Max Rudolf Frisch (15 May 1911 – 4 April 1991) was a Swiss playwright and novelist.

Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1986.

Spouses

Gertrud Frisch-von Meyenburg, (married 1942, separated 1954, divorced 1959)
Ingeborg Bachmann, (partner 1958–1963)
Marianne Oellers (married 1968, divorced 1979)

Biography

Early years

Frisch was born in 1911 in Zürich, Switzerland, the second son of Franz Bruno Frisch, an architect, and Karolina Bettina Frisch (née Wildermuth). He had a half-sister, Emma (1899–1972), his father's daughter by a previous marriage, and a brother, Franz, eight years his senior (1903–1978). The family lived modestly, their financial situation deteriorating after the father lost his job during the First World War. Frisch had an emotionally distant relationship with his father, but was close to his mother. While at secondary school Frisch started to write drama, but failed to get his work performed and he subsequently destroyed his first literary works. While he was at school he met Werner Coninx (1911–1980), who later became a successful artist and collector. The two men formed a lifelong friendship.

In the 1930/31 academic year Frisch enrolled at the University of Zurich to study German literature and linguistics. There he met professors who gave him contact with the worlds of publishing and journalism, and was influenced by Robert Faesi (1883–1972) and Theophil Spoerri (1890–1974), both writers and professors at the university. Frisch had hoped the university would provide him with the practical underpinnings for a career as a writer, but became convinced that university studies would not provide this.[3] In 1932, when financial pressures on the family intensified, Frisch abandoned his studies. In 1936 Max Frisch studied architecture at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), [Federal Institute of Technology], Zurich and graduated in 1940. In 1942 he set up his own architecture business

Journalism

Frisch made his first contribution to the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) in May 1931, but the death of his father in March 1932 persuaded him to make a full-time career of journalism in order to generate an income to support his mother. He developed a lifelong ambivalent relationship with the NZZ; his later radicalism was in stark contrast to the conservative views of the newspaper. The move to the NZZ is the subject of his April 1932 essay, titled "Was bin ich?" ("What am I?"), his first serious piece of freelance work. Until 1934 Frisch combined journalistic work with coursework at the university. Over 100 of his pieces survive from this period; they are autobiographical, rather than political, dealing with his own self-exploration and personal experiences, such as the break-up of his love affair with the 18-year-old actress Else Schebesta. Few of these early works made it into the published compilations of Frisch's writings that appeared after he had become better known. Frisch seems to have found many of them excessively introspective even at the time, and tried to distract himself by taking labouring jobs involving physical exertion, including a period in 1932 when he worked on road construction.

First novel

Between February and October 1933 he travelled extensively through eastern and southeastern Europe, financing his expeditions with reports written for newspapers and magazines. One of his first contributions was a report on the Prague World Ice Hockey Championship (1933) for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Other destinations were Budapest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Istanbul, Athens, Bari, and Rome. Another product of this extensive tour was Frisch's first novel, Jürg Reinhart, which appeared in 1934. In it Reinhart represents the author, undertaking a trip through the Balkans as a way to find purpose in life. In the end the eponymous hero concludes that he can only become fully adult by performing a "manly act". This he achieves by helping the terminally ill daughter of his landlady end her life painlessly.

Käte Rubensohn and Germany

In the summer of 1934 Frisch met Käte Rubensohn, who was three years his junior. The next year the two developed a romantic liaison. Rubensohn, who was Jewish, had emigrated from Berlin to continue her studies, which had been interrupted by government-led anti-Semitism and race-based legislation in Germany. In 1935 Frisch visited Germany for the first time. He kept a diary, later published as Kleines Tagebuch einer deutschen Reise (Short Diary of a German Trip), in which he described and criticised the antisemitism he encountered. At the same time, Frisch recorded his admiration for the Wunder des Lebens (Wonder of Life) exhibition staged by Herbert Bayer, an admirer of the Hitler government's philosophy and policies. (Bayer was later forced to flee the country after annoying Hitler). Frisch failed to anticipate how Germany's National Socialism would evolve, and his early apolitical novels were published by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA) without encountering any difficulties from the German censors. During the 1940s Frisch developed a more critical political consciousness. His failure to become more critical sooner has been attributed in part to the conservative spirit at the University of Zurich, where several professors were openly sympathetic with Hitler and Mussolini. Frisch was never tempted to embrace such sympathies, as he explained much later, because of his relationship with Käte Rubensohn, even though the romance itself ended in 1939 after she refused to marry him.

