(Full name: Peter Ulrich Weiss, pseudonym: Sinclair, born November 8, 1916 in Nowawes near Potsdam, died May 10, 1982 in Stockholm) was a German-Swedish writer, painter, graphic artist and experimental filmmaker.
Peter Weiss acquired prominence in German post-war literature as a representative of a literature of minutiae and the avant-garde, as an author of autobiographical prose as well as a politically-engaged playwright. He achieved international success with the piece Marat / Sade, which was awarded the US Theater and Musical Award “Tony Award”. His ‘Oratorio for Auschwitz’ entitled “The Investigation”, an kind of piece of documentary theatre, led to broad international policymaking in the mid-1960s. Weiss’s main work of fiction is the three-volume novel “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, one of the “most important German-language works of the 1970s and 1980s”. Less well known are Weiss’ early, surrealist-inspired works as a painter and experimental film director.
Photo: (c) Jochen Vogt: Peter Weiss. Reinbek: Rowohlt 1987. P. 11. (Peter Weiss with his parents, summer 1917 in Przemyśl)