Weiss/Sartre: Cold War Stellungnahme and the Poetic–Political Either/Or in Peter Weiss's Final Swedish Novel

Abstract

This essay studies the emergence of the concept of Stellungnahme in the prose of Peter Weiss. The last long-form text Weiss wrote in Swedish, the unpublished 1956 novel Die Situation, represents a serious consideration of the literary theory of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose arguments about the different efficacies of prose and poetry inform much of Weiss's early thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and politics and about his own place in the world of letters and ideas. Connecting Weiss's early encounters with Sartre's critical models to his frequent return to the originary scene of Stellungnahme in his German-language autobiographical writing, this essay recovers Sartrean existentialism's early importance for Peter Weiss's thought, finally reflecting on the persistence of an existentialist vocabulary of situation in Weiss's later, better-known work.