Peter Weiss was a writer whose entire life was dominated by feelings of alienation and deepseated insecurity. As a youth he made frequent attempts to escape from the social conventions into which he was born and to free himself from his parents' demands that he prepare himself for a career in business. In early adulthood he retreated more and more from the increasingly hostile world around him until he found--however vulnerable and uncertain it may have been--a sense of identity in artistic expression. This sense helped him to survive the anguish and feeling of helplessness with which he reacted to the Nazi dictatorship. His family's financial resources and his withdrawal into a private search for existential orientation saved him from the horrors of war and of the extermination camps. Yet the place to which he felt most intensely bound all his life was not one of the many...