Between Genius and Depression: Ambivalences of Maternal Melancholy

The third and final installment of Peter Weiss's voluminous work on anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, begins with the evocation of a melancholy condition. On her knees in a snowy, sandy landscape that through the imagery of coldness and dryness conveys a world in the grip of a withering melancholy paralysis, the narrator's mother, alongside several other beleaguered individuals, digs into the earth with her bare hands (3:7). We only later realize that these people are Jews and are digging their own graves. The shifting narrative perspective of these initial pages subtly makes clear that this opening vision is not a direct representation of the mother's experience. Rather, it is the narrator's empathetically imagined post-memory of his mother's persecution and flight through Nazi-occupied Europe—a year of “dunklester Wanderung” (the darkest journey)—before she and his father eventually arrive in Sweden (3:7). Stations along this darkest of journeys include concentrated points of extermination in Czechoslovakia and Poland, a literal topography of terror that renders the mother a traumatized witness to the unfolding of the Holocaust. Darkness and the nocturnal are closely associated with the destruction of Europe's Jews in this epilogue volume, which in its first half engages with the aesthetic problem of how to represent the Holocaust. Part of this undertaking is a nuanced consideration of how aesthetics may remain ethical in a historical epoch that issues new challenges to the artistic imagination.