literary scene. Weiss abandoned painting and filmmaking and turned exclusively to writing. Nearly all his subsequent works – and all of the major ones – are written in German. His next prose work, Abschied von den Eltern (Leavetaking, 1959/60) was less hermetic than Coachman and strongly autobiographical. It was not only a critical but also a public success, as was its follow-up Fluchtpunkt (Vanishing Point, 1962) Since the early 1950 Weiss had also been writing plays: Der Turm (The Tower, 1950), Die Versicherung (The Insurance, 1952), Nacht mit Gästen (Night with Guests, 1963), Wie dem Herrn Mockinpott das Leiden ausgetrieben wird (How Mister Mockinpott was Cured of His Sufferings, 1963/68). But none of these stage works prepared the public for what came next: A play about the French Revolution which through its title alone became an overnight a sensation: "Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade). First performed in West Berlin in 1964, it quickly brought Weiss notoriety. The following year, 1965, British director Peter Brook staged it at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in London. Brook's film version (1967) turned Marat/Sade into an international cultural icon. Set in an insane asylum and constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by madness and chaos, the play explores the place of writers and intellectuals in a time of revolutionary upheaval. At its center are two very different historical figures, Jean-Paul Marat, a writer and leading intellectual of the French Revolution, and the Marquis de Sade, a writer and intellectual as well, whose attitude towards the revolution is much more ambivalent and who is solipsistically obsessed with sex, violence, and pain. In the play Weiss draws both on Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty and on its opposite: Brecht's theater of reason. In the words of de Sade: "Our intent in creating such dialogues as these / was to experiment with various antitheses / to oppose each to each so that we might / upon our many doubts shed some light". Much of the discussion of the play has focused on whether it is Marat's or Sade's position which prevails. Beginning with Marat/Sade Weiss's work increasingly attracted the attention of communist East Germany. The play and