SOURCE: Helmetag, Charles H. “Volker Schlöndorff's ‘American’ Film Adaptation of Max Frisch's Homo faber.” Monatshefte 87, no. 4 (winter 1995): 446-56.

[In the following essay, Helmetag discusses the 1991 cinematic adaptation of Frisch's Homo faber, particularly the attempts to “Americanize” the story.]

Luchino Visconti and Bernhard Wicki considered making a film version of Max Frisch's 1957 novel Homo faber but dropped their plans, in part due to the high production costs resulting from the many locations utilized in the novel. Paramount offered Volker Schlöndorff the opportunity to direct a movie version in 1978, but it was not until 1991, after experiencing a midlife crisis of his own, that he actually was able to bring the book to the screen. Schlöndorff's journal entries recounting his collaboration with Frisch on the film from January 1988 until the film was previewed three years later, shortly before Frisch's death, were published in the New York Times Book Review in April 1992. In order to get such a wide-ranging motion picture made, if it was to “sell internationally,”¹ it had to be filmed in English with an American actor in the central role. As a result, Schlöndorff made certain changes in the plot. The present article will discuss Schlöndorff's adaptation, with emphasis on his “Americanizing” alterations of Frisch's novel.

Schlöndorff's international success as a filmmaker can be attributed to several factors: his frequent recourse to well-known literary works as the basis for his screenplays, the “comparative ease and accessibility of Schlöndorff's style”² and, particularly since the late 1970s, his preference for big productions with multinational financing and international stars.³ Thomas Elsaesser speaks of Schlöndorff's employing “formula film-making” based on “more classical-conventional American or European models” in order to attract a broad European audience, “but with a potential American market to warrant substantial production values.”⁴ This tactic has generally brought him success at the box office in Germany, where his version of Homo faber enjoyed long runs despite a number of unfavorable reviews.⁵ Schlöndorff himself has stressed the need for German films to serve as “Brückenschläge zwischen hier und Amerika.”⁶

Eric Rentschler characterizes the dominant figure in Schlöndorff's films as the “specular hero,” the “enraptured spectator.”⁷ In the late seventies and early eighties Schlöndorff filmed three novels which deal with the memories and feelings of their protagonists: Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel, Nicolas Born's Die Fälschung and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Times Past; under his direction, each of these works became a first-person “voice-over” narrative about a voyeur, a passive voyeur in the two latter works.⁸ In Homo faber Schlöndorff chose again a novel of remembrance and reflection with a passive, introspective, globetrotting title character who is participant, witness, reporter and commentator for the events portrayed.

In 1957, Walter Faber has reached a turning point in his life, which manifests itself physically in the problems he is having with his eyes. (The film makes no mention of his fatal stomach cancer.) Psychologically, he seems to be experiencing dissatisfaction with his personal life as his fiftieth birthday approaches: he breaks off with Ivy; he impulsively accompanies Herbert Hencke to Mexico, where he discovers Joachim's body; he decides to go to Europe by ship instead of by plane, etc. A series of unforeseen events sends Faber on a journey into his past, related in flashbacks in both the novel and the film, and confronts him with the choices he has made and the opportunities he has missed.

Around 1987, Schlöndorff became unhappy with the course his own life had taken and suddenly thought of Frisch's novel as a solution. “Vor ein paar Jahren,” he said in a 1991 Spiegel interview,

als ich nach New York gezogen war, habe ich so ziemlich an allem gezweifelt, vor allem an meiner Karriere, und ich habe mit dem Gedanken gespielt, nach 30 Jahren beim Film wäre es Zeit, etwas Anständiges zu lernen und zum Beispiel Architektur oder Medizin zu studieren. Aus vielen Gründen ging es mir nicht sehr gut. Ohne überhaupt nachzudenken, stand da vor mir plötzlich der Titel ‘Homo faber’. … : Dieser Film ist dein Ausweg aus deiner Krise.⁹

He immediately contacted Frisch about the film rights to the novel. He implies in the interview that making the film helped him resolve his midlife crisis while the film in turn benefited from the crisis.

Among the major deviations of the film from the novel are (1) the fact that Walter Faber is now American rather than Swiss; (2) the omission of the second, shorter chapter of the novel and consequently the omission of Faber's death from cancer as well as his explicit condemnation of the American way of life during his visit to Cuba; (3) the expansion of the role of the airline stewardess; and (4) the framing of the film by a new scene showing Faber sitting deep in thought in the waiting room at the Athens Airport, reflecting upon his experiences.

