SOURCE: Cohen, Robert. “Early Texts.” In Understanding Peter Weiss, pp. 21-39., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Cohen offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Weiss's early work.

Peter Weiss's early life is defined by everything it lacked: familial warmth, friendship, a home country, a language, success, and a future. It was a life of exile and isolation, in London, Varnsdorf, and Alingsås, where the young painter led his attic-room existence. It was a nearly autistic life, an ivory tower existence. This early experience of barely existing, of being dead to the real world, is the theme of Weiss's earliest work published to date, where it appears turned on its head, as its title implies: “Traktat von der ausgestorbenen Welt” (“Treatise about the Died-Out World”). It was written in 1938-39, during the period when the twenty-two-year-old spent his second summer in the southern...