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Peter Weiss

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Born: November 07 1916

Died: 0909 05 19821982

Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his play Marat/Sade and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Weiss' first art exhibition took place in 1936. His first produced play was Der Turm in 1950. In 1952 he joined the Swedish Experimental Film Studio, where he made films for several years. During this period, he also taught painting at Stockholm's People's University, and illustrated a Swedish edition of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Until the early 1960s, Weiss also wrote prose. His work consists of short and intense novels with Kafkaesque details and feelings, often with autobiographical background. One of the most known films made by Peter Weiss is an experimental one, The Mirage and the second one - it is very seldom mentioned - is a film Weiss directed in Paris 1960 together with Barbro Boman, titled Play Girls or The Flamboyant Sex . Among the short films by Weiss, The Studio of Doctor Faust shows the extremely strong link of Weiss to a German cultural background.

Weiss' best-known work is the play Marat/Sade , first performed in West Berlin in 1964, which brought him widespread international attention. The following year, legendary director Peter Brook staged a famous production in New York City. It studies the power in society through two extreme and extremely different historical persons, Jean-Paul Marat, a brutal hero of the French Revolution, and the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism was named. In Marat/Sade, Weiss uses a technique which, to quote from the play itself, speaks of the play within a play within itself: "Our play's chief aim has been to take to bits great propositions and their opposites, see how they work, and let them fight it out." The play is considered a classic, and is still performed, although less regularly.

Weiss was honored with 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 De Nios Prize, 1982; the Swedish Theatre Critics Prize, 1982; and the Georg Büchner Prize, 1982.

A translation of Weiss' L'instruction was performed at London's Young Vic theater by a Rwandan company in November 2007. The production presented a dramatic contrast between the play's view on the Holocaust and the Rwandan actors' own experience with their nation's genocide.

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Peter Weiss

Peter Weiss

Books from Peter Weiss

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

The Investigation

Die Ermittlung

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1

Marat-Sade/The Investigation/The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman

Die Ästhetik des Widerstands

Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers

Kindheit des Zauberers: Ein autobiographisches Märchen

Hölderlin: A Play in Two Acts

Trotsky In Exile

Everything Christmas Book 2nd

ماراصاد و أنشودة غول لوزيتانيا

Abschied von den Eltern

The New Trial

Granta 6: A Literature for Politics

كيف يتخلص السيد موكينبوت من متاعبه

Congedo dai genitori e Punto di fuga

Spectaculum 79: Vier moderne Theaterstücke: Kommt ein Mann zur Welt / Ehrensache / Der Gott des Gemetzels / Inferno

Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. Materialien

La conversación de los tres caminantes