The architect and his family

Frisch's second novel, An Answer from the Silence (Antwort aus der Stille), appeared in 1937. The book returned to the theme of a "manly act", but now placed it in the context of a middle class lifestyle. The author quickly became critical of the book, burning the original manuscript in 1937 and refusing to let it be included in a compilation of his works published in the 1970s. Frisch had the word "author" deleted from the "profession/occupation" field in his passport. Supported by a stipend from his friend Werner Coninx, he had in 1936 enrolled at the ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) to study architecture, his father's profession. His resolve to disown his second published novel was undermined when it won him the 1938 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer Prize, which included an award of 3,000 Swiss francs. At this time Frisch was living on an annual stipend from his friend of 4,000 francs.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the army as a gunner. Although Swiss neutrality meant that army membership was not a full-time occupation, the country mobilised to be ready to resist a German invasion, and by 1945 Frisch had clocked up 650 days of active service. He also returned to writing. 1939 saw the publication of From a Soldier's Diary (Aus dem Tagebuch eines Soldaten), which initially appeared in the monthly journal, Atlantis. In 1940 the same writings were compiled into the book Pages from the Bread-bag (Blätter aus dem Brotsack). The book was broadly uncritical of Swiss military life, and of Switzerland's position in war-time Europe, attitudes that Frisch revisited and revised in his 1974 Little Service Book (Dienstbuechlein); by 1974 he felt strongly that his country had been too ready to accommodate the interests of Nazi Germany during the war years.

At the ETH, Frisch studied architecture with William Dunkel, whose pupils also included Justus Dahinden and Alberto Camenzind, later stars of Swiss architecture. After receiving his diploma in the summer of 1940, Frisch accepted an offer of a permanent position in Dunkel's architecture studio, and for the first time in his life was able to afford a home of his own. While working for Dunkel he met another architect, Gertrud Frisch-von Meyenburg, and on 30 July 1942 the two were married. The marriage produced three children: Ursula (1943), Hans Peter (1944), and Charlotte (1949). Much later, in a book of her own, Sturz durch alle Spiegel, which appeared in 2009, his daughter Ursula reflected on her difficult relationship with her father.

In 1943 Frisch was selected from among 65 applicants to design the new Letzigraben (subsequently renamed Max-Frisch-Bad) swimming pool in the Zürich district of Albisrieden. Because of this substantial commission he was able to open his own architecture studio, with a couple of employees. Wartime materials shortages meant that construction had to be deferred until 1947, but the public swimming pool was opened in 1949. It is now protected under historic monument legislation. In 2006/2007 it underwent an extensive renovation which returned it to its original condition.

Overall Frisch designed more than a dozen buildings, although only two were actually built. One was a house for his brother Franz and the other was a country house for the shampoo magnate, K.F. Ferster. Ferster's house triggered a major court action when it was alleged that Frisch had altered the dimensions of the main staircase without reference to his client. Frisch later retaliated by using Ferster as the model for the protagonist in his play The Fire Raisers (Biedermann und die Brandstifter). When Frisch was managing his own architecture studio, he was generally found in his office only during the mornings. Much of his time and energy was devoted to writing.

