Peter Weiss, in full Peter Ulrich Weiss, was a German dramatist and novelist whose plays achieved widespread success in both Europe and the United States in the 1960s.
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 also as a politically engaged dramatist.
Background
Ethnicity:
He was born in the family of Hungarian Jewish father and Christian mother
The son of a textile manufacturer who was Jewish by origin but Christian by conversion, Weiss was brought up a Lutheran. His family was prosperous, educated, and middle-class; his father had been in the military, and his mother had given up her acting career in order to marry Peter's father and raise a family. In 1934 he and his family were forced into exile by Nazi persecution. He lived in England, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia before settling, in 1939, in Sweden.
Education
During his adolescence in Berlin Weiss began training for a career as a visual artist.
Career
Here Peter Weiss made films for several years.
Politics
He was politically active as a member of the Left Party, and in 1967 participated in Bertrand Russell's tribunal against the Vietnam War in Stockholm.
Views
Having himself suffered deep conflict with his father and his upper-middle-class background, Weiss assumes in this work the identity of a working-class figure, in whose guise he follows events and stages in his own life, which forms the basis of an amply documented investigation into the failure of the anti-fascist resistance. The title draws attention to the responsibility of art towards the cause of resistance