SOURCE: White, Alfred D. “Max Frisch Revisited: Blaubart. Monatshefte 78, no. 4 (winter 1986): 456-67.

[In the following essay, White discusses the major thematic and stylistic elements of Blaubart.]

Frisch's Blaubart, Eine Erzählung was written in 1981. Interviewing Frisch for his seventieth birthday, Peter Wapnewski found him unenthusiastically at work on what is then described as a novel (the finished work is under 40,000 words).¹ In November Frisch read from the manuscript at a symposium in Graz.² From 22 February to 17 March 1982 Blaubart was serialized in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung before publication in book form.

Blaubart is based on an authentic Zürich Schwurgericht case.³ A doctor, Felix Schaad, several times divorced, has been accused of the murder of one of his ex-wives, Rosalinde Zogg, but acquitted, as the evidence is entirely circumstantial. At the outset he wrestles with the problem of his “Freispruch mangels Beweis” (8).⁴ It later appears he never heard this phrase, which has no basis in Swiss law, but imagined it (135). At any rate, such an acquittal is in effect a condemnation: his patients desert him because of the scandal and his ten months' absence in remand. “Ich habe jetzt Zeit wie noch nie” (19)—like Stiller in prison, Faber in hospital. He seems incommunicado; there are no patients in the waiting room, he can read the old magazines; his receptionist is a Yugoslav; nobody rings him up but his friend Neuenburger. Human relations, the busy practice, the succession of wives, yachting, social work, all lie behind him. The trial was traumatic for Schaad. He seems able to do little but contemplate it: “Drei Wochen nach dem Freispruch habe ich noch keinen einzigen Brief geschrieben, ich sitze immer noch da, die Arme verschränkt, wie vor Gericht” (22). Later he sells his practice and takes a trip to Japan.

The action is in his mind: memories of the trial and of his past life, musings, imaginary interrogations of himself and others. He examines his past and unearths, as did the court hearing, several examples of his potential for violence. Long ago, for instance, he was in a gang of boys who left another boy with his feet bound, to be discovered by the police days later (31f.). Rosalinde too had her feet bound by the murderer before being asphyxiated (35). “Seit meinem vierzehnten Lebensjahr habe ich nicht das Gefühl, unschuldig zu sein …” (73f.). One may suppose that as a child, not knowing what he was doing, he killed his pet rabbit with a razor (52); but his mother's divergent account, that he opened the body afterwards to find out why the rabbit had died, contradicts this argument and would serve as pointer to an early interest in medicine (141).

Much else in Schaad's past is equally difficult to assess. Seven times married, he is beset with varying views of him, which he would often like to see as misunderstandings. Remarks which he explains as jokes, or denies outright, or has forgotten, are produced in court to blacken his character. He has forgotten that he jokingly threatened to leave one wife behind if she was late for the train they planned to catch—but remembers actually doing so (53). Pfeifer remembers hearing him, when drunk, threaten to strangle Rosalinde (20); but another witness certifies he is “ein Mensch, der keiner Fliege auch nur ein Bein krümmen könnte” (22). He denies having said to his wife Andrea during a row “Dann fahre halt gegen einen Baum!” (116)—he finds it so terrible and so unlike him that he demanded a written retraction of the accusation at the time; but she still insists he said it. Such statements are continually adduced on one side or the other, and often they have little to do with reality: they have become stereotypes, fixed images of his behavior; they are no truer for having often been related among his acquaintances (21). The divergence of memories is exemplified much as in Rolf's story in Stiller: “Es gibt kein gemeinsames Gedächtnis” (58).