Theatre

Frisch was already a regular visitor at the Zürich Playhouse (Schauspielhaus) while still a student. Drama in Zürich was experiencing a golden age at this time, thanks to the flood of theatrical talent in exile from Germany and Austria. From 1944 the Playhouse director Kurt Hirschfeld encouraged Frisch to work for the theatre, and backed him when he did so. In Santa Cruz, his first play, written in 1944 and first performed in 1946, Frisch, who had himself been married since 1942, addressed the question of how the dreams and yearnings of the individual could be reconciled with married life. In his 1944 novel J'adore ce qui me brûle (I adore that which burns me) he had already placed emphasis on the incompatibility between the artistic life and respectable middle class existence. The novel reintroduces as its protagonist the artist Jürg Reinhart, familiar to readers of Frisch's first novel, and in many respects a representation of the author himself. It deals with a love affair that ends badly. This same tension is at the centre of a subsequent narrative by Frisch published, initially, by Atlantis in 1945 and titled Bin oder Die Reise nach Peking (Bin or the Journey to Beijing).

Both of his next two works for the theatre reflect the war. Now they sing again (Nun singen sie wieder), though written in 1945, was actually performed ahead of his first play Santa Cruz. It addresses the question of the personal guilt of soldiers who obey inhuman orders, and treats the matter in terms of the subjective perspectives of those involved. The piece, which avoids simplistic judgements, played to audiences not just in Zürich but also in German theatres during the 1946/47 season. The NZZ, then as now his native city's powerfully influential newspaper, pilloried the piece on its front page, claiming that it "embroidered" the horrors of National Socialism, and they refused to print Frisch's rebuttal. The Chinese Wall (Die Chinesische Mauer) which appeared in 1946, explores the possibility that humanity might itself be eradicated by the (then recently invented) atomic bomb. The piece unleashed public discussion of the issues involved, and can today be compared with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Physicists (1962) and Heinar Kipphardt's On the J Robert Oppenheimer Affair (In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer), though these pieces are all now for the most part forgotten.

Working with the theatre director Hirschfeld enabled Frisch to meet some leading fellow playwrights who would influence his later work. He met the exiled German write, Carl Zuckmayer, in 1946, and the young Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1947. Despite artistic differences on self-awareness issues, Dürrenmatt and Frisch became lifelong friends. 1947 was also the year in which Frisch met Bertolt Brecht, already established as a doyen of German theatre and of the political left. An admirer of Brecht's work, Frisch now embarked on regular exchanges with the older dramatist on matters of shared artistic interest. Brecht encouraged Frisch to write more plays, while placing emphasis on social responsibility in artistic work. Although Brecht's influence is evident in some of Frisch's theoretical views and can be seen in one or two of his more practical works, the Swiss writer could never have been numbered among Brecht's followers. He kept his independent position, by now increasingly marked by scepticism in respect of the polarized political grandstanding which in Europe was a feature of the early cold war years. This is particularly apparent in his 1948 play As the war ended (Als der Krieg zu Ende war), based on eye-witness accounts of the Red Army as an occupying force.

Travels in post-war Europe

In April 1946 Frisch and Hirschfeld visited post-war Germany together.

In August 1948 Frisch visited Breslau/Wrocław to attend an International Peace Congress organized by Jerzy Borejsza. Breslau itself, which had been more than 90% German speaking as recently as 1945, was an instructive microcosm of the post-war settlement in central Europe. Poland's western frontier had moved, and the ethnically German majority in Breslau had escaped or been expelled from the city which now adopted its Polish name as Wrocław. The absented ethnic Germans were being replaced by relocated Polish speakers whose own formerly Polish homes were now included within the newly enlarged Soviet Union. A large number of European intellectuals were invited to the Peace Congress which was presented as part of a wider political reconciliation exercise between east and west. Frisch was not alone in quickly deciding that the congress hosts were simply using the event as an elaborate propaganda exercise, and there was hardly any opportunity for the "international participants" to discuss anything. Frisch left before the event ended and headed for Warsaw, notebook in hand, to collect and record his own impressions of what was happening. Nevertheless, when he returned home the resolutely conservative NZZ concluded that by visiting Poland Frisch had simply confirmed his status as a Communist sympathizer, and not for the first time refused to print his rebuttal of their simplistic conclusions. Frisch now served notice on his old newspaper that their collaboration was at an end.

