The Aesthetics of Resistance, in summary

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. III

So it turns out the question I went to 20th century German literature to answer was the wrong question.

Vol. III differs from the first two in that in does not tell a cohesive narrative. Vol I concerns the narrator in Spain, fighting fascism. Vol II concerns trying to establish himself in Sweden, and dealing with Bertolt Brecht. Vol III is a cascade, shifting from one character to another (many, mostly, women) and recounting how their war ended. For most, this was capture, torture, and death. There is a very real sense in the last volume that time is running out--in the book, in their lives, in the moment during the war--and it becomes stuffed with remembering; names, places, the beliefs and dreams they died for. The futility of trying to save oneself after committing to the resistance, because once you're involved, that's it for you: you might live or die, but that connection is enough, no matter how tenuous or short-lived. 

(And the thing is: these are almost all real people. There really was a Red Orchestra, and they really did sabotage Germany from the inside. But whatever they accomplished is not visible to the people living through it.) 

There's a real anger in the book, too, for the vast majority of Germans who simply exchange one yoke for another: they believe in the Nazis until they lose, and then believe in whoever comes after them, as a matter of blind obedience and not thought or reflection. Anger, too, for the people who went into exile, who think Germany is still the place it was in 1932 or earlier, and one can simply restart and wipe away the last ten years. Anger that the chance to start again was taken away by the US and the USSR who decided that their rivalry was more important, that let the people responsible for the war get away with little or no punishment. 

And I think in some ways this is the thing: the world of ten years ago cannot come back. You might believe that everything that has happened is an aberration, because to you it is an aberration, but the world and the vast majority of people around you live in the reality of right now. You can undermine what is happening, you can try to survive (both valid strategies, though we need a lot of people in the first category, as they did), but the thing you wanted to happen back then will never happen. Nor, and this is the kicker, will anything you have learned in the last ten years help you at all in what comes next: it will simply be new and different.