On Rosalinde's actual murder, the evidence in his favor seems slight; the finding of traces of his tobacco all over her flat except on her body is oddly underestimated as evidence (45). The circumstantial evidence against him, however, seems strong. The thought that he might, as the prosecutor says, have murdered her and suppressed the memory of it worries him (80): although he denies the murder (74, 87, 134) he must fill in the blank in his memory. Even if he did not kill her, he perhaps steered her towards her fate: after divorce from him she became a call-girl and thus at risk.⁵ This development is explained in terms of her character. Her father's exaggerated expectations of her made her lack self-confidence; the only field where she could count on success was the sexual, so from time to time, though no nymphomaniac, she needed her “Selbstbestätigung als Frau” (29) in a fresh affair. Schaad had an affair with her when both were married—indeed, she was having two affairs at once (90); yet Schaad, viewing her (by video) in the act with clients after their divorce, concludes that she found coitus itself at best “lustig” (78) and that “Das Bett war für Rosalinde kein sehr persönlicher Bezirk” (78); more, she “habe nie eine sexuelle Erfüllung erlebt” (130). “Im Grunde ist sie ein Kamerad” (29) is the nearest we get to an explanation of their marrying; presumably it should have been clear that she would deceive him, yet he is “überrascht” (30) to find out about her affair with Jan when it has been going on for a year.

More specifically, Schaad belatedly remembers often having seen lilies in her flat (164) and having sent her five lilies on the afternoon of her death—though lilies are to his conscious mind a kitschy flower which he would never buy (163). Some lilies were found lying on the body (luckily the police did not trace them back to Schaad!). One can then reconstruct the chain of events: the anonymous sending of flowers as a test of a wife's reactions is one of the jealous Schaad's bad habits (49); he sent lilies to Rosalinde, a bad joke expressing residual jealousy of her and enmity towards the regular provider of lilies. At this point the murder itself is still not cleared up: either Schaad went to the flat and killed her, or the giver of lilies was made jealous by the appearance that he had a rival. Eventually we find the latter is the forensic truth. Even so, sending lilies on the fatal day was a thoughtless act for a man who claims to understand women (29). He has much to reproach himself with, and must accept guilt, whether the specific guilt of murder, guilt as a contributor to the circumstances, guilt as her potential murderer, or guilt as a generally violent person.⁶

At the broadest level, Schaad's potential for violence links him to many if not all members of the human race. A number of Nazi torturers who have come to trial recently have like him been acquitted for lack of proof.⁷ And the title links him to the legendary Bluebeard, killer of seven wives. Thus as in Homo faber and Mein Name sei Gantenbein Frisch provides a mythic correlative to point up the universality of his protagonist's underlying behavior-patterns. Under the skin, Schaad is a Bluebeard. Bluebeard insists on absolute obedience from his wives, who die because they penetrate his secret room;⁸ Schaad expects to have things his own way. Though he observes civilized conventions, though his weapon is the divorce court and not the cutlass, though he behaves amicably to his ex-wives, he has the same destructive passion as Bluebeard,⁹ or as the real murderer Grammaticos, who unlike Schaad does not sublimate his violent urges.

Guilt is incurred, as often with Frisch, within marriage. “Stiller erscheint als Rollenvariante Schaads, der sich schuldlos zu machen versucht, indem er sich dazu verurteilt, nicht der Ehemann seiner (frigiden) Frau zu sein.”¹⁰ Schaad comments on the trial: “Wenn Gattinnen einvernommen werden, ist die Tribüne voll; auch für Studenten ist die Ehe, so scheint es, immer noch ein Problem” (48). Frisch's oblique answer to critics who accuse him of repeating himself in his obsession with an outworn subject. For Frisch, continually changing social attitudes prevent the subject from growing stale. Schaad is an eternal male trying to come to terms with the changes in attitudes to marriage and women's social role over the last twenty years. Despite knowing a wife is “nicht ein Dienstmädchen” (109), he has made his wives feel unduly dependent on him, both in straightforward economic terms, and for instance by completing their tax returns for them (76). The words “Blaubart” and “Ritter” go together. “Felix ist ritterlich” (119), says his current wife Jutta, inventor of the pet-name Blaubart. Chivalry is murderous. Schaad seems still, despite all surface equality, to expect all to go “nach Ihren männlichen Wünschen” (53). He is very jealous: “zärtlich, aber ein possessiver Typ” (61). So how can he be cool about the trade Rosalinde took up after divorce from him? He explains his tolerance of her visitors by his now knowing what she was doing (12), but the supposition that he killed her out of jealousy (36) is still plausible.

