by Peter Weiss
PRAISE FOR THE AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE, VOLUME I
“Some of the most gripping—and most beautiful—passages of Weiss’s novel appear in detailed examinations of classic paintings by Delacroix, Goya, Brueghel, Géricault, Munch and others, and their bearing on contemporary struggles.… Weiss’s project has another, deeper aim than advancing the socialist revolution, namely to give voice to fascism’s victims, and to preserve the memory of their lives and example—hence the archival nature of his work, with its painstaking attention to the names of fallen comrades.”—Noah Isenberg, The Nation
“One of the most significant works of postwar German literature.… The novel feels like an endless soliloquy on a bare stage, but one that takes the audience on the most amazingly imaginative time-and-space journey, with the narrative perspective cutting like a movie director’s camera from one intensely rendered visual detail to the next.… [E]xhilaratingly strange, compelling, and original.”—Mark M. Anderson, Bookforum
“This excellent translation of the first volume of this formidable, convoluted masterpiece makes Weiss’s autobiographical novel, one of the major works of literature of the 20th century, available in English for the first time.… Essential.”—R. C. Conard, Choice
“The Aesthetics of Resistance writes those who have been culturally and historically excluded back into the story of their time and demands—as modernism does—that we learn to read in a new way.… The monuments of modernism today rise like Ozymandias’ statue in the sand: Ulysses, Proust, Beckett, Pound’s Cantos, The Making of Americans, The Waste Land. At last, we have an English translation of a work that stands alongside them.”—Robert Buckeye, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“[The Aesthetics of Resistance] gives a rich reward. There are many novels which convey the bitter experience of Europe’s twentieth century, but few which range so widely or reflect so deeply on that history.”—Brian Hanrahan, Open Democracy
“One of the most powerful books of contemporary German literature, this sprawling, spirited work is a novel masquerading as history masquerading as a novel as.… The story, magnificently translated by Joachim Neugroschel, is splendid, experimental, and absolutely gripping.”—The Tempest
“The novel has long enjoyed a prominent place in the German intellectual left. Now that the first volume is finally available from Duke University Press in a superb English translation by Joachim Neugroschel (with a readable and engaging foreword by Fredric Jameson), Weiss’s work can finally emerge into the wider public sphere where it deserves to occupy a prominent space.”—Inez Hedges, Socialism and Democracy
THE AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE
Volume II
PETER WEISS
Translated by Joel Scott • With an afterword by Jürgen Schutte
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 2020
© 2020 Joel Scott, English Translation
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Drew Sisk
Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, appears below:
Weiss, Peter, 1916–1982
[Aesthetik des Widerstands. Volume I. English]
The aesthetics of resistance : volume I / Peter Weiss ; translated by Joachim Neugroschel ; with a foreword by Fredric Jameson and a glossary by Robert Cohen.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8223-3534-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8223-3546-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Neugroschel, Joachim. II. Title.
PT2685.E5A6513 2005
833'.914–dc22 2004028462
Additional information for Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume II, translated by Joel Scott, appears below:
ISBN 978-1-4780-0614-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4780-0699-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4780-0756-2 (ebook)
The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume II, was originally published as Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, Band II, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1978. This translation is based on Suhrkamp Verlag’s New Berlin Edition of Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (which includes all three volumes), edited and with an afterword by Jürgen Schutte (Die Neue Berliner Ausgabe, mit einem editorischen Nachwort von Jürgen Schutte © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2016).
Cover art credit: Great Altar of Zeus, Pergamon: Hekate with Her Molossian Dogs and Artemis Battle the Giants Klytios and Otos(?); detail of east frieze. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, cc0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/aict/x-gas295/gas295.
AN ANONYMOUS DONOR PROVIDED FUNDS TOWARD THE PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK. TRANSLATION OF THIS WORK WAS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM THE GOETHE-INSTITUT, WHICH IS FUNDED BY THE GERMAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
Contents
Translator’s Acknowledgments
The Aesthetics of Resistance, volume II
Afterword to the New Berlin Edition, by Jürgen Schutte
Glossary
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Making this translation truly would not have been possible without the support of a host of individuals and institutions. Some—such as the Goethe Institut, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds, Maison Suger, the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium, and Adam Magyar—provided material support in the way of funding or residencies, in which slices of time could be carved out of my usual schedule of wage labor to focus on this task.
