A Survivor's Tale

...He travels to Czechoslovakia, to Sweden, always to return to the desolate family...

...What is more important, Weiss has the artist's eye for the essential and memorable detail...

...the Weiss family was rigid, secretive, cold, held together by the bare threads of convention and habit...

...This document is sincere but synthetic, as is his last, disastrous play, The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey...

...Unlike his dead friends and the exiles, Weiss was lucky, he escaped whole, never actually experiencing the sadistic reality of Nazism...

...One of Weiss' earliest memories of Nazism's threat occurred the day of the Austrian Anschluss...

...Chairs were being knocked over...

...They were both running around the room...

...This guilt, combined with the guilt he felt toward his parents, seemed to paralyze him...

...Then suddenly Fritz leaped at us, and in a few tugs ripped my sister's clothes off . . . stripped off my trousers and blouse and shoved me together with my sisters into the circle of his own children...

...It surely goes against the spirit of his best work: this book and his first two plays...

...Even his admittance to Sweden was a matter of luck...

...Weiss did not rebel against the rational, ordered bourgeois existence that Mann's Tonio Kroger confronted...

...Outside lay the farmyard and the grunting pigs and in the house Abraham was damning his own race...

...Just as Nazism made the need for a firm Leftist ideological position necessary for some in the '40s, so today the brutality of the Vietnam war has led to a new burst of ideology in the form of the New Left...

...And we now found out what we could have found out any day that summer, though it never returned, how alive we became in our nakedness...

...The viewer is less distressed about the plight of the oppressed Angolese when he leaves the theater than when he enters it...

...Hoderer's attacks, before he committed suicide, were not based on Weiss' chance survival, but rather on his "ivory tower" view of art?Weiss' inability to align himself with the ideological postion of the Stalinist Left...

...Despite the barrenness of this existence, the father wants the son to follow in his footsteps on the familiar path of business and bourgeois life...

...Weiss, through long and tortured years, rejects what has always been loveless and empty to him but cannot find a way of his own...

...During a frenzied battle between the father and another son, Gregor, the author heard "a din in my brother's room, I went out on to the landing and listened to him and my father behind the door yelling at each other...

...My father panted and tried to grab hold of him but Gregor tore himself free...

...Exile for Weiss has a double meaning: the escape to a foreign country in the face of Nazism's growth, and the alienation he felt toward his own family with its attachment to material objects and its glossing over of realities...

...Writing of his father's death and the visit to the crematorium at the cemetery, he recalls: "In the circular chapel the coffin was placed on a pedestal, I stood next to it and waited, and at a harmonium in an alcove sat an elderly man with the face of a drinker playing a psalm tune, and then in the middle section of the wall a sliding door suddenly opened and imperceptibly the pedestal with the coffin set itself in motion and slid slowly on almost invisible rails sunk in the floor into the bare, rectangular chamber behind the door, which noiselessly shut again...

...The book ends with his departure for Paris and a sense of realization at the age of 30...

...I saw him lying naked in the warm water, the pants floating around him, hiding his genitals with the circumcised penis he had never let me see...

...There is a frankness in the telling: an account of an incestuous relationship with his sister, an open treatment of the problem of sexual impotence that is resolved after much struggle...

...Perhaps the guilt which followed Peter Weiss through much of his life has been reawakened by Vietnam...

...Curiously, in Exile Weiss rejects Hoderer's position, although since the time he wrote the book he has come to accept the New Left version of it...

...Otherwise he would not have been admitted...

...He imagined the dead Hoderer, an exile who committed suicide because he was not allowed to practice medicine in Sweden, telling him: ". . . others have done the fighting for you, and will carry on fighting for you, while you sit comfortably at your writing desk and contemplate the misery of the world...

...it was predicated solely upon the good financial standing of his parents...

...Two hours later I collected the urn with the ashes of my father's body...

...His father, a Jew who converted to Christianity, "did not dare to step naked into the bath but kept on his pajama bottoms...

...In contrast with the repressiveness of his home life, Weiss describes one of the highlights of his childhood, a visit to the home of a family friend, Fritz W. He sees Fritz' children jumping around the garden naked, while Peter and his sister look on in embarrassment, dressed in their Sunday best...

...Weiss is a survivor saddled with inextricable guilt: "I had grown up to be destroyed but I had escaped destruction...

...I pressed the dog's head close to me, felt his warm breath on my face and clutched with my hands at his soft coat . . . The piece of furniture that I was in this home was all polished and put in place and the dirt forever settling down on me forever wiped off...

...Fortunately, Exile was written before Weiss embraced the New Left (and before his two memorable plays, Marat/Sade and The Investigation...

...In a family scene reminiscent of Kafka, Weiss writes: "I lay in the evenings in the living room under the table, with the dog...

...We can only guess at why Weiss rejected the equation of fascism with capitalism when he was young and accepts it now...

...This expression of an innocence and kindliness that cannot conceive of the world's brutality reminded him of all his friends who were gassed and killed by the Nazis, and of the exiles he encountered in Sweden who were so crippled in spirit that they could not function...

...He was standing beside his artist friend Peter Kien, humming a duet, when a man suddenly threw himself out of a window and landed on the pavement in front of them...

...Weiss saw his friend's reaction, a "helplessly staring look from behind thick lenses, this look which already encompassed Theresienstadt," and he alludes to it several times...

...To assuage it he has gone to unusual, artistically self-destructive lengths...

...Then my father shouted twice: You bloody Jewish lout, you bloody Jewish lout...

...In a futile gesture, he tried to save an old girl friend from the concentration camp by informing the German authorities he wished to marry her (they did not answer him...

...We felt the grass, leaves, earth, and stones with all our pores and nerves, romping and shouting with joy, we lost ourselves in a brief dream of unsuspected potentialities...

...Here then is still another portrait of the artist, but Exile holds up well on its own terms...

...Reviewed by DAVID EVANIER In the current issue of yale/ theatre, Peter Weiss presents a manifesto, "The Necessary Decision," a series of banalities about the superiority of the "Socialist" countries which, to increase its significance, he has numbered from one to 10...