But he also states that he loved her (27) and that divorce was intended to help her to fulfil herself sexually by escaping from what seemed to be his limiting influence (131). For him, love means marriage; but when marriage turns out to be a constraint on her, then although the love on his part still survives, the marriage must be given up. During the time of the narration, Jutta moves from the stage of casual adultery to the belief that she must leave Schaad for good because she feels deeply for Herbert (120f.); and he seems to do nothing to keep her. After seven marriages, Schaad still overestimates sex; he still idealistically presses each woman he loves to marry him; and when abandoned he still chivalrously swallows his own feelings and lets his wife do what she finds right. Perhaps this accounts for the “gestaute Emotionalität” (97) observed by the psychiatrist who reports on Schaad for the court. He is still expecting too much of marriage, and he expects too much of himself in repressing his feelings so as not to stand in the way of his successive wives. Perhaps he should have fought harder for his marriages? As it is, he becomes ridiculous because he can never both understand and keep a woman; he has got to the point where he cannot clearly distinguish Andrea and Corinne (112).

The stresses placed on Schaad by marriage and the trial result in psychological abnormalities, perhaps best summed up as a traumatic neurosis, or state of mental conflict brought on by stress. Such states are marked by inappropriate reactions to the world around, and characterized by difficulty in reconciling the demands of society with the desires of the self, or conscience with instinct. Schaad's conflict is the latter, internal one. Social influences are at work only in that he refuses to kill himself or emigrate because it would seem to be a “nachträgliches Geständnis” (136). Franz Josef Görtz thinks that in the way he tries to come to terms with his situation he resembles Stiller in being “in eine Rolle gedrängt, die zu spielen man ihm abverlangt, weil niemand sonst sie übernehmen mag,” the role of Rosalinde's supposed murderer; and that he is like Gantenbein in trying to adapt by hiding behind a mask—he is the Frischian man “der nicht der sein will, für den, nach Lage der Dinge, alle ihn halten müssen.”¹¹ But in fact Schaad pays little attention to others, shakes off the traumatically disturbing memory of the prosecutor in court (85), outstares the curious who watch him playing billiards for a prurient thrill (142), scorns Neuenburger's clumsy approaches, registers his yacht club's attitude to the scandal dispassionately (153), and makes an honest attempt to find out whether he is really guilty.

A primary symptom of Schaad's neurosis is amnesia—the involuntary banishment of what would otherwise be intolerably painful memories or experiences, in this case of the day of the murder. (Since he was not the murderer, what these experiences were remains unclear.) The alibis he gives for the time of the murder—driving into the country and walking in the woods, preparing his tax return in his surgery, or at the cinema—are mere guesses (17f.); that he was drunk, as shown by the garage owner's evidence (106), might explain his total lack of recall—he has in the past said things when drunk which he did not remember afterwards (55)—but that the amnesia extends to his morning meeting with Rosalinde, before he got drunk (157, 165). So uncertain is he of his statements about outer reality that he is even glad to have it confirmed that the quarry where he often leaves his car is between Zumikon and Ebmatingen (32). His interrogations of himself point to depersonalization, also a neurotic trait.