Other individuals have provided support in the process of translation, editing, and reworking. First and foremost among these is Charlotte Thießen, with whom I worked intensively on the entire text. She found countless slips and misreadings, but also pushed me to go back and find something more fitting for sections that I, in my haste and exasperation, wanted to write off as good enough—in other words, to do justice to the strange and unwieldy beauty of this work. She was tolerant when I pestered her mercilessly with questions, often trailing back over old terrain, trying to convince her to see one word and say another when the recalcitrant language of the text rubbed against the grain of my thinking. Tabea Magyar also helped me to resolve many questions about the meaning and tone of the German; and my ability to read and translate this text is in so many ways a result of the love that we’ve lived. Tom Allen likewise read the entire manuscript in an early version and provided considered suggestions. A number of other people read sections and provided commentary, and I would like to thank Sam Langer, Rory Dufficy, and Marty Hiatt. Daniel Reeve provided invaluable help with the translation of German terminology for medieval Swedish social ranks when I was totally at a loss. I would also like to thank Jesper Festin and Ulrika Wallenström, likewise, for tips on Swedish names and details about Stockholm. Thanks to Bill Bird for trying to help resolve a question about the vocabulary of shoemaking. Thanks also to Jenny Willner, who helped to solve a few last-minute queries and who made me wish we’d crossed paths so much sooner. I also owe thanks to Robert Cohen for his detailed scholarship on the work, and finally to Jürgen Schutte, who sadly passed away while this translation was being completed.
Joel Scott
Berlin, January 2019
THE bearded ebony gnome held the lamp above me in his fists. Settees, enormous upholstered armchairs, tables topped with marble or adorned with intarsia were mirrored in the parquet floor, dark paintings hung on the damask-covered walls, maritime scenes, landscapes, in heavy golden frames. The fireplace mantel rose up like an altar, and from beneath the tripartite Gothic window a spi
ral staircase led up to the gallery which, with its balustrade full of chinoiserie, ran around the room, dividing the walls in two. Figures lay asleep on the sofas, hunched up on the fauteuils, threadbare items of clothing were tossed over the backs of the chairs, a naked foot jutted out from under a blanket, a flaccid, bloated hand hung down toward the dusty boots. Once again we were camped in one of those spaces that seemed to have no other purpose than to remind us of the dualism that defined our entire project. But this time we had not come to requisition and repurpose the sumptuous property of some temporarily ousted baron of finance but rather to be harbored by the landlord for the span of a few days, before we would move on, each seeking out his own path. Discharged from the collapsing Spanish Republic and having arrived in Paris in the evening, we had taken up quarters in the library of the Cercles des Nations on Rue Casimir-Périer, in this palace which had been erected during the Second Empire for the Marquis d’Estourmelle, and which under its current owner, the Swedish banker Aschberg, had been made available to the movement for world peace and the Committee for the Foundation of a German Popular Front. Utterly exhausted yet unable to sleep, I had walked over to the shelves and stumbled across a book which I pulled down to read. The sentences on the yellowed pages emanated an extraordinarily calming effect, even though the events portrayed moved with certainty toward catastrophe. It was as if, reading of the bygone events described here, everything that lay torn open within me could be brought to a reconciliation. On the seventeenth of June eighteen sixteen, at seven o’clock in the morning, in good winds, the squadron that had been ordered to Senegal under the command of the frigate captain Mr. de Chaumareys had left the roads of the island of Aix. Four centuries before the departure of the French fleet, Cadamosto, the Venetian, had already sailed up the river in Senegal on behalf of Portugal; the Portuguese had established their trading posts on the coast; they were relieved by the Dutch, who were in turn driven out by the French, who founded the city of Saint-Louis in the delta, making it the center of the slave trade. From this point on, the settlements between Cap Blanc and the Gambia River alternated between French and English rule until the area was left to the French in the Paris treaties of 1815. Having come through the long period of wars, defeated the French, and banished Napoleon to Saint Helena, Great Britain—having received almost all of the colonies they had sought—could afford upon the installation of Louis XVIII to grant France that