Peter Weiss: Fallen Between Two Stools

Peter Weiss surged into the American consciousness in 1964 with Peter Brook’s production of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade (Marat/Sade). Embodying “Total theatre”, it synthesized the Theatre of Cruelty, Brechtian dialogue, and carnival acts into a single, searing show. The production was a darling of both establishment and anti-establishment alike – creating an off-off Broadway aesthetic and simultaneously winning a Tony. Time magazine called it “a hypodermic needle plunged directly into the playgoer’s bloodstream,” and Robert Brustein lauded it as “a daring invasion of hitherto forbidden dramatic territory.” The film version further disseminated the Weiss-Brook aesthetic, changing the face of avant-garde production in the States and Britain.

Weiss followed this success with a play about the Auschwitz trials, The Investigation, which reached millions of Americans as a television film, won awards across Europe, and, according to philosopher Jürgen Habermas, served as “a central occasion in Germany’s postwar construction of a collective identity that refuses to repress its murderous past.” Germany recognized Weiss as one of the great writers of his generation, and the world concurred. Suddenly, he vanished. Although he continued to write plays until his death in 1982, his presence went largely unnoticed on the world stage.

Today, Weiss has virtually disappeared from the English-speaking theatre. After the first flush of attention, American and British circles quickly lost interest. While Heiner Müller (Hamletmachine) and Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage) enjoyed a rich production history with the world’s great directors, companies shied away from Weiss’s works as the Cold War receded into memory. Only the Guthrie in Minneapolis has staged a major American Marat/Sade in the last decade, and it, like the revival at London’s National Theatre in 1997, drew fire for wanly impersonating the Brook production. Not only Weiss’s theatrical presence has suffered. Weiss was a renaissance man: in addition to his plays he illustrated a volume of poetry for Hermann Hesse and penned autobiographical novels. But when the English-speaking world forgot his plays, it forgot everything. In 2000 a conference at the University of Wisconsin in Madison explored the “abrupt recession of interest” in Weiss’s oeuvre, examining his neglect by the academic and theatrical establishment as a casualty of the Cold War’s end. Jost Hermand concluded that once Weiss was pigeonholed as a “political playwright,” his popularity dwindled when the political landscape shifted. Weiss’s work, however, and Marat/Sade in particular, provides such seductive possibilities for theatrical production that the political climate cannot be called the sole reason for his absence on the American stage. Rather, a paralyzing fear of the Brook production and Weiss’s own slippery political alliances conspired to damn the play.

The play itself is rooted in historical events. In 1808, the Marquis de Sade, imprisoned at Charen ton Hospice for his lewd writings, staged his own plays using his fellow inmates as actors and a curious bourgeoisie as audience. Weiss imagined a new production for Sade’s troupe: a reconstruction of Jean-Paul Marat’s 1793 murder at the hands of Charlotte Corday. Marat, publisher of a polemic newspaper, had championed the radicalization of the French revolution and allied himself with the lower classes against the moderates (Girondists). His calls for the destruction of all the old structures eventually culminated in the beheading of Louis XVI. Inflamed by a Girondist meeting in Caen, the young Corday decided that only Marat’s assassination could avenge the many innocent dead and restore the revolution to its correct path. Marat, confined to a bathtub because of a terrible skin disease, could not stop her. In 1808, the “time” of Weiss’s production, Sade uses Marat’s story to criticize the Napoleonic regime and incites a riot among the lunatics. Simultaneously, Weiss uses Sade and Marat to define his own aesthetics of resistance. Weiss was in the process of resolving his own goals as a writer – would he use his work as a call for socialist action or would he confine himself to an aesthetic revolution? Sade and Marat function as two halves of Weiss’s divided self.

Both Germanies, East and West, individualist and communist, wanted to claim Weiss. Disillusioned with the abuses of communism (he considered himself a Marxist first, a communist second) and contemptuous of the exploitations of capitalism, Weiss never fully served either ideology. Just as his play Discourse on the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Viet Nam and the Events Leading Up to It as Illustration for the Necessity for Armed Resistance against Oppression and on the Attempts of the United States of America to Destroy the Foundations of Revolution savaged capitalists, his Trotsky shocked Leninists. The historical Sade had served on the tribunals of the French Revolution and had grown disgusted with them. Weiss in his program notes likened the libertine Marquis to “the modern advocate of the third approach, [who] fell between two stools.” Weiss found himself in the same position.

Weiss referred to himself as a “perpetual refugee,” an outsider everywhere. Son of a Jewish father, Weiss grew up posing as a young Protestant German. He was excepted from performing the Nazi salute at school assemblies, not because of his Jewish blood, but because of his father’s Czech nationality. He would later look back in horror at how he envied his classmates, how he wished to salute with them, how close he had come to being one of the monsters. His older stepbrother, in fact, wound up as a member of the SS, and his childhood friend Uli (who had introduced him to Brecht’s work), died fighting for the Germans. Much later, two of his close friends at school disappeared into the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Weiss had come perilously close to both fates, murderer and victim. Division and doubt plagued him: when he escaped into a Swedish exile in 1942, he worked as a lumberjack to survive. This contact with the working class seriously tested his socialist allegiance – he found himself hating the proletariat’s brutish herd mentality even as he fought for them. A decade and a half later in Marat/Sade, Weiss would express his frustration with the sheep-like allegiances of this “Fourth Estate.” Weiss fell between the “two stools” of communist idolatry and capitalist dogma, and those who wished to use his plays as propaganda were frustrated by his shifting positions.

Others may have been baffled by Weiss’s loyalties, but with Marat/Sade Weiss’s own ideas were reaching a crisis point. It was his first play, and, as well as using it as a testing ground for political theories, he was placing his identity as an artist on trial. Previously, his novels and poems had been largely autobiographical; Robert Cohen called them “literature as therapy.” Franz Kafka’s cult of self-abasement permeated his work – Weiss flagellated himself whenever an autobiography was not sufficiently confessional. Also influenced by Henry Miller’s graphic sexual revelations, his pieces often raged with a cacophony of gruesome brutality, incest, and fastidious catalogues of masturbatory fantasies. As the fifties drew to a close, however, artistic repression in East Germany and the terrible wars in Angola and Vietnam spurred Weiss to extend his poetics into the documentary style – through which he believed he could more immediately effect social change. Weiss felt a terrible chasm between liberation through self-absorption (as preached by Henry Miller) and liberation through politics (as preached by Brecht). In Marat/Sade the Marquis says “this is a world of bodies,” while a diseased Marat sits, effectively bodiless in his bathtub, trying to save the world. Liberation may have been the common goal, but as personal and aesthetic solutions, the approaches could not co-exist.

In 1964, Weiss saw his options on stage. Body battled mind, capitalism battled communism. When Brook produced his version, the cool, condemning Sade (as played by the mesmerizing Patrick Magee) emerged the “winner” – especially since political action seemed pointless in such a mad world. Watching it, Weiss made up his mind to abandon his even-handed treatment of the argument and turn away from Brook’s interpretation. A subsequent variant of the play strengthened Marat’s arguments for immediate political action. From then on, Weiss’s own work swerved definitively toward the documentary style and socialist involvement. The play remains, however, like Weiss, tantalizingly ambiguous. Brook’s shadow may be long, but there can be no doubt that in a fight as well-matched as this one, no one bout can be judged definitive. This winter, which side will win?

Helen Shaw is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.