PETER WEISS
223
ROLOFF: Did you write in Gennan in those first years in Sweden?
WEISS:
Oh yes: I did write in Gennan. But at that time-towards the
end of the war-there was just no question of ever returning to
Gennany. So I tried to assimilate myself within another language and
Swedish was naturally the closest.
If
I had emigrated to England or
the United States I would have written in English and that would
certainly have been much more natural because I would have had
a very different relationship to English than I had to Swedish and I
probably would also have continued to write in English, I assume. I was
still you-ng enough then to grow into another language. And English
has a genuine durability. First of all, it is a language in which you
find yourself in good company and you have the feeling that it is
a language rich in expressive power and you sympathize with the
whole culture that stands behind it, while Swedish and Sweden were
_ something entirely alien to me. I had no relationship to Sweden
whatsover, not culturally either. That came only much later. But
by the middle of the war I had almost perfect command of Swedish
and so I had little choice but to write in Swedish.
ROLOFF: But you believe that once-when you were sixteen, seventeen
years old-that you had what could
be
called a natural style?
WEISS:
Yes. That was German at that time. That was the natural
language for me. Then came the next language, Swedish, a language
which actually was only an instrument with which I could express
myself and could communicate what I wanted to say in a language
which I commanded, while to communicate in German was quite
secondary at that time.
ROLOFF: Yet your relationship to Swedish never did become a truly
natural one compared with your previous relationship to German?
WEISS:
No,
nev~r.
That is, -toward the end of the war and during the
first years after the war I wrote a good deal in Swedish, even wrote
for Swedish newspapers, and when I returned to Germany it was in
1947 as a reporter for a Swedish newspaper. That seemed quite
natural. Nonetheless, Swedish was not my first language but one I
had learned. Very soon afterwards-especially when it became a
question of literary matters-I wrote my pieces in German and
translated them myself into Swedish.
ROLOFF: SO the books you published
in
Swedish . . .
WEISS:
That differs from case to case. The first things were written
in Swedish to begin with, while some of the other things are a
mixture, are mixed, and then during some of those years . . . there