semi-arid, steppe-covered promontory in the far west of Africa. With access to the natural resources of the south from their base at the Cape of Good Hope and in possession of the fertile banks of the Gambia River and the port of Bathurst, the English furthermore had reserved the right to run the trade in rubber together with the French and to secure it with their own forts and transshipment points. On board the flagship Medusa as it steered through the Bay of Biscay were the governor and other functionaries who were to administer France’s new crown colony, several engineers, land surveyors, and settlers, five doctors and two pharmacists for the hospital, a portion of the officers and navy personnel from the three companies that had been assigned to the garrison—each comprising eighty-four men—four storekeepers, six clerks, two notaries, and thirty-one servants, including eight children. In total, three hundred sixty-five people had been sent to Senegal by the Ministry of the Navy—of which approximately two hundred forty went on the frigate, with the others on the corvette Echo, the barque Loire, and the brig Argus—a figure which seemed paltry considering Europe’s growing stakes in the African continent and the likelihood of further disputes in the partitioning of the conquered areas. The undertaking, in its improvised, careless nature, mirrored the situation in which France found itself: crushed by the burden of war debts which were to be paid to the Bank of England yet at the same time delivered by England and the Allies to apparent stability out of anxiety over the reemergence of revolutionary impulses. The king, after twenty years of exile, had bestowed the executive positions upon his cronies: aristocrats returned from emigration entirely lacking in experience, animated only by the compulsion to reacquire influence and property. These functionaries were concerned not so much with the task of turning a profit for the court as they were with the possibility of lining their pockets, hoping to find the veins of gold on the upper courses of the Senegal River that had once been reported by the Portuguese. The officers also hoped to gain income from their raids in the bush, from the sale of ivory, skins, and pelts, and the members of the battalions could, at any rate, count on the punitive expeditions against the Berber tribes for some diversion. Other than that, everything seemed to remain within the confines of petty administration, was almost idyllic, having neither the stuff of triumph nor tragedy. But the reader who in November eighteen seventeen delved into the recently published book about the shipwreck of the Medusa could see in it how the epoch in which they lived was unfolding out of narrow-mindedness, selfishness, and avarice; he saw an empire with provincial features rising up, he saw the profiteers, and he saw their victims. The suffering of the castaways on the raft of the stranded ship had left him shaken, as it had many others; the account written by the two survivors, Savigny and Corréard, which I read in the contemporaneous German translation on the night of the twentieth of September nineteen thirty-eight and into the twenty-first, introduced him to a wealth of scenes which, after a year of drafting, would result in the constellation that materialized in his great painting. The phases that the painter had gone through in the search for an expression of his indignation became clear to me. Immediately after rounding Cape Finisterre in good weather with a weak northeasterly, an incident occurred that placed the journey under the sign of calamity. Watching the leaping dolphins from the quarterdeck, a scream could be heard; a cabin boy, they said, had fallen overboard and, after having clung to a dangling rope for a few moments, had been carried away in the rapid movement of the ship. With the feel for precision that the authors had already displayed in their listing of the participants of the expedition, and because there was nothing further to report about the victim of the accident, they now described the rescue buoy that had been thrown out. Fastened to a hawser, cobbled together out of pieces of cork, measuring a meter in diameter and bearing a small flagstick, it was able to be sketched by Géricault. Its emptiness, and the emptiness of the water all around, foreshadowed the forsakenness that was soon to come. Madeira, which was reached after ten days, rose up in the reader’s vision like a colored engraving, with the city of Funchal, the cottages embedded in flower gardens and forests of date palms, bitter orange, and lemon trees, the slopes of the vineyards lined with laurel and plantain trees. On the following morning the Selvagens Islands were sighted and, at sundown, Tenerife, a spectacle which immediately roused the authors to depict the majestic form of the Pico del Teide, the crown as if wreathed with fire, whereupon they provided the exact height of the