complex dialectical unity between the processes of individual and social development and transformation. Few narrative projects in modern literature could be as breathtaking in intention and scope as The Aesthetics of Resistance which was published in three intimidating grey volumes (1975,78,81) totalling nearly a thousand closely printed pages. In order to understand the connotations of the title of the novel it is helpful to refer to its genesis. In interviews and in his important work diary, the Notizbucher (Notebooks) Peter Weiss mentions that he had originally planned a novel about the anti-fascist resistance with the simple title: Widerstand (Resistance). In the course of collecting material for the novel in the GDR he revisited the Pergamon Museum which houses the famous Greek Pergamon altar (c. 2nd Century B.C.) Under the influence of this ancient masterpiece the project widened into a realization that the theme concerned not only a specific case of political struggle but also to every struggle for liberation from political and cultural subjugation. The title points to the dialectical unity of art and resistance, of political and cultural revolution. For, in the process of its struggle for socio-political emancipation the working class must also appropriate and producet art and literature in which such struggle and resistance are crystallized. Here 'aesthetics' no longer implies a philosophy of beauty in the idealist sense; it seeks to connect 'intellectual processes of cognition with social and political insights.' In the Notebooks we come across the concept of'Militant Aesthetics5. The importance of the novel lies in the fact that it not only thematizes and depicts such aesthetics of resistance but is itself an attempt to realize it. The richness and complexity of the novel is such that it resists a quick summary. In a sense Peter Weiss has attempted nothing less than an epic of the entire working class movement in the epoch begining with the Great October Revolution and ending with the collapse of Fascism as reconstructed through a narrative sequence which itself moves from 1937 to 1944/45. The sequence is held together by the anonymous narrator who functions both as protagonist and as narrative medium. Volumes I and II of the novel can be read as an account of the development of the protagonist, a young German worker whose Social-Democrat father had participated in the German revolution of 1919. This young worker is drawn into the Communist movement and in 1937 shifts from the class struggles in Berlin to fight in the Spanish Civil war. The defeat of the communists and the hopeless situation in Hitler's Germany force him to go via Paris into in exile Sweden. The narrative unfolding of this process is accompanied by a detailed and authentic reconstruction of the analyses, disputes and debates within the working class movement. The clash of views, the alternative interpretations, are presented Peter Weiss in a discursive manner without prejudgement and with an almost desperate at-Self Portrait (detail) 1938 tempt at trying to understand the objective reasons and compulsions which deter-Oil 53x44 cm mined the positions taken in the working class movement in this period. If there is 76 Journal of Arts and Ideas