There are, however, signs of a grosser disturbance of his thought, a psychosis accompanied by disorientation in space, time and identity, mental processes independent of the environment, delusions, and inattention. Schaad seems to attempt three psychotic evasions of guilt. Firstly, visiting a country inn, he three times tries to phone Rosalinde (41), as if time could be reversed, it were still the day of the murder, and he could interrupt whatever is happening in her flat; but he cannot escape his conscience thus. Secondly, he again tries to put the clock back when he feels “wie zu Hause” in the antique shop whose owner has bought some of his furniture from an ex-wife (66); but he does not repeat the visit. Thirdly, he regrets the loss of his first wife, who gave him no grounds for jealousy (92f.); shared immaturity ended their marriage. Schaad seems to see a potential, less guilty life he could have had; but he does not dwell on it. In Japan we find him musing that a description of experiences there “reicht nicht für ein Alibi” (97). An alibi for what? Perhaps the compulsion to prove even things that can only be of personal significance reflects the persecution mania the psychiatrist's report mentions, which seems to have started from marital jealousy (80): he is establishing alibis in respect of any crimes now being committed, trying to show that though perhaps a potential killer he is not an actual one. (Some of his actions in the country inn suggest the same thing.) Persecution mania is a common paranoid state, and as such psychotic. On the other hand the tendency to paranoia offers a certain relief from guilt towards others when it turns against himself and becomes masochistic. Schaad (like Stiller) is egocentric (not egoistic), as his wise sixteen-year-old son says (42): the exaggerated self-reference of the paranoid personality. He thinks of himself as responsible for all that goes on around him, and thus blames himself for his quarrels. Gisel describes how he would destroy his shirt, glasses or best pipes when he wished to punish her (autobiographical traits already confessed in Montauk); she concludes he would not have strangled a woman—“Eher erwürgt er sich selber” (111). However, the interpretation of Schaad's state in general as psychotic is dubious because he does not persist in his delusions and evasions, is able to see when his reactions to reality are inappropriate, and finally reaches mental clarity by self-analysis without medical aid. It seems unlikely that even a doctor could cure his own psychosis. The psychiatric report too says that the paranoid element (which it connects with alcoholism—Schaad is a heavy drinker) never gets the upper hand for more than a few hours at a time (97).

Schaad's dreams, offered as material for interpretation (162), provide hints about his mental state too. He dreams of a cross which he wanted to drive into the roadway behind his car like a large iron accident warning triangle (94f.). While he tries to do this, the car is stolen. At first unidentified, the cross is then associated with the church at Ratzwil where his mother is buried—he had suppressed this aspect (152). Only after his memory is thus shown to be playing him false does he entertain the thought that he might actually have killed Rosalinde and suppressed the memory of the deed. This dream graphically represents a mother-fixation: the cross associated with her (and representative of conscience or morality) denotes immobility and is opposed to the car, by means of which he could escape moral constraints. Frisch backs up the symbolism: the garage where, before the murder, Schaad finds that his car is not yet ready for collection—so that he cannot spend the afternoon in the country, but gets drunk in town—is on the Kreuzplatz (104). And it is to Ratzwil that he eventually goes to confess to the police. Later he dreams of a woman giving him three pills and of a revolver with which he three times tries to kill himself not going off; he is humiliated when her new friends (she must be one of his ex-wives) see him being too cowardly to kill himself (131-3). It is a failure or impotence dream. He dreams also of a fish which half-eats a snake and dies in the attempt (161). This could symbolize the moral and intellectual side of him attempting in vain to control the sexual and passionate side. All in all, he emerges as a man who in search of some ideal of marriage perhaps determined by a mother-fixation has subjected himself to unbearable strains; and he feels guilty because of the results of this stress, guilt in turn producing more stress in a psychological vicious circle.

The circle is broken by his acceptance of guilt, but this is a slow process, continually interrupted by his attempts to exculpate himself and show his good character, as well as by the evasions which show his mental imbalance. Thus he presents himself as intelligent, open, helpful: his uncondescending manner allowed him to talk Rossi out of suicide (88); he is sensitive to the hypocrisy of a funeral where the minister did not know the deceased (129) (at least, this is his excuse for not going to Rosalinde's funeral); he has fought drug addition and pollution, he served as a doctor in Biafra, and a string of other good works—“was auch zur Wahrheit gehört” (106)—is put in rather as an afterthought (like the description of Svoboda's work in Gantenbein) because a biography consists “nicht bloß aus Ehen” (107). Schaad also tries with no lasting success to get relief from his inner voices by distractions such as hiking (49), brothels (98) and reading the newspaper (122). The cinema is little use because he has become sensitive to violent scenes (85). Alcohol at one point seems to help by giving him the freedom, like Kürmann in Biografie, to imagine a different past course of action; some useful insights are gained, but not comforting ones. Even when drunk he knows, “Ich bin nicht unschuldig” (73); and rather than living in his alcoholic imaginings, he sobers up and returns to painful self-analysis in the here and now, “in der Praxis” (75). He cannot and does not wish to avoid occupying himself with guilt.

