Introduction to “Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger: A Controversy”

This introduction situates the 1966 essays by Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the context of decolonization, taking into account Gary Wilder’s and Michael Rothberg’s reframing of the immediate postwar decades. More precisely, the introduction discusses Weiss’s and Enzensberger’s texts as engaging Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence,” published in Kursbuch, together with Enzensberger’s “Europäische Peripherie” (1965), the article to which Weiss responds with “Enzensberger’s Illusions.” Analyzing their present moment in global terms, the authors debate the role of European intellectuals. Although Weiss and Enzensberger do not address the relationship between politics and aesthetics directly, the introduction asks us to rethink postwar modernisms. Keeping in mind the connection between anticolonial politics and surrealism in the writings of Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the introduction briefly traces the political and aesthetic significance of surrealism in Weiss’s thought and writing.