Questionnaire max frisch biography

Posted By Susan Bernofsky 1 Comment ». Kerry says:. May 16, at am. Apply now! Who's Afraid of Spiders? Oh, Banff! Let Beckett Help! Want to Go to Lithuania? Submit Here! Interviewed by PEN! So What Is 'Voice' Anyhow? Translator, Meet Thy Author! Frisch's questionnaires max frisch biography tend to be centred on male protagonists, around which his leading female characters, virtually interchangeable, fulfil a structural and focused function.

Often they are idolised as "great" and "wonderful", superficially emancipated and stronger than the men. However, they actually tend to be driven by petty motivations: disloyalty, greed and unfeelingness. In the author's later works the female characters become increasingly one-dimensional, without evidencing any inner ambivalence. Often the women are reduced to the role of a simple threat to the man's identity, or the object of some infidelity, thereby catalysing the successes or failings of the male's existence, so providing the male protagonist with an object for his own introspection.

For the most part, the action in the male-female relationship in a work by Frisch comes from the woman, while the man remains passive, waiting and reflective. Superficially the woman is loved by the man, but in truth she is feared and despised. From her thoughtfully feminist perspective, Karin Struck saw Frisch's male protagonists manifesting a high level of dependency on the female characters, but the women remain strangers to them.

The men are, from the outset, focused on the ending of the relationship: they cannot love because they are preoccupied with escaping from their own failings and anxieties. Often they conflate images of womanliness with images of death, as in Frisch's take on the Don Juan legend: "The woman reminds me of death, the more she seems to blossom and thrive".

Death is an ongoing theme in Frisch's work, but during his early and heyday periods it remains in the background, overshadowed by identity issues and relationships problems. Only with his later works does death become a core question. Frisch's second published Diary Tagebuch launches the theme. A key sentence from the Diary — publishedrepeated several times, is a quotation from Montaigne : "So I dissolve; and I lose myself.

Although political demands are incorporated, social aspects remain secondary to the central concentration on the self. The Diary 's fragmentary and hastily structured informality sustains a melancholy underlying mood. The answers reveal the complexity of the topics covered and confront the reader with contradictions. Frisch's aim is to show, through irony, how one should think correctly.

The narrative Montauk also deals with old age. The autobiographically drawn protanonist's lack of much future throws the emphasis back onto working through the past and an urge to live for the present. In the drama-piece, Triptychondeath is presented not necessarily directly, but as a way of referencing life metaphorically. Death reflects the ossification of human community, and in this way becomes a device for shaping lives.

The narrative Man in the Holocene presents the dying process of an old man as a return to nature. According to Cornelia Steffahn there is no single coherent image of death presented in Frisch's late works. Instead they describe the process of his own evolving engagement with the issue, and show the way his own attitudes developed as he himself grew older.

Along the way he works through a range of philosophical influences including MontaigneKierkegaardLars Gustafsson and even Epicurus. Frisch described himself as a socialist but never joined the political party. After Victory in Europe Day the threat to Swiss values and to the independence of the Swiss state diminished. Frisch now underwent a rapid transformation, evincing a committed political consciousness.

In particular, he became highly critical of attempts to divide cultural values from politics, noting in his Diary — : "He who does not engage with politics is already a partisan of the political outcome that he wishes to avoid, because he is serving the ruling party. That generates opposition to the ruling order, the privileging of individual partisanship over activity on behalf of a social class, and an emphasis on asking questions.

Frisch's social criticism was particularly sharp in respect of his Swiss homeland. In a much quoted speech that he gave when accepting the Schiller Prize he declared: "I am Swiss, not simply because I hold a Swiss passport, was born on Swiss soil etc. They do not eat up prosperity, on the contrary, they are essential for prosperity". A characteristic pattern in Frisch's life was the way that periods of intense political engagement alternated with periods of retreat back to private concerns.

Bettina Jaques-Bosch saw this as a succession of slow oscillations by the author between public outspokenness and inner melancholy. Interviewed inFrisch acknowledged that his literary career had not been marked by some "sudden breakthrough" " In his 20s he was already having pieces published in various newspapers and journals. As a young writer he also had work accepted by an established publishing house, the Munich based Deutschen Verlags-Anstaltwhich already included a number of distinguished German-language authors on its lists.

In Frisch switched publishers again, this time to the arguably more mainstream publishing house then being established in Frankfurt by Peter Suhrkamp. It was only inwith Count Oederlandthat Frisch experienced his "first stage-flop". I'm Not Stiller started with a print-run that provided for sales of 3, in its first year, [ 67 ] but thanks to strong and growing reader demand it later became the first book published by Suhrkamp to top one million copies.

Apart from a few early works, most of Frisch's books and plays have been translated into around ten languages, while the most translated of all, Homo Faberhas been translated into twenty-five languages. The scholar Hans Mayer likened them to the mythical half-twins, Castor and Polluxas two dialectically linked "antagonists". Ina minute episode of the multinationally produced television series Creative Persons was devoted to Frisch.

Walterand Adolf Muschg. More than a generation after that, inwhen it was the turn of Swiss literature to be the special focus [ 76 ] at the Frankfurt Book Fairthe literary commentator Andreas Isenschmid identified some leading Swiss writers from his own baby-boomer generation such as Ruth SchweikertDaniel de Roulet and Silvio Huonder in whose works he had found "a curiously familiar old tone, resonating from all directions, and often almost page by page, uncanny echoes from Max Frisch's Stiller.