The most obvious departure from the novel is the fact that Walter Faber is no longer Swiss but an American engineer who studied in Switzerland. Schlöndorff himself is fluent in German, English, and French and has expressed his aversion to casting Americans in the roles of Europeans. Therefore, if finances dictated that this be an English-language film and that Faber be played by an American actor, Schlöndorff preferred to make the protagonist an American. It also seemed more plausible that the engineer, “der technische Mensch” who had never been to Italy, Greece or the Louvre, should be an American.¹⁰

Making an American movie of Frisch's novel was not without complications, however. First of all, it is a French-German co-production in association with a Greek home video company. There were “strenuous objections” on the part of the German and French authorities “that it was not a European film.”¹¹ Schlöndorff has been quoted as saying that his European sponsors tried to force him to make the film in French or German. “What's German about the film is the whole mentality of the piece,” he stated. “It's not a question of language. You know, culture goes more insidious ways.”¹² Eventually the European sponsors gave in, and we have an English-language film by a German-born director who has lived in the U.S. for many years with an American actor/playwright in the central role and a new, more American-sounding title: Voyager.

Reservations about Schlöndorff's film project also came from Frisch himself. Schlöndorff consulted with Frisch during the casting, filming, and editing of the film, just as he had collaborated with Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Arthur Miller, and Margaret Atwood when he was directing their works for film or television (Die Blechtrommel, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Death of a Salesman, The Handmaid's Tale). Walter Faber is a kind of alter ego for Max Frisch. Frisch made some half dozen trips to the United States during his almost eighty years. He lived in New York from 1980 to 1983. His first major novel Stiller (1954) was inspired by his stay in the United States and Mexico on a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1951-52. Since the narrator of his next novel, Walter Faber, was a stickler for facts and details, Frisch made use of a lecture trip to America in the summer of 1956 to visit not only important settings in the U.S. but also Mexico, Havana, the Yucatan Peninsula and Rome. Like Faber, Frisch returned to Europe by ship. Before completing the final version of the novel, he went to Greece (in May 1957), where he had already been in 1933.

Between the publication of Stiller and his taking up Homo faber at the end of 1955, Frisch separated from his first wife Constanze von Meyerberg. This is reflected in Faber's separation from his sweetheart Hanna Landsberg. The more direct inspiration for Hanna, however, was a young Jewish student from Berlin named Käte, whom Frisch offered to marry so that she could stay in Switzerland in 1936. Like Hanna, Käte rejected the proposal. Käte also appears, as Anja, in the “Kalendergeschichte” in Frisch's Tagebuch 1946-1949.¹³

Frisch did not object to Faber's being an American in the film. “After all,” he told Schlöndorff, “he is a very American Swiss, like myself.”¹⁴ However, Sam Shepard, Schlöndorff's choice to play Walter Faber, was an actor whom Frisch had never heard of. Moreover, he was tall and lanky, just the opposite physical type from Frisch. According to Schlöndorff, Frisch was shocked at first by Shepard's portrayal of Faber: “He found this man was so closed within himself,” Schlöndorff recalled in a 1992 interview. “He perceived him as laconic, feelingless, like a killer. Frisch was afraid that people would hate the character.” “Laconic,” “feelingless,” unlikable? These epithets are not inappropriate when applied to the title character of Frisch's novel. Schlöndorff, who seems also to have identified with Faber in his own midlife crisis and failed marriage, concurred with Shepard's coldly unemotional interpretation of the role. It showed “enormous grandeur” on Frisch's part, Schlöndorff stated, to accept the American actor as his alter ego.¹⁵ It should also be noted that Shepard is probably closer to Frisch's description of Faber (“hager,” “lange Nase”) than Frisch himself was. The novelist told Schlöndorff that he had pictured Faber physically as “a tall, blond Swede.”¹⁶

In the novel, Walter Faber is a Swiss engineer employed by UNESCO, who has lived in the United States for many years and has adopted the American way of life. In a conversation with schoolchildren in Zürich in the 1970s, Frisch said in connection with Faber:

Dieser Mann lebt an sich vorbei, weil er einem allgemein angebotenen Image nachläuft, das von Technik. … Der ‘Homo faber’ ist sicher ein Produkt einer technischen Leistungsgesellschaft und Tüchtigkeitsgesellschaft, er mißt sich an seiner Tüchtigkeit, und die Quittung ist ein versäumtes Leben. … Das ist ein Produkt dieses American way of life, wie man es damals noch sehr gläubig nannte.¹⁷

In the course of the novel, Faber comes to reject the coveted “American way of life,” which he had pursued for the previous twenty years. In the process, he begins to reject his own lifestyle going back to his decision as a young man to put career before love and a family. In Sabeth's company, he begins to open up to the cultural traditions and values of France, Italy, and Greece. Thus his European journey is, for the first time