“Front Lines: Peter Weiss’s Literature of Revolt”

This review of the English translation of Weiss’s modernist epic The Aesthetics of Resistance argues for its relevance for organizers thinking about the current crisis. Experimental and dialectical in form, the novel imagines the conversations of actual figures in the German anti-Nazi underground as they try to figure out what to do at each step in the catastrophe. Staging debates about politics, history, consciousness, works of art, and the functions of writing, the characters grapple with understanding each other’s motivation to act in order to orient themselves to move together politically.