Fantasies, Echoes, and Whispers: The Experience of World War I in Peter Weiss's Abschied von den Eltern and Die Ästhetik des Widerstands

Abstract

The author argues for the previously unexamined significance of World War I in Weiss's oeuvre and for Weiss's unique position in this highly influential literary tradition of imagining war through the figure of an uncommunicative witness to catastrophe. The story of the soldier returning silently from the trenches, unable to communicate the new horror of modern mass warfare, has become a myth of origin of the twentieth century. Weiss's Abschied von den Eltern formulates the second-generation desire to locate its origin in the violence of World War I. By replacing the uncommunicative father of his youth with the heroic figure of the wounded soldier, the narrator constructs not only his own origin amidst historical catastrophe but follows his quest for an originary moment of narration. Weiss's concept of narration as it emerges in the third volume of Die Ästhetik des Widerstands concedes the limits of accessing direct experience of catastrophic history without renouncing the project of narrating history as if it were tied to such experiences.