After accepting guilt and confessing to the police (a confession which, being in literal terms false, is not accepted), he drives his car into a tree at high speed. This “accident” conflates Stiller's suicide attempt and the car accident of the narrator in Gantenbein. Schaad's identity is not dubious like that of those figures. He lacks their complexity. Reinhard Baumgart sees Blaubart as a story of a man aging, prematurely cold and rigid: “der hätte nicht mehr die Kraft, ein Buch lang zu behaupten: Ich bin nicht Stiller! Und schon gar nicht die Phantasie, sich den Namen Gantenbein und die Abenteuer der neuen Haut zu wünschen.”¹² Indeed, there is some Torschlußpanik in Schaad's successive marriages, each shorter than the last because “Das Leben wird kürzer” (98). But surely his failure to demand a fresh identity is a sign of moral progress: he has realized that although the facts of his biography are fortuitous, uncertain and open to misrepresentation, the man whose image emerges from the totality of these facts is himself; and he accepts the responsibility of being himself, with his guilt—a guilt which, whether it is actual or potential, he takes most seriously, to the point of self-rejection. He is his own harshest judge. Among a set of characters who are isolated and interested in their own pleasures and ambitions, he stands out with his absolute moral standards. There is something religious about his attitude; in a way m.v.¹³ is right that the court could represent the Last Judgment.

What we know is entirely mediated by Schaad. Even what reads like a transcript of a witness's examination in court is his memory at a later time of that dialogue. It seems a reliable memory; he remembers exchanges in court convincingly and apparently fairly completely, though he sometimes omits the lawyer's questions to pass straight on to the answers (thus 14f.). Then the remembered trial fades imperceptibly into imagined questionings of himself, starting (at the latest) with “Wieso stapfen Sie durch Unterholz?” (36). The questioner in this case is like the Registrator in Biografie or the interlocutor in the early version of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän,¹⁴ inviting answers to such comments as “Sie lieben Unterholz” (36), reminding him that the film he saw while waiting for Jutta was “Fellini” (143), objecting “Das haben Sie vor Gericht nicht erwähnt” (163), telling him he has suppressed things vital to the case from his memory (152), which is otherwise good enough to remember details of a film seen eighteen months ago (18). His increasingly intensive self-analysis eventually pays off: walking in the forest—“wo kein Richter fragt” (164)—he remembers about the lilies. Also interspersed among his memories are imagined interrogations of others, which enable him to see his behavior in the present through the eyes of the cemetery groundsman Knapp (122) and the waitress in the country inn (140), and in the past from the perspective of his dead parents (137, 141). Imagined interrogations are also the form in which he reacts to current experience, such as Jutta's delayed return from Kenya (144-9); and the form for extracting—in imagination—the truth from others. Interrogating Jutta, the questioner insists on her claim to be irreplaceable during filming work, as a lever to get information about her intimacy with the cameraman Herbert (145). To sum up, the whole complex bears out Frisch's remark to Arthur Zimmerman in 1981: “Die Ästhetik des Infragestellens, wie Sie es nennen, das ist tatsächlich eine durchgehende Methode in meiner literarischen Arbeit. Sie wird bei der neuen Erzählung, wenn diese zustande kommt, extrem ausgeprägt sein.”¹⁵

It is a spare, tightly-written work. Baumgart finds the observed world much reduced, objects functioning only as clues, Schaad's activities mere work-therapy, the whole as bare and meaningful as a Japanese garden, the plot skeletal: all lines, no color. Sibylle Cramer sees the work's formal qualities:

Der Text entfaltet einen kunstvollen Sprechrhythmus von Einzelstimme und forensischen Chorpartien, in denen die epische Sprache dramatisiert und das heißt auf den ersten Blick objektiviert wird … Eine rhetorische Choreographie, deren Bewegungsgesetze, deren Kräftekalkülationen im spielerischen Modell des Billardspiels, aber auch der Wanderungen Schaads abgebildet werden.

