IN A LETTER TO THE EDITORIAL STAFF of Theater heute in 1965, Peter Weiss expresses his discontent with the formalistic, politically evasive tendencies pervading postwar German literature, arguing that the time has come for a type of literature which directly confronts the problems of social reality. Only a year earlier, with the appearance of Marat/Sade, Weiss himself was not yet quite so realistic in his own mode of literary creation; in this play the logicality of historical conflict is dramatized within an absurd, "formalistic" medium, implying that ideological debate and method of presentation were still in need of reconciliation. Weiss soon attained the appropriate medium for presenting social conflict when, a year later, he clarified once and for all the issue of individualism contra collectivism that had gone unresolved in the play: "Between the two choices offered me today, I see the possibility of settling existing world misunderstandings only in the socialist order." The revolutionary doctrine espoused by Marat now becomes artistically programmatic for the author; as a politically engaged playwright embarking upon a new realism Weiss turns to documentary drama for portraying "dialectic confrontation [and a] continuous openness to change and ... development."