Second marriage to Marianne Oellers and a growing propensity to avoid Switzerland

In summer 1962 Frisch met Marianne Oellers, a student of Germanistic and Romance studies. He was 51 and she was 28 years younger. In 1964 they moved into an apartment together in Rome, and in autumn 1965 they relocated to Switzerland, setting up home together in an extensively modernised cottage in Berzona, Ticino. During the next decade much of their time was spent living in rented apartments abroad, and Frisch could be scathing about his Swiss homeland, but they retained their Berzona property and frequently returned to it, the author driving his Jaguar from the airport: as he himself was quoted at the time on his Ticino retreat, "Seven times a year we drive this stretch of road ... This is fantastic countryside" As a "social experiment" they also, in 1966, temporarily occupied a second home in an apartment block in Aussersihl, a residential quarter of down-town Zürich known, then as now, for its high levels of recorded crime and delinquency, but they quickly swapped this for an apartment in Küsnacht, close to the lake shore. Frisch and Oellers were married at the end of 1968.

Marianne Oellers accompanied her future husband on numerous foreign trips. In 1963 they visited the United States for the American premieres of The Fire Raisers and Andorra, and in 1965 they visited Jerusalem where Frisch was presented with the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In order to try to form an independent assessment of "life behind the Iron Curtain" they then, in 1966, toured the Soviet Union. They returned two years later to attend a "Writers' Congress" at which they met Christa and Gerhard Wolf, leading authors in what was then East Germany, with whom they established lasting friendships. After they married, Frisch and his young wife continued to travel extensively, visiting Japan in 1969 and undertaking extended stays in the United States. Many impressions of these visits are published in Frisch's Tagebuch covering the period 1966–1971.

In 1972, after returning from the US, the couple took a second apartment in the Friedenau quarter of West Berlin, and this soon became the place where they spent most of their time. During the period 1973–79 Frisch was able to participate increasingly in the intellectual life of the place. Living away from his homeland intensified his negative attitude to Switzerland, which had already been apparent in William Tell for Schools (Wilhelm Tell für die Schule) (1970) and which reappears in his Little service book (Dienstbüchlein) (1974), in which he reflects on his time in the Swiss army some 30 years earlier. More negativity about Switzerland was on show in January 1974 when he delivered a speech titled "Switzerland as a homeland?" ("Die Schweiz als Heimat?"), when accepting the 1973 Grand Schiller Prize from the Swiss Schiller Foundation. Although he nurtured no political ambitions on his own account, Frisch became increasingly attracted to the ideas of social democratic politics. He also became friendly with Helmut Schmidt who had recently succeeded the Berlin–born Willy Brandt as Chancellor of Germany and was already becoming something of a respected elder statesman for the country's moderate left (and, as a former Defence Minister, a target of opprobrium for some on the SPD's immoderate left). In October 1975, slightly improbably, the Swiss dramatist Frisch accompanied Chancellor Schmidt on what for them both was their first visit to China, as part of an official West German delegation. Two years later, in 1977, Frisch found himself accepting an invitation to give a speech at an SPD Party Conference.

In April 1974, while on a book tour in the US, Frisch launched into an affair with an American called Alice Locke-Carey who was 32 years his junior. This happened in the village of Montauk on Long Island, and Montauk was the title the author gave to an autobiographical novel that appeared in 1975. The book centred on his love life, including both his own marriage with Marianne Oellers-Frisch and an affair that she had been having with the American writer Donald Barthelme. There followed a very public dispute between Frisch and his wife over where to draw the line between private and public life, and the two became increasingly estranged, divorcing in 1979.

Later works, old age and death

In 1978, Frisch survived serious health problems, and the next year was actively involved in setting up the Max Frisch Foundation (Max-Frisch-Stiftung), established in October 1979, and to which he entrusted the administration of his estate. The foundation's archive is kept at the ETH Zurich, and has been publicly accessible since 1983.