The game of billiards has two functions. It is a comfortingly mathematical distraction (like Frisch's typical chess) and also a physical occupation needing sureness of hand (like the also typical table tennis). Only when the opponent plays does Schaad run over the trial in his mind (8f.). He can also play on his own, scattering the balls by hand to chance positions (9f.): this makes him even less dependent on human company than the chess or table tennis player (though Max did play chess against himself in Montauk). But it also puts billiards in parallel with self-interrogation: there, too, cheating is useless; like an awkward lie at billiards, an awkward question will not go away of its own accord; and there, too, a second participant is unnecessary. The geometrical, sparse elegance of solo billiards reflects the structure of the book as a whole, which concentrates on one man and one event, not dwelling on descriptions or marginalia, and thus creating what has been called a Giacometti effect:¹⁶ the less material used, the greater the echo produced.

Information is released in measured doses, and the form of detective novel is respected in that vital clues, disguised or left hanging on first appearance, are fitted into place at the very end. The narrative stance is much like the interior monologue of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, but explanatory passages, seemingly addressed to a reader, such as a description of how to play billiards solo (9f.), suggest to me that Schaad writes down his thoughts (perhaps, in view of his paranoia, as a defense against any fresh accusations leveled at him).

The style is prosaic: Frisch tries to be honest and down to earth. A simile such as “Ackerschollen schwarz wie Speckschwarten” (150f.) can be contrasted with the younger Frisch's poetic evocations of ploughed fields. Yet the phrase is also intended symbolically, as a hint of early spring, a fresh start, a new life. There is much symbolism. The lilies represent, if not actual virginity, a sort of sexual innocence. Schaad's nakedness in the sauna (like that of the patient in Gantenbein), alone with his self-questionings yet bared to others' curiosity (48), implies something to be ashamed of, rather than primal innocence; “ich komme mir nackter vor als die anderen” (49), the attendant and other bathers intrusively aware of his past (51). Then there are such things as the suggestive asparagus spears (90f.), and the ambiguous Holzwege (woodmen's tracks, or false trails) Schaad habitually follows in the woods (36). Touches of melancholy humor include Schaad's alcoholic gratitude to the usher (73) and Isolde Bickel's testimony that she had an idea Schaad must be Rosalinde's ex-husband because he never brought her champagne (25).

There are autobiographical elements. Schaad wears a Frischian “Baskenmütze” (38). Frisch mentions also “daß ich—christlich erzogen, nicht gläubig—Schuldgefühle habe, aber nicht weiß, worin die Schuld besteht,” and that he like Schaad cannot simply emigrate because it would be misunderstood.¹⁷ Neuenburger, with his studies of astronomy and Einstein (100) and his love of Bordeaux (131), has generally been seen as a portrait of Dürrenmatt, who lives at Neuchâtel. Those who have experienced Dürrenmattian erudition, or read the description of him in Tagebuch 1966-1971 (GW 6:232f.), will recognize the expansive self-satisfaction of Neuenburger's speeches to the court. Frisch is known to be sensitive to what Dürrenmatt says about him “hintenherum” (103), as Schaad is to Neuenburger. Finally, Neuenburger characteristically asks whether Schaad expected anything but “eine Komödie” (131) from his trial. However, the whole form of the story, the symbolic Krimi, suggests that Frisch is not above taking a leaf out of Dürrenmatt's books.

