Resistance is Not Futile

The third volume of Peter Weiss’s masterwork The Aesthetics of Resistance opens with the narrator describing the murder of dozens of innocents by Nazi troops. In actuality, he is watching his mother lost in a hallucinatory vision brought on by the madness she and her husband have witnessed in their forced exile from their home in Bohemia. It is not until near the novel’s end that we discover that not only did she witness such executions—soldiers lining up civilians in front of a ditch then shooting them from behind so they fall face first into their mass grave—but that she fell into such a pit alive, wrestling with the dying humans to get out after the shooting ended. It was this moment that her mind broke and began to withdraw from the deranged reality of the Nazi frenzy of murder and annihilation. It is her encroaching insanity that serves as metaphor for the descent into madness taking place across Europe in the novel.

This trilogy was first published in German from 1975 to 1981. The English translation of the first volume appeared in 2005, the second volume in 2020 and this volume was just published. The narrative spans the years of Nazism’s rise up through its end. It takes place across Europe, from the anti-fascist war in Spain to the streets of Paris and to Sweden and Berlin. The story involves leftist resisters, Communist, anarchist and otherwise; fascists, liberals, artists, writers, workers, students and journalists. It takes place mostly in a place without a geographic location—the antifascist resistance—and it describes a commitment to the better side of humanity in a deadly struggle against the worst humankind has produced.

The characters come from real life and include young and old, male and female. Some are workers organizing antifascist cells at their workplaces and others are couriers of messages from spies inside the Nazi Wehrmacht carrying battle plans and codes between communist organizers and journalists, political prisoners and their families. The novel describes and celebrates a resistance movement working underground across borders, classes and genders. It’s a movement constantly under attack, being watched and occasionally at odds with itself over political philosophies and strategic approaches. Reading it in 2025 one cannot help but imagine elements of what Weiss describes so resolutely as being part of the impending future.

Any literary work of such scope defies summation. Instead let me mention two passages which define and underscore the text, its sublime nature, its focus and its finesse. The first involves the journey of the communist soldier Stahlmann on his assignment to China as a military advisor to the revolutionary army led by Mao ZeDong. As part of his journey Stahlmann visits the ancient temples of Cambodia’s Angkor. The descriptions of the journey and especially of the temple compound itself reveal a verdant lush jungle and its tropical heat, the poverty, the mosquito swarms, and the aura of spiritual peace for which the site was most likely chosen by the ancients millennia ago. The taste of the food offered to the soldier and his entourage bites the tongue as the majesty of the vine-covered structures appears as if before the reader’s eyes.

In the other passage chosen to represent the novel, it is the bureaucratic brutality of a day of executions that is described. Several members of the underground cell comprising many of the characters in Weiss’s tale have been caught, tortured, starved and brutalized by the Reich’s agents. Their day of death has come. Small acts of heroism in the victims’ final hours are shaded by the emotions of the priest whose attempts at solace are ultimately meaningless. This scene of despair and state murder is the banal efficiency of the Nazi regime defined. Indeed, it is the modern regime defined. It’s personification is found in a forlorn priest consumed and overwhelmed by his complicity and guilt but unable to act and an executioner counting on the extra money he’ll make to help pay for his Christmas celebration. Money and guilt, inaction in the face of brutal power and the banality of evil. There truly is no respite here. Even the narrator’s brief consideration of Europe after the Nazi defeat is not a hopeful one. “The things we thought we had overcome,” writes the narrator. “would terrify us once more.”(263)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of novels about World War Two. They are written by citizens of the victorious countries and by those who were defeated. Some have stood the test of time while others are long forgotten. Having not read them all, I do not dare to rank these works. However, after finishing up the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance, I am secure in writing that it is certainly one of the best. As I read the text, I couldn’t stop thinking of Thomas Pynchon’s novel set in World War Two, Gravity’s Rainbow. These novels’ similarity goes beyond their size and scope. Both texts are a complex matrix of individuals, human structures, and their tales. Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is a rambling yet coherent novel centered on a relatively small group of individuals whose work involves stopping the German V-rocket attacks. Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance is a rambling yet quite coherent novel about a relatively small group of individuals devoted to fighting fascism in the underground in the hope hope of creating a socialist future. Where Pynchon creates a chaos that is simultaneously seductive, cruel and illusory, the devolution Weiss describes is despondent yet disturbingly honest. The former’s narrative is anchored to an understanding that demands an almost apathetic acceptance of the terror, while Weiss’s narrative fights that terror almost until his story ends when the agents of that terror execute a dozen resisters in a day. Only then does a truth hit the narrator and, one assumes, Weiss himself: the same people who profited from the war, the same ones who sent men to kill and die, will be the ones determined to do the same thing all over again. Yet, even with this realization, he remains determined to see a future where the people, not the powerful, determine their destiny. We should be so courageous.

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