mountain and its latitude and longitude. In their mention of the entrance into the bay of Santa Cruz, passing Fort San Cristóbal, they made sure to reminisce on the victory that a handful of French had scored over a fleet of English there, after the drawn-out battle in which Admiral Nelson lost an arm. The squadron moored in the harbor, boats traveled to the city, as wines and fruits were to be bought, and filters in the form of a mortar, as were produced on the island from the volcanic soil. The observations from this visit inspired the painter to create sketches that revealed his tendency to break an event down into various stages. Just as he had been preoccupied with the betrayal and murder of the revolutionary Fualdès while working on the studies for the painting of the shipwreck, depicting the bestial minutiae of the deed in a series of sheets, he also mused over the chroniclers’ accounts of the unleashing of passions in Santa Cruz. Fualdès was lured into a brothel, stabbed to death on a table, his blood slurped up by pigs, his body tossed into the river. So in this city, which lay in a swale between slaggy, fissured rocks and jungle-like flora from which cedars and dragon’s blood trees shot up, in this city with the squat white houses under the burning sky, a pecu
liar excitement and lasciviousness began to spread upon the announcement of the arrival of the French. The women stepped out from the doors, hurried toward the strangers appearing in the narrow streets, and invited them to come in for a bite to eat and to make a sacrifice to the goddess of Paphos. Often this occurred in the presence of the men, who had no right to rebel against it, for the Holy Inquisition had once wished it to be so, and the numerous monks on the island took care to maintain the custom. The scintillating heat, the women, untying the strings of their bodices, lifting up their blinding white skirts, hemmed with lace, and flicking them back down, edging forward a pointed, polished black shoe; the naked, intertwined bodies on the beds, the old names of the island, playing on inaccessibility, felicity, the Gardens of the Hesperides, yet also reminding of a fatal danger, the threshold between day and eternal night, the emergence of the basalt columns and phonolite blocks of the foothills, the fragrance of the white-flowering broom at the foot of the crater mountain, the pitchy luster of the obsidian veins in the gray, yellow, and rust-red pumice walls, the clumps of tuff, the smoking fissures and vents of the lateral craters, with congealed lava in iridescent, sulfurous hues, the glassy cone on high, all this conjured up visions in Géricault which caused him to perceive the isolation in which he had placed himself. He tore up what he had drawn, but an agonizing restlessness continued to mark every moment to which he gave pictorial form. Back on the open seas, the fleet passed Cape Bojador on the first of July, and at ten o’clock in the morning reached the Tropic of Cancer, where the passengers found amusement in the baptismal custom, the main purpose of which, according to the authors, was actually the tips that were given to the sailors on this occasion. On the second of July, they set out from Cap Barbas on course for the Gulf of Saint Cyprian. The shore was only half a cannon shot away, the coast clearly visible, with its stretches of desert behind the tall cliffs, onto which the sea broke violently. Following the route set out by the Minister of the Navy, the ships navigated between packs of lurking rocks, dismissing the warnings of some of the sailors; the commander of the frigate believed he had sighted Cap Blanc, but it was soon revealed to be a dense patch of cloud. During the night, the corvette Echo burned several charges of gunpowder and hoisted a lantern onto the mizzenmast, but it never once occurred to the officers on watch aboard the Medusa to respond to the signals. At daybreak, the plumb line revealed the continuing reduction of the water level; separated from the remaining vessels, the flagship floated toward the long sandbank off the island of Arguin. Even those least practiced in seafaring noticed the yellowish coloring of the waves. All the additional sails on the port side were hoisted in order to gather as much wind as possible for turning, yet the rudder ran aground. For a moment the ship became buoyant again; then, after another jolt, it became lodged at a point measuring only five meters and sixty centimeters deep—and the tide had just reached its highest level. For days on end the painter must have contemplated the events conveyed to him by the following pages of the book. The distress and desperation, the confusion and the torpor were portrayed so palpably that the reader felt as if he were in the midst of the castaways. He heard the screaming, the thundering of the waves breaking on the hull. The sails were lowered, the crow’s nest taken down, the booms and