Critics are always, rightly, on the lookout for parallels with Frisch's previous works. Thus m.v. sees Schaad's “Weg der völligen Resignation, Vereinsamung und Selbstaufgabe” as Geiser's in Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän—quite wrongly, for Schaad is aware of the ethical basis of existence and Geiser is not. Sibylle Cramer lists many (more or less convincing) parallels with Stiller. The revolver dream is for her only comprehensible in the light of Stiller; the quarry whose rock strata represent Schaad's petrified guilt is borrowed from Gantenbein; Schaad is “ein Selbstzitat Frischs,” the whole so reduced, mummified and enciphered that it has life only in relation to the rest of the œuvre: “Nahrung für die Frisch-Philologie.” However many figures Frisch imagines, she says, he is in the end always evoking the same biography, his own.

There are indeed many reminiscences of earlier Frisch in addition to those already mentioned, and knowledge of previous works does help the reader's work of association and interpretation. Occasionally significant contrasts are found. Thus Grammaticos, like Stepan in Als der Krieg zu Ende war, speaks no German (23) and presumably cannot talk to Rosalinde, but Frisch takes back the view of that play that lack of linguistic communication is an aid to mutual understanding. Kloten, a vital scene in Zürich-Transit, is mentioned here (104) for no apparent reason except perhaps to remind us that whereas there Ehrismann abandoned his previous life, here Schaad accepts his. But more often analogies appear—here are some of the more important ones. Schaad like Rolf in Stiller is a jealous husband who walks up and down declaiming (57, 112), throws a cup at the wall (57f.), sulks for days and then goes abroad, to Vienna in his case (62); some of this takes place in a Jugendstilhaus since demolished, parallel to the sanatorium in Stiller, and perhaps symbolic of the irrecoverability of the past and of his having forgotten (repressed) such episodes. Like Schinz in Tagebuch 1946-1949 Schaad walks his dog in the woods when under emotional stress (113f.). In both cases, as in Stiller and in Hesse's Steppenwolf, a state of self-awareness with psychotic elements is contrasted with the shallowness of the Normalbürger. The sprayed slogan “Jesus ist Sieger” (15), the only appearance of religion here, reminds me of the ironically-named Viktor in Skizze eines Unglücks in Tagebuch 1966-1971. Schaad, his potency dubious, is like Viktor sensitive to a woman's accusations that he makes mistakes all the time, even in the surgery perhaps, where, as we know from Viktor, the doctor should be godlike; but no mere human is infallible (107f.). Another stress on personality is known from Stiller: the difficulty of personal experience in the age of reproduction. One can see almost anything at second hand through films. “Steingärten usw., die Perlenfischerinnen in Sowieso, das kennt man, auch wenn man nie in Japan gewesen ist” (97). Indeed Schaad could have had hints on Japan from Tagebuch 1966-1971,¹⁸ though a magazine in his waiting room is a better source.

But all the repeated elements (and the autobiographical) are fitted into a quite new context and often need a fresh interpretation. When Schaad discusses local geology, for instance (137-40), we are in the world of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (a work, incidentally, largely free of this teasing self-quotation): rocks last longer than men, possibly longer than mankind; the granite mentioned here is an emblem of endurance, both generally (the reader with no knowledge of Frisch could work it out) and specifically in Tagebuch 1966-1971. But Blaubart adds a new geological element, the erratic block, a rock alien to the environment in which it is found. This symbol is not at all hermetic.

