Diss. Uppsala : Univ., 2003.

Diss. Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2005.

In Peter Weiss debut Från ö till ö (1947) the ‘I’ travels from island to island as a castaway. The island here can signify, or work as a synecdoche for exile and the feeling of isolation that exile often induces. But the movement from island to island also implies a restless state: Peter Weiss shifting from painting to writing to filmmaking and theatre, from German to Swedish and then back to German. The years during exile and the years that followed the exile until his breakthrough in Germany with Schatten des körpers des Kütchens (1960), Abschied von den Eltern (1961) and Fluchtpunkt (1962), were the formative years of Peter Weiss authorship. In Sweden he abandoned a Hesse-influenced new-romanticism – an aesthetical and political dead-end in the 1940s – and oriented towards the Swedish modernists – fyrtiotalisterna – discovered psychoanalysis and became politically “aware”. These happenings – or machines as this essay likes to view them – all influenced and produced Weiss Swedish prose which is this essay’s main focus. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari this essay understands Weiss Swedish authorship as a minor authorship. As Franz Kafka was in the German language, Peter Weiss was a stranger in Swedish and in Sweden, a “foreign bird” as one critic calls him. As a minor writer he is a political writer, the political realities are connected to him, his half-Jewish body is intertwined in the (bio)political realities of mid-century Germany; and those realities are visible in his prose, even if he himself, or his contemporaries, see him as an unpolitical author. Therefore there is no unpolitical and political period in the œuvre of Peter Weiss. Instead there are different flows and movements, from the political, from the production of the psychoanalytic-, modernist- and romantic-machine among others. There are lines of flights, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This essay aims to follow some of these lines in the Swedish prose of Peter Weiss.

The main purpose of this thesis is to discuss what exile writing is and who can be seen as an exile writer. If the word “exile” is related to forced dislocation, like Paul Tabori and Sopia A. McClennen describes it, who can be viewed as an exile writer? Is Anders Olsson’s definition of an exile writer acceptable or not? Could the The Escape, a future story about exiled Northern Europeans in Myanmar, be classified as exile literature? Another purpose with this text is to describe how a story about exile can be made realistic and tangible to a reader who has not experienced exile. How can the exile experience be shown in a text? The third major aim with this thesis is to discuss how an ethnographic study differs from a fictive novel about another culture. Is an academic text more close to reality than fiction and what is reality anyway? Is it possible to make a mix of an academic study and a fictive novel?