Peter Weiss, 1940 ^ - Oil, 77x56 cm rpmterpreiauon of Herakies as class struggle is the historical alternative to the aporias of the bourgeois individual. Perhaps this is one reason why this novel has generated a reading passion unparallelled in recent German literary history; among not only students or intellectuals, but also workers, many of whom dp not ordinarily consider themselves as literary consumers, whereas as the novel met with little understanding or response from the established literary critics of the culture industry, the readers of the novel rapidly organized themselves into groups committed to the project of'Reading the Aesthetics of Resistance' (title of a collection of essays on the novel edited by W. F. Haug, Berlin, 1981). The discursive style and the richness and complexity of the novel have themselves led to dis2 cursive forms of reading. One reason for this response certainly lay in the widescale disorientation of the left in the FRG ir^the wake of the collapse of the students movement of the sixties. The novel strikes a chord. It is a requiem for the anti-fascist resistance without glossing over the mistakes and failures to achieve working class unity. Its criticism is self criticism. Ir^ spite of (a key phrase in the novel) the mistakes and difficulties and setbacks, it affirms the necessity of a principled hope in and commitment to Socialism and the political and cultural emancipation of the oppressed. Journal of Arts and Ideas 8l