bowsprit, powder barrels and woodwork thrown into the ocean; in the bilge, the bottoms were beaten out of the water barrels and they began to pump, but the ship could no longer be saved. The twenty-four cannons, the jettisoning of which would have considerably lightened the load, were left on board in the hope of being able to salvage them later. Since the frigate carried only six smaller boats, which couldn’t possibly hold all the passengers and personnel—together more than four hundred people—a raft was hurriedly constructed which, according to the calculations of the governor, was supposed to be able to carry two hundred people. The skies cast over, a storm approached from out at sea, the frigate rolled violently, its bilge burst in the night, the rudder broke off and was left hanging from the stern by nothing but its chain. On the fifth of July, early in the morning, it was decided to immediately clear the wreck, which was threatening to capsize. The soldiers were relegated to the raft, their request to take their muskets and some cartridges denied. They were allowed to retain only their sabers or carbines, while the officers carried shotguns and pistols. The raft—the design sketch of which was reproduced in the book as a copperplate print, and of which the painter would have a model fabricated—was twenty meters long and seven meters wide. Topmasts were fastened to the sides; between them, yards and topgallant masts of the foremast and the main mast were fixed and knotted thick with rigging; on top of these, boards from the decks were nailed at a right angle, broken up by five longer planks which stuck out on the sides by two or three meters; on the bow, two intersecting topgallant yards formed a kind of breastwork; and serving as a handrail—for this is what it was called by those who had the raft built but who had no intention of entrusting their lives to it—was an assortment of all kinds of timber lashed together, barely half a meter tall. At first glance it did seem possible that the two hundred people could fit onto the raft, yet scarcely had some fifty clustered together on it when it began to sink, right up to the railing, and even when the majority of the barrels of food had been jettisoned, after the addition of the remaining castaways they were left standing with water above their waists, pressed so tightly against one another that they couldn’t move. There were one hundred forty-nine of them: one hundred twenty soldiers and twenty-nine sailors and passengers, a single woman among them. They had with them six barrels of wine and two barrels of drinking water. A sack of rusk was thrown to them and some sailcloth, even though there was no mast fixed to the raft, and no rudder either. The castaways did not receive the instruments and maps that the captain had promised them. Mr. de Chaumareys hurried away and boarded the officers’ boat, which, in addition to twelve oarsmen, held forty-two men. The governor and higher functionaries went in the pinnace along with fourteen oarsmen, making thirty-five people in all, as well as significant baggage. The third boat, rowed by twelve men, was occupied by twenty-eight officers. Thirty people crowded onto the oarless shallop and thirty onto the eight-oared barge which had been intended for the port service in Senegal; and lastly, fifteen ended up on the jolly boat. So at least thirty men must have drowned or stayed behind on board the Medusa. The thought of this embarkation, among the roaring and pummeling, while the waves shattered the bulwark and the mast stumps of the overturned frigate, climbing down on rope ladders, on rigging, the cries for help of those who had fallen into the sea, the distorted mouths, the eyes drawn wide with fear, hands straining up and splayed out, the effort of pushing the raft off against the slick side of the ship, the moment when the governor, sitting in an armchair, was winched down into the head boat, such impressions had absorbed the painter before he was overwhelmed by the image of the fully laden raft. It was towed along by the smallest and least seaworthy vessels, and when the oarsmen saw that the boats of the governor and captain were trailing off into the distance, they soon gave up towing and let go of the ropes, themselves battling against the worsening seas. While the flotilla headed for the shore, the raft, unable to be maneuvered, was carried out to sea by the tidal currents. Those gathered together on the raft still did not want to believe they had been abandoned. The coast was visible, as was the island of Arguin with the ruins of the old Portuguese fort; the castaways assumed that the boats would return for them, or that the Echo, Loire, and Argus would spot them. But night fell, and they had still not received help. Powerful swells swept over us. Hurled back and forth, struggling for every breath, hearing the cries of those washed overboard, we longed for the break of day.
