Life
Weiss was born in Nowawes (now part of Potsdam-Babelsberg), Brandenburg, to a Hungarian Jewish father and Christian mother. At age three he moved with his family to Bremen, and then during his adolescence to Berlin where Weiss began training for a career as a visual artist. In 1934 he emigrated with his family to Chislehurst, near London, England, where he studied photography at the Polytechnic School of Photography, and then in 1937-1938 attended the Prague Art Academy. After the German occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, his family moved to Sweden, and Weiss himself removed to Switzerland. In 1939 he again emigrated to Stockholm, Sweden, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became a Swedish citizen in 1946.
Weiss was married three times: to the painter Helga Henschen, 1943; to Carlota Dethorey, 1949; and to the hereditary baroness Gunilla Palmstierna, 1964. He was politically active as a member of the Communist Party of Sweden, and in 1967 participated in Bertrand Russell's tribunal against the Vietnam War in Stockholm.
In 1970 Weiss suffered a heart attack. During the following decade, his writing was focused on his three part novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance. He died in Stockholm in 1982.
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