SOURCE: Stephan, Alexander. “The Civil War as Model: Peter Weiss, Spain, and Die Ästhetik des Widerstands.” In German and International Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War: The Aesthetics of Partisanship, edited by Luis Costa, Richard Critchfield, Richard Golsan, and Wulf Koepke, pp. 477-89. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1992.

In the following essay, Stephan asserts that Weiss's treatment of the Spanish Civil War in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands allows him to explore “the two central themes that have determined his life and writings for years: the possibilities and limits of resistance to violence, and the difficulty in portraying this resistance.”

Much has been written about the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, especially by those authors that the Nazis had driven out of Austria and Germany after 1933. Alfred Kantorowicz, himself a veteran of the war and a writer, reckons the number of titles at more than a thousand.¹ The forms...