against North Vietnam which seems to have scandalized his German colleagues more than his US hosts. In 1967 he participated in the anti-war Russell Tribunal in Stockholm and in 1968 he joined the eurocommunist Swedish Left Party (VPK). During the same year he also visited North Vietnam and published a book about his trip. In 1970 Weiss suffered a heart attack. During the following decade, he wrote his monumental three-part novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance, as well as two very different stage versions of Kafka's novel The Trial. He died in Stockholm in 1982. Painting, Film, and Literature During his early life as a painter – 1930 to 1950 – Weiss was influenced by old Dutch masters such as Pieter Breughel, and Hieronymus Bosch. After World War II his painting, as well as his work in film and literature, came under the lasting influence of Surrealism. He taught painting at Stockholm's People's University, and illustrated a Swedish edition of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. In 1952 he joined the Swedish Experimental Film Studio, where he directed several experimental short films, followed by several socially conscious documentary shorts: Gesichter im Schatten (Faces in the Shadow, 1956), Im Namen des Gesetzes (In the Name of the Law, 1957), Was machen wir jetzt? (What Do We Do Now?, 1958). In 1959 he directed his only full length (experimental) film Hägringen (The Disappeared). In the early 1950s, Weiss had begun to write again, producing a number of prose works, some in German, others in Swedish. Most are short, intense, surrealist text which suggest the influence of Kafka (whose work Weiss would later adapt for the stage). The most important of these prose texts is Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers (The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, 1952). It is a nearly hermetic experimental work which explores language through the use of surreal, disturbing imagery whereby an apparent rural idyll is transformed into a kafkaesque nightmare. The Surrealist effect was enhanced by collages in the style of Max Ernst, so-called xylography, which Peter Weiss created for the book. Coachman has been linked both to the French nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Raymond Queneau, as well as to French absurdist works by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. When it was eventually published in Germany in 1960 it put its 45-year-old writer at the forefront of the West German