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Peter Weiss and the Politics of ‘Marat-Sade’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

John R. P. Mckenzie
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Abstract

Peter Weiss, who died in 1982, achieved international recognition as a playwright relatively late in his life – at the age of almost fifty when, in 1964, the Marat-Sade received its premiere in West Germany and in London. Although these productions were followed by a Marxist interpretation in East Germany in the following year, it was Peter. Brook's version for the RSC, later filmed, which shaped most English-speaking theatregoers' perceptions of the play, as a culmination of Brook's exploration of ‘theatre of cruelty’. So what is the philosophy of the Marat-Sade? In this article, John McKenzie, who teaches in the Department of German at the University of Exeter, returns to the statements made by Weiss himself – which, though numerous, were mostly in ephemeral or untranslated sources – and traces the feelings of the playwright as these evolved from the political neutrality of what he called the ‘third standpoint’ to the overtly Marxist position of Weiss's later life.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , August 1985 , pp. 301 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

Notes and References

1. Discussion in English of aspects of the play's political theme has appeared in the following: Hilton, Ian, Peter Weiss: a Search for Affinities, Modern German Authors, Texts and Contexts, III, ed. by Last, R. W. (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Parham, Sidney F., ‘Marat-Sade: the Politics of Experience or the Experience of Politics’, Modern Drama, XX (1977), p. 235–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, John J., ‘History and Cruelty in Peter Weiss's Marat-Sade’, Modern Language Review, LXIII (1968), p. 437–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Sontag, Susan, ‘Marat/Sade/Artaud’, Partisan Review, XXXII (1965), p. 219.Google Scholar

3. Sontag, op. cit., p. 216. The function of cruelty in Marat-Sade and Weiss's debt to Artaud are convincingly and more sensitively treated in White, op. cit.

4. An important exception is Milfull, J., ‘From Kafka to Brecht: Peter Weiss's Development towards Marxism’, German Life and Letters, XX (1966–1967), p. 61–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which discusses both the Alvarez interview and the Arbeitspunkte.

5. Whether the contemporaneity should be applied with mathematical precision is doubtful. Weiss's statement surely refers to the twentieth century in general and not specifically to the development of the Federal Republic, pace Sidney F. Parham, who writers: ‘there are fifteen years between the murder of Marat and the presentation of Sade's play. The same number of years separate the audience (in 1964) from the founding of the Bundesrepublik.… Weiss seems to suggest that the defeat of Hitler was an event similar to the French Revolution in that both were opportunities to create a new order of society and that both succumbed to the forces of counter-revolution in the bourgeoisie’ (p. 236). Parham supports his argument with a quotation from one of Sade's speeches in which the phrase appears ‘before applying the final solution’ (Marat, 32). This is an inaccurate translation of the German text ‘ehe wir zur letzten Behandlung schritten’ (Marat-Sade, 36). While this formulation indeed suggests Nazi terminology for the extermination of the Jews, it does not refer specifically to the Endlösung. In any case, the modern parallel to the Napoleonic betrayal of the French Revolution must surely be sought in the destruction of the Weimar Republic by the Nazis in 1933, in the fifteenth year of its existence. The establishment of the Federal Republic can surely not be seen as a revolutionary act; on the contrary, it was imposed on the West Germans by the western allies in response to Soviet unwillingness to hold elections in all four zones of occupation. White offers a similar parallel, and argues the case far more convincingly, in ‘History and Cruelty’, p. 439–40.

6. But see also Manfred Jäger, ‘Eine Entladung der Gesellschaft’, Peter Weiss, Text + Kritik, 37 (Aachen, 1973), p. 23–40, in which, quoting from this interview, he concludes that Girnus, unwilling to allow Weiss to continue discussing the question of the play's acceptability in the GDR, quickly turned to a different topic (p. 34).

7. See Mayer, Hans, ‘Berlinische Dramaturgie von Hauptmann bis Peter Weiss’, Theater Heute, XII (1965), 1 ff.Google Scholar