We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out.

Leipzig: Reclam. He became a Swedish citizen in 1946. In 1934 he emigrated with his family to Chislehurst near London England where he studied photography at the Polytechnic School of Photography and then in 1937-1938 attended the Prague Art Academy.

Peter Weiss earned his reputation in the post-war German literary world as the proponent of an avant-garde meticulously descriptive writing as an exponent of autobiographical prose and also as a politically engaged dramatist. His "Auschwitz Oratorium" The Investigation served to broaden the debates over the so-called "Vergangenheitspolitik" or "politics of history. He is particularly known for his plays Marat/Sade and The Investigation and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.