The author's art lies less in producing original material than in arranging and combining elements from various sources. It is the new constellation of the fresh narrative that counts. The validity of individual elements is not impaired by their being borrowed; in this, artistic truth is like any other truth. Blaubart does not repeat the structure of any other of Frisch's works. The narrative viewpoint has an artful simplicity like that of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, but put at the service of the portrayal of a man coming to terms with himself. The subjectivity links it to Gantenbein, but Schaad eschews games with biography, standing to his past rather than trying to find alibis in other potential courses of events. Unlike the narrator there, he does have something to say to the police. Unlike Stiller who wants to deny his past, or Kürmann who wants to adapt it, Schaad is willing to be judged by the totality of his past actions. The attempt at pure honesty in Blaubart links it to Montauk, but the auto-intertextual and confessional elements are reduced here to incidentals—just enough to establish that Schaad stands in the line of Frisch's protagonists who seek self-knowledge, identity, self-acceptance: Reinhart, Stiller, the later Faber, the Buch-Ich of Gantenbein, Max in Montauk. In Montauk Frisch had to adopt an autobiographical pose in order to prove his honesty as a writer: he opens himself (and his previous works) for examination in order to show that he has always been trying (with varying degrees of success) to express ethical truths in his work and not indulging in inconsequential play-acting or games with identity. Once done, this breast-baring need not be repeated. But Schaad pays dearly, even more so than Max in Montauk, for the ethical satisfaction of taking responsibility for his self as it has developed in the course of a real biography: the potential for change and development insisted on by earlier protagonists is limited, he knows himself, his character holds no further surprises for him—and he rejects himself.¹⁹

Notes

1. Peter Wapnewski: “Schreiben ist Notwehr,” Stern no. 21 (14 May 1981) 252f. Some pages from the working typescript dated “Sommer 1981” are reproduced in Max Frisch, Dossier, ed. Arthur Zimmermann (Berne, 1981) 88-91.

2. See Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Fernausgabe (26 November 1981).

3. Hans Keller was accused of murder in February 1980 but eventually found not guilty. Frisch attended all but three of the 68 hours of proceedings, which he says he found “zum Teil ungeheuer komisch.” (Quoted in Volker Hage: “Nur noch das Artistische ist möglich,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung no. 234 (8 October 1983).

4. Page references are to the first edition (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982).

5. See Hans Mayer's review in Die Zeit no. 17 (23 April 1982).

6. See Peter Wapnewski's review in Stern no. 15 (7 April 1982) 138.

7. See for example an article headed “Freispruch mangels Beweises darf nicht das letzte Wort sein,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung no. 93 (21 April 1979), on the Majdanek trial in Düsseldorf.

8. Frisch, Gesammelte Werke, (Frankfurt a.M., 1976) 5:106, hinted at the necessity of secrets in marriage in Gantenbein, whether ironically or not: “erst das Geheimnis, das sie voreinander hüten, macht sie zum Paar.”

9. Frisch mentions Perrault, whose version of the Bluebeard story is the earliest known; but his reference to the “Märchen von dem Ritter, der seine sieben Gattinnen umbringt” (121) suggests he is following not Perrault, who does not describe Bluebeard as a knight, but one of the many variations on him. The concept of Bluebeard as a knight is common in the German-speaking world. Der große Brockhaus of 1953 refers to “Der Ritter mit dem bläulich schimmernden Bart.” Perrault text in translation, and notes, in Iona Opie and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (London, 1980) 133-41.

10. Sibylle Cramer: “Mein Name sei Blaubart,” Frankfurter Rundschau (26 June 1982). I am also indebted to S. Cramer for some further parallels between Blaubart and other works.

11. Introducing the serialization of Blaubart in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (20 February 1982).

12. Der Spiegel no. 16 (19 April 1982) 264-7, here 264.

13. The reviewer in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 77, Fernausgabe (3 April 1982).

14. Fragment aus einer Erzählung, Gesammelte Werke, 12:522-534.

15. Max Frisch, Dossier 43.

16. By Sven Birkerts, quoted in Gody Suter, “Roter Teppich für Blaubart,” Die Weltwoche (6 July 1983).

17. Statements made to Volker Hage (see note 3).

18. But only if he possessed the extended version published in GW: references to pebble gardens and massage, GW, 6:429f.

19. Since writing this article I have seen Walter Schmitz, Max Frisch: Das Spätwerk (1962-1982), Eine Einführung (Tübingen 1985), which adds further interesting points.