Peter Weiss is considered to be one of the major European writers of the postwar period, a reputation based almost exclusively on his German works written after 1958, especially his plays Marat/Sade (1964) and Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965; a version of the Auschwitz trial) and his prose memoir/novels Abschied von den Eltern (Farewell to my Parents, 1961) and Die Asthetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance, 1975). He was born in 1916 to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a Czech-German mother in Berlin and, after spending a year at the Art Academy in Prague, followed the flight of his parents to Sweden in 1940. He spent the war years and the decade that followed as a painter, film director, and writer among the young Swedish artists of Stockholm, became a Swedish citizen, which he remained for the rest of his life, and published his first works in Swedish. In 1956 he wrote the novel Situationen (The situation) but could not find a Swedish publisher willing to print it. Its first publication came forty-three years later in German translation (Suhrkamp Verlag). The story of Engineer Knut combines six excerpts from the novel, interweaving the story of Knut’s adventures with those of about a dozen of his friends and acquaintances on the day the Hungarian Revolution was crushed. Engineer Knut is the same age as Weiss was when he wrote the novel and shares many biographical traits with his author. According to his last wife, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, he felt that all doors were closed to him as a Swedish writer after his failure to find a Swedish publisher for Situationen, and he then wrote his works in German. Weiss died in Stockholm in 1982.