Peter Weiss

Peter Ulrich Weiss was born in Berlin in 1916. His family was prosperous, educated, and middle-class; his father had been in the military, and his mother had given up her acting career in order to marry Peter's father and raise a family. Weiss describes, with Kafkaesqe photographic recall, his childhood in the one-paragraph autobiographical "Leavetaking", published in Germany in 1961. As a young student he was passionately, sometimes torturously, involved with people and things, and interested in art and literature, and by his twenties was writing novels and painting. The rise of Nazism forced Weiss to flee Germany and settle in Sweden in 1940, where he remained until the war's end. He wrote prolifically and politically and lived in Paris and London, while continuing to travel widely. His second autobiographical work, "Vanishing Point", (1962) describes his emotional and intellectual struggles, his intense inner states, relationships with friends and lovers, and creative life -- up to one evening in Paris in the spring of 1947, when he had a sort of revelation. Weiss remained true to his humanistic, liberal, left-wing political values throughout his life, and expressed them in his widely-admired plays and novels, which were translated into many languages. He died in 1982.