Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Subversive Slapstick: The Early Plays Der Turm, Die Versicherung, Nacht mit Gästen, and Mockinpott
- 2 The Choreography of Documents: Die Ermittlung, Gesang vom Lusitanischen Popanz, and Viet Nam Diskurs
- 3 Staging Writers as Outcasts: Marat/Sade, Trotzki im Exil, Hölderlin, Der Prozess, and Der neue Prozess
- 4 Scenarios of Stagnation: Early Prose
- 5 Autobiography and Fiction: Abschied von den Eltern, Fluchtpunkt, and Rekonvaleszenz
- 6 Poetics and Politics: Essays, Open Letters, and Fragments
- 7 Perception as Resistance: Die Ästhetik des Widerstands
- Works Consulted
- Index
5 - Autobiography and Fiction: Abschied von den Eltern, Fluchtpunkt, and Rekonvaleszenz
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Subversive Slapstick: The Early Plays Der Turm, Die Versicherung, Nacht mit Gästen, and Mockinpott
- 2 The Choreography of Documents: Die Ermittlung, Gesang vom Lusitanischen Popanz, and Viet Nam Diskurs
- 3 Staging Writers as Outcasts: Marat/Sade, Trotzki im Exil, Hölderlin, Der Prozess, and Der neue Prozess
- 4 Scenarios of Stagnation: Early Prose
- 5 Autobiography and Fiction: Abschied von den Eltern, Fluchtpunkt, and Rekonvaleszenz
- 6 Poetics and Politics: Essays, Open Letters, and Fragments
- 7 Perception as Resistance: Die Ästhetik des Widerstands
- Works Consulted
- Index
Summary
The German author and literary scholar W. G. Sebald, whose novels explore the work of mourning and remembrance, refers to his reading experience with Weiss's Abschied von den Eltern (1961, Leavetaking) and Fluchtpunkt (1962, Vanishing Point) as the beginning of his own efforts to think through the recent history of German violence. Weiss's notebooks and semiautobiographical novels are permeated by self-critical remarks about the precariousness of turning one's life into a text. Shortly after the subsequent deaths of his mother and father in 1958 and 1959, Weiss wrote two major works of autobiographical fiction. The narrator of Abschied von den Eltern examines his complicated relationship to his parents. At the beginning and at the end of the text, the narrator expresses his intense regret about his prolonged lack of communication with his parents:
Die Trauer, die mich überkam, galt nicht ihnen, denn sie kannte ich kaum, die Trauer galt dem Versäumten, das meine Kindheit und Jugend mit gähnender Leere umgeben hatte. Die Trauer galt der Erkenntnis eines gänzlich mißglückten Versuchs von Zusammenleben, in dem die Mitglieder einer Familie ein paar Jahrzehnte lang beieinander ausgeharrt hatten. Die Trauer galt dem Zuspät […] Aus dieser Zeit würgt sich ein Schrei aus mir heraus, warum haben wir diese Tage und Jahre vertan, lebendige Menschen unterm gleichen Dach, ohne einander ansprechen und hören zu können.
(59; 139)The terrifying childhood experience of hearing his mother calling his name out loud merges with the narrator's fear of and desire for closeness to the maternal body (64–65).
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- An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss , pp. 82 - 98Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003
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