222
MICHAEL ROLOff
do the differences in the approach to language make for a difficult
relationship?
WEISS:
I have of course had an entirely different development, which
can be disturbing at times and at other times is taken for granted.
And I never criticize my colleagues. Mter all, I participate in the
meetings of the Gruppe 47 and I consider it a very fruitful experience
to meet these writers and to know them.
ROLOFF:
Are your working methods worth mentioning? For example,
Hemingway supposedly always sharpened twelve pencils before getting
down to work.
WEISS:
No, I have no methods of that sort. But when I write I have
to
write an enormous amount. When I am writing I can't do anything
that might keep me from writing and anything which does stop me
from writing at those times hurts me to the core. That is why a time
like this in Berlin
is
absolutely killing for me, because I don't get a
chance to work. I have to be completely alone with myself, cut off from
the rest of the world, and I have to work the entire day, from early
in the morning until late at night, from eight in the morning until
late at night and for months on end like that. I am compelled to
work like that, in such a continuous fashion, otherwise I don't ac–
complish anything. I never produce anything when I make a salad–
here a little leaf, there a little leaf. That just doesn't go. When I
work I generally work on something big, on a larger theme, and then
I need enormous amounts of time. And of course I also need a milieu.
I always admire people who can work wherever you plunk them down,
who can sit down in a hotel room and write. Unfortun:ately I can't
do that at all. I need a very particular working milieu, I need my
books, papers and notes.
ROLOFF:
And this milieu you have found in Sweden.
WEISS:
In Stockholm. There I have my studio where I can sit down
and here in Berlin I haven't found it yet. At first I thought I might
find the right atmosphere here and a place to work too, but- it just
didn't turn out that way. I tried it a number of times, four times at
least, but now it seems quite certain that I shall return to Stockholm.
ROLOFF:
Yet when you arrived in Sweden in
19'38
you of course did
not have this milieu at once, and you entered a kind of linguistic
vacuum. You call it a monologue in a vacuum in
Fluchtpunkt.
And
eventually you decided to begin to write in Swedish. .When?
WEISS:
That was in the middle of the war when I made an attempt
to
adapt myself.
