into the collective of the working class movement to become its memory, the task of which is to resist amnesia, to battle against forgetting the lessons of the past struggles, expecially the problem of working class unity. The historical period may be over but its problematic remains and the task of the narrator is seen as an attempt to turn to the past in order to uncover through the interaction of past and present "the roots of the processes which still remain valid." The style and technique of the novel are fascinating. The discursive narrative proceeds with a deceptive monotony, like a calm surface under which unimaginable struggles are being conducted. At decisive moments the apparent monotony of sentences is broken by passages of sheer horror, the prose of which has an intensity unparallelled in contemporary German fiction. Surrealist techniques and montage which connect different levels (time and space, real history, visions and dream-reports) resist appropriation by a reader concerned only with culinary entertainment. Many critics (notably Scherpe and Metscher) have pointed out that a unique aspect of the novel lies in the unity ofavante garde technique and realism. The model of the teacher Brecht is discemable. Not only does the novel realize this programme, it also thematizes it through signals: Kafka, Brecht. And it is important to note that "avante garde' is an artistic as well as a political concept for Weiss. There is an avante garde in art and there is the avante garde in politics, and the necessary unity of the two is projected by Weiss as a vision: the Spiegels-trasse in Zurich at one end of which Lenin lived in exile in 1916; at the other and was the Cafe Voltaire, the haunt of the Dadaists. The dissection of the political and cultural revolutionary movements is itself the possible root of their deviations: in the case of bourgeois avante garde art, its anarchism and in the case of the political revolution, the deviations of dogmatism. The agonizing discussions of the errors of the working class movement (especially the passages on the Moscow trials) are self-criticism at the end of which there is a defiant gesture of commitment to communism and, in this historical period, to the anti-fascist struggle. The corrective to the anarchism of the cultural avante garde lies in the Leninist appropriation of tradition as practised by the narrative figure and his comrades. The Aesthetics of Resistance thus projects a programme of unity; Weiss's own movement from art to politics and his proletarian alter-ego's movement from political activity to art have to be considered together within this programme. Significantly, the narrator in the final monologue imagines the moment when the proletarian comrades interpret the Pergamon altar and, in doing so, quote Rimbaud and the Communist Manifesto, It will probably take a long time before some publisher and translator have the courage to translate this novel into English: longer perhaps than it took to translate L 'ysses into German. The reference to Joyce is not fortuitous. The shattering final'monologue of the anonymous narrator of a collective of the proletarian struggle can also be seen as a political pendant to the final monologue of Ulysses, and ii fact, as pointed out by Walter Jens, the Herakles myth as a counter to the myth of Ulysses. For if the myth of Ulysses is the prototype of bourgeois modem subjectivity (and this is how Adomo and Horkheimer interpret it in the Dialectics ofEnlightement) then Weiss5 radical 80 January-March 1984