The Aesthetics of Resistance (German: Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, 1975–1981) is a three-volume novel by the German-born playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and painter Peter Weiss which was written over a ten-year period between 1971 and 1981.

Spanning from the late 1930s into World War II, this historical novel dramatizes anti-fascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe.

It represents an attempt to bring to life and pass on the historical and social experiences and the aesthetic and political insights of the workers' movement in the years of resistance against fascism.

Weiss suggests that meaning lies in the refusal to renounce resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that it is in art that new models of political action and social understanding are to be found.

Moving from the Berlin underground to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and on to other parts of Europe, the story teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures.

The fragments were reassembled in the specially built Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the capital of Wilhelminian Germany, and were to signal from this point forward the late claims to power of German imperialism.

In a lengthy discussion the three friends attempt to interpret the stone figures and events depicted in the frieze in a way which would make them relevant for their own present day struggle.

Under the pressure of the present and with their lives in constant danger, the three young antifascists read the empty space in the frieze as an omen, they feel encouraged to fill it with their own representation of the absent half-god.

From a friend of the Gods, the mighty and the powerful, Heracles is transformed into a champion of the lowest classes, of the exploited, imprisoned, and tortured – a messianic "leader" in the struggle against the terror of the "Führer".

Before they reach this conclusion, however, readers of Weiss's novel are confronted with nearly a thousand pages of text interrupted only occasionally by a paragraph break – a sea of words which resists any attempt at summarizing.

The novel presents a history of the European Left, from Marx and Engels to the post-war era, in countries as diverse as Germany and Sweden, the Soviet Union, France and Spain.

Woven into the historical narratives and political discourses are extensive passages on works of art and literature from many centuries and from many European, and even non-European cultures – from the Pergamon frieze to the temple city of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, from Dürer and Brueghel to Géricault and Picasso, from Dante to Kafka, and from Surrealism and Dadaism to Socialist realism.

The novel takes upon itself the enormous task of reinterpreting the great works of western culture from the perspective of the perennial victims of history and to fuse art and politics into one inseparable revolutionary unity.

Dante's work becomes the subject of art conversations in Aesthetics of Resistance, and motifs from the Divina Commedia underlie central passages of the novel, even to the point of direct quotation.

During 1972 for example, Weiss conducted interviews with Max Hodann's surviving relatives and his doctor, several of Bertolt Brecht's collaborators, Rosalinde von Ossietzky, the daughter of Nobel prize winner and journalist Carl von Ossietzky who was tortured to death by the Nazis and Maud von Ossietzky[11] along with resistance fighter Karl Mewis, resistance fighter Charlotte Bischoff, journalist and later a politician Herbert Wehner, committed communist and later a politician Paul Verner, communist journalist, later a diplomat Georg Henke, trade unionist Herbert Warnke, Ottora Maria Douglas, the sister of the resistance fighter and aristocrat Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Hans Coppi Jr., the son of resistance fighter Hans Coppi as well as with other contemporary witnesses, including various engineers from the Alfa Laval separator works, where the narrator worked for a time.

Among other things, Weiss discovered the remains of a mural in a storage room of the former headquarters of the Civil Guard in Albacete, that gave the visit an epic character,[13] which is described in detail in the novel.

The author's nervousness and sensitivity to disturbances are also illustrated by repeated problems with motorboat drivers on the lake on which Weiss's weekend house was located, as well as a letter to Unseld, to whom he had sent the first part of the novel for review on 19 July 1974 "with some reservations".

Again, the work was interrupted, this time by various political statements (such as on Wolf Biermann's expatriation, after being stripped him of his citizenship or the travel ban on Pavel Kohout) as well as the awarding of the Thomas Dehler Prize[18] by the Federal Ministry for Inner-German Relations [de], which caused him considerable misgivings.

[22] Suhrkamp Verlag initially did not comply with Weiss's request even after the author's death, except for minor corrections from June 1981 - the first edition had appeared in May - which did not change the make-up.

After initial irritations, triggered in particular by the less than editor-friendly form of the typescripts, the sending of the typeset drafts was followed by fruitful and intensive editing at Suhrkamp Verlag, primarily by Elisabeth Borchers.

In 1993, for example, Jens-Fietje Dwars [de] compared the letter "Heilmann an Unbekannt", one of the last text blocks in volume 3, in the Urtext, Suhrkamp and Henschel versions.

For example, a passage describing bodily experiences of disgust has been significantly toned down in Suhrkamp and reinstated in Henschel in its full drasticness: Due to such deviations, Jürgen Schutte, the editor of the digital edition of Weiss's notebooks, called in 2008 for the creation of a critical edition of Aesthetics of Resistance, which would be based on the GDR version and would at least list the text variants of the published versions and the typeset drafts.

[35] They are considered to be cultural traces that span an arc from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, through works of Romanticism and Realism to the art of Expressionism and the avant-garde with its expression in Dadaism, Surrealism and Cubism.

Another literary work discussed in detail in the first volume is Franz Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle, published in 1922, and presented in the significant debate about the realist and avant-garde concepts of art.

Beginning with the question of why his image is missing from the frieze of the Pergamon Altar, the search for the true Heracles continues throughout the novel, culminating in the final scene.

[44] Other authors also took more aim at Weiss's oft-published political confession than at the novel form itself, for example Moritz Menzel and Hans Christoph Buch [de] in Der Spiegel.

He judged that Aesthetics of Resistance as a novel was an aberration, as it merely presented abstract, nonsensical, unpsychological figures and list-like enumerations ("Fascism as a crossword puzzle", "Bubbles from the flood of words", "Not a fresco, but a patchwork carpet").

[51][52][53] Hanjo Kesting [de] argued exactly the opposite in Der Spiegel: it is precisely the break with genre traditions that makes the work valuable; moreover, all interpretations that equate the aesthetics of resistance with the positions represented in it fall short, because the actual theme of the novel is the self-discovery of the first-person narrator as an artist.

The approximately three-and-a-half-hour play version, which was realised with eleven actors, concentrated mainly on the first and third volumes of Weiss's novel and emphasised the elements of the original, which were designed in a surreal dream language.

[71] While some critics praised a theatrically effective, lightly paced and painfully precise play against oblivion, others saw the project as overtaxing the theatre in view of the abundance of material, missed approaches to updating or criticised an incongruence between Weiss's experimental narrative technique and the adaptors' restriction to classical stage dialogue.