14 Facts About Peter Weiss

Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, graphic artist, and experimental filmmaker of adopted Swedish nationality.

Peter Weiss earned his reputation in the post-war German literary world as the proponent of an avant-garde, meticulously descriptive writing, as an exponent of autobiographical prose, and as a politically engaged dramatist.

Peter Weiss was born in Nowawes near Berlin, to a Hungarian Jewish father Jeno Weisz from Nagy Emoke, Nyitra County and a Christian mother from Switzerland.

Peter Weiss taught painting at Stockholm's People's University, and illustrated a Swedish edition of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

The Surrealist effect was enhanced by collages in the style of Max Ernst, so-called xylography, which Peter Weiss created for the book.

Peter Weiss abandoned painting and filmmaking and turned exclusively to writing.

Since the early 1950 Peter Weiss had been writing plays: Der Turm, Die Versicherung, Nacht mit Gasten, Wie dem Herrn Mockinpott das Leiden ausgetrieben wird.

Peter Weiss frequently visited East Berlin and became friends with many East German writers and artists.

Peter Weiss developed a collaborative relationship and eventually a close friendship with Manfred Haiduk, professor of literature in Rostock.

Peter Weiss was one of only a handful of western artists and intellectuals whose work attracted wide interest in both Germanies though in both states he was subjected to distrust and denunciations.

Peter Weiss became obsessed with Dante's Divine Comedy the influence of which is present in all his works from the mid-1960s until his death.

In 1965, Peter Weiss wrote the documentary play The Investigation on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials.

Between 1971 and 1981 Peter Weiss worked on his opus magnum: his three part 1000 page novel on the European resistance against Nazi Germany, The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Peter Weiss received numerous awards, among them the Charles Veillon Award, 1963; the Lessing Prize, 1965; the Heinrich Mann Prize, 1966; the Carl Albert Anderson Prize, 1967; the Thomas Dehler Prize, 1978; the Cologne Literature Prize, 1981; the Bremen Literature Prize, 1982; the Swedish Theatre Critics Prize, 1982; and finally the highest German literary award, the Georg Buchner Prize, 1982.