The works of Frisch were also important in West Germany. Translations of Frisch's works into the languages of other formally socialist countries in the Eastern Bloc were also widely available, leading the author himself to offer the comment that in the Soviet Union his works were officially seen as presenting the "symptoms of a sick capitalist society, symptoms that would never be found where the means of production have been nationalized".

He was generally questionnaire max frisch biography regarded by the New York literary establishment: one commentator found him commendably free of "European arrogance". Petersen reckons that Frisch's stage work had little influence on other dramatists. And his own preferred form of the "literary diary" failed to create a new trend in literary genres.

By contrast, the novels I'm Not Stiller and Gantenbein have been widely taken up as literary models, because of the way they home in on questions of individual identity and on account of their literary structures. Issues of personal identity are presented not simply through description or interior insights, but through narrative contrivances.

This stylistic influence can be found frequently in the works of others, such as Christa Wolf 's The Quest for Christa T. Frisch also found himself featuring as a "character" in the literature of others. Adolf Muschgpurporting to address Frisch directly on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, contemplates the older man's contribution: "Your position in the history of literature, how can it be described?

You have not been, in conventional terms, an innovator… I believe you have defined an era through something both unobtrusive and fundamental: a new experimental ethos and pathos.

Questionnaire max frisch biography

Your books form deep literary investigation from an act of the imagination. He is himself always at the heart of the matter. His matter is the matter. The film director Alexander J. Seiler believes that Frisch had for the most part an "unfortunate relationship" with film, even though his literary style is often reminiscent of cinematic technique.

Seiler explains that Frisch's work was often, in the author's own words, looking for ways to highlight the "white space" between the words, which is something that can usually only be achieved using a film-set. Already, in the Diary — there is an early questionnaire max frisch biography for a film-script, titled Harlequin. For the novels I'm Not Stiller and Homo Faber there were several film proposals, one of which involved casting the actor Anthony Quinn in Homo Faberbut none of these proposals was ever realised.

It is nevertheless interesting that several of Frisch's dramas were filmed for television adaptations. This was based on a sketch from one of Frisch's Diaries. The prize is awarded every four years and comes with a CHF 50, payment to the winner. The occasion was also celebrated by an exhibition at the Munich Literature Centre which carried the suitably enigmatic tagline, "Max Frisch.

Heimweh nach der Fremde" and another exhibition at the Museo Onsernonese in Lococlose to the Ticinese cottage to which Frisch regularly retreated over several decades. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item.

Swiss playwrighter and novelist — Early years and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Journalism [ edit ]. First novel [ edit ]. Architecture [ edit ]. Theatre [ edit ]. Travels in post-war Europe [ edit ]. Success as a novelist [ edit ]. As a dramatist [ edit ]. Second marriage and living in other countries [ edit ]. Later life and death [ edit ].

Literary output [ edit ]. Genres [ edit ]. The diary as a literary form [ edit ]. Narrative form [ edit ]. Dramas [ edit ]. Style and language [ edit ]. Themes and motifs [ edit ]. Image vs. Relationships between the sexes [ edit ]. Transience and death [ edit ]. Political aspects [ edit ]. Recognition [ edit ]. Success as a writer and as a dramatist [ edit ].

Reputation in Switzerland and internationally [ edit ]. Influence and significance [ edit ]. Film [ edit ]. Awards and honors [ edit ]. Major works [ edit ]. Further information: Max Frisch bibliography. Novels [ edit ]. Journals [ edit ]. Plays [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. In Suzanne M. Bourgoin and Paula K. Byers, Encyclopedia of World Biography.

Detroit: Gale Research, Retrieved 18 April Max Frisch. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,p. In Heinz Ludwig Arnold ed. Sturz durch alle Spiegel: Eine Bestandsaufnahme. In Bartram, Graham ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN Die Zeit in German. Retrieved 8 July Der Spiegel in German. Retrieved 10 July In: Walter Schmitz Hrsg.

Suhrkamp, Seite Der Tages-Anzeiger. Retrieved 11 July In Heinz Ludwig Arnold Hrsg. Mein Name sei Gantenbein. Untersuchungen und Anmerkungen. Joachim Beyer Verlag, 2. Auflage Fragment einer Kritik. In: Thomas Beckermann Hrsg. Seite 8—9. Die Dramen. Literaturwissenpp. De Gruyter, Berlinpp. In: Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge.

Dritter Band. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Mainp. Man umstellt es. Man gibt Aussagen, die nie unser eigentliches Erlebnis enthalten, das unsagbar bleibt Werner Stauffacher: Sprache und Geheimnis. Erster Band. Second volume. In: Collected works chronologically sequenced Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge. Are you conscious of being in the wrong in relation to some other person who need not necessarily be aware of it?

If so, does this make you hate yourself — or the other person? Give the name of a politician whose death through illness, accident, etc. Or do you consider none of them indispensible? If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority? Yes or no. Which do you find it easier to hate, a group or an individual?

And do you prefer to hate individually or as part of a group? When did you stop believing you could become wiser — or do you still believe it? Give your age. What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself? If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse?