Peter Weiss(1916-1982)
- Writer
- Director
- Editor
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.
