marat." Drama Survey 5 (1966): 123-30.