Old age and the transience of life now came increasingly to the fore in Frisch's work. In 1976 he began work on the play Triptychon, although it was not ready to be performed for another three years. The word triptych is more usually applied to paintings, and the play is set in three triptych-like sections in which many of the key characters are notionally dead. The piece was first unveiled as a radio play in April 1979, receiving its stage premier in Lausanne six months later. The play was rejected for performance in Frankfurt am Main where it was deemed too apolitical. The Austrian premier in Vienna at the Burgtheater was seen by Frisch as a success, although the audience reaction to the complexity of the work's unconventional structure was still a little cautious.

In 1980, Frisch resumed contact with Alice Locke-Carey and the two of them lived together, alternately in New York City and in Frisch's cottage in Berzona, till 1984. By now Frisch had become a respected and from time to time honoured writer in the United States. He received an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 1980 and another from New York's City University in 1982. An English translation of the novella Man in the Holocene (Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän) was published by The New Yorker in May 1980, and was picked out by critics in The New York Times Book Review as the most important and most interesting published Narrative work of 1980. The story concerns a retired industrialist suffering from the decline in his mental faculties and the loss of the camaraderie which he used to enjoy with colleagues. Frisch was able, from his own experience of approaching old age, to bring a compelling authenticity to the piece, although he rejected attempts to play up its autobiographical aspects. After Man in the Holocene appeared in 1979 (in the German language edition) the author developed writer's block, which ended only with the appearance, in the Autumn/Fall of 1981 of his final substantial literary piece, the prose text/novella Bluebeard (Blaubart).

In 1984 Frisch returned to Zürich, where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1983 he began a relationship with his final life partner, Karen Pilliod. She was 25 years younger than he was.[20] In 1987 they visited Moscow and together took part in the "Forum for a world liberated from atomic weapons". After Frisch's death Pilliod let it be known that between 1952 and 1958 Frisch had also had an affair with her mother, Madeleine Seigner-Besson. 

In March 1989 he was diagnosed with incurable colorectal cancer. In the same year, in the context of the Swiss Secret files scandal, it was discovered that the national security services had been illegally spying on Frisch (as on many other Swiss citizens) ever since he had attended the International Peace Congress at Wrocław/Breslau in 1948.

Frisch now arranged his funeral, but he also took time to engage in discussion about the abolition of the army, and published a piece in the form of a dialogue on the subject titled Switzerland without an Army? A Palaver (Schweiz ohne Armee? Ein Palaver) There was also a stage version titled Jonas and his veteran (Jonas und sein Veteran). Frisch died on 4 April 1991 while in the middle of preparing for his 80th birthday. The funeral, which Frisch had planned with some care, took place on 9 April 1991 at St Peter's Church in Zürich. His friends Peter Bichsel and Michel Seigner spoke at the ceremony. Karin Pilliod also read a short address, but there was no speech from any church minister. Frisch was an agnostic who found religious beliefs superfluous. His ashes were later scattered on a fire by his friends at a memorial celebration back in Ticino at a celebration of his friends. A tablet on the wall of the cemetery at Berzona commemorates him.

Novels

• Antwort aus der Stille (1937, An Answer from the Silence)
• Stiller (1954, I'm Not Stiller)
• Homo Faber (1957)
• Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964, A Wilderness of Mirrors, reprinted later under Gantenbein)
• Dienstbüchlein (1974)
• Montauk (1975)
• Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979, Man in the Holocene)
• Blaubart (1982, Bluebeard)
• Wilhelm Tell für die Schule (1971, Wilhelm Tell: A School Text, published in Fiction Magazine 1978)

Journals

• Blätter aus dem Brotsack (1939)
• Tagebuch 1946–1949 (1950)
• Tagebuch 1966–1971 (1972)

Plays

• Nun singen sie wieder (1945)
• Santa Cruz (1947)
• Die Chinesische Mauer (1947, The Chinese Wall)
• Als der Krieg zu Ende war (1949, When the War Was Over)
• Graf Öderland (1951)
• Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1953, Firebugs)
• Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie (1953)
• Die Grosse Wut des Philipp Hotz (1956)
• Andorra (1961)
• Biografie (1967)
• Triptychon. Drei szenische Bilder (1978)
• Jonas und sein Veteran (1989)