In the first paper, “‘Eichmann would've said’: Arno Schmidt’s Aesthetics of False Compliance in Postwar Resistance Debates,” Evers identifies a 1961 West-German debate with contributions by politicians. generals, the supreme court, as well as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, as a turning point in the debate on resistance. Germany’s most experimental and controversial author, Arno Schmidt, commented in his fiction on these attempts to settle the legal, political, military, and moral meaning of resistance in a way that challenges Weiss’ project. Schmidt’s contribution to an aesthetics of resistance, Evers argues, subverted the 1961 debate but also retained the potential to disrupt recent reconsiderations of resistance from Scott’s weapons of the weak to Lüdtke’s concept of Eigensinn to Därmann’s recent expansion of our notion of resistance.

The second paper, “‘Benn, the traitor’: Intertextuality as Resistance in The Aesthetics of Resistance,” delivered by Julia Hell, draws attention to the ways in which forms of intertextuality may operate as resistance. Techniques of intertextuality vary widely from (citational) appropriation of the source text to its expropriation or what Genette called constellation meurtrière. They tend to leave traces of the texts more or less visible. Hell explores the hidden presence of Gottfried Benn’s 1934 essay, “Dorische Welt,” about Sparta, power and art in the ekphrastic passage about the Pergamon Altar that opened The Aesthetics of Resistance. Using Genette’s idea of murderous intertextuality, Hell understands Weiss’s intertextual moves as forms of aesthetic resistance against Benn’s fascist aesthetics.

In the third paper, “Peter Weiss & Hubert Fichte: Resistance, Sensitivity, and Decolonial Performance,” Fischer brings the monumental prose epics of Weiss and Fichte into conversation. Fischer compares the performative poetics in Weiss anti-colonial plays and Fichte’s ethnographic novel fragment The History of Sensitivity as two intersecting paths towards a decolonial aesthetics of resistance. While Weiss remained committed to a Marxist conceptual framework and notions of the “Third World,” Fichte investigates, Fischer argues, the colonial dialectic of the Black Atlantic through a poetic framework of sensitivity, permeability, and queerness that ultimately seeks to decenter European cultural hegemony.

In the final paper, “‘Das Geheul vom Maifeld’: The Sound, Noise, and Silence of Fascism in Weiss and Kluge,” Howes compares Weiss’s approach to narrating fascist sonorities in Nazi-occupied Germany and Europe, to the filmmaking and montaged prose of Alexander Kluge. When fascism makes itself known in Weiss’s novel, it is often as an aural menace: as a danger that can be heard, a threat whose approach can be listened for. Whether transmitted by radio, thundered from a grandstand, or overheard through bulkhead steel, these sounds intrude on, and shape, the conversations of the novel’s protagonists. Listening to one another, Weiss’s antifascists attend to the nonverbal din of fascism’s escalating violence, “the blinding roar” [das Tosen der Verblendung] that cannot be traced to a single source, and yet rages all around them. In his analysis of Weiss and Kluge, Howes considers how the National Socialist soundscape continued echoing in the image-texts of German modernism, decades after the Third Reich’s collapse.

The contributors of the proposed panel value and present a diversity of voices on several levels. At different stages in their academic careers (and of different genders), the contributors employ a variety of different methods and approaches to engage the work of the socialist emigre with the works of a fascist writer (Benn), a former Wehrmacht soldier and experimental prose writer (Schmidt), as well as a filmmaker (Kluge) and a queer writer (Fichte) of the next generation.

The contributors are fully aware of the time constraints of a panel with four presenters. They will keep each presentation to no more than 12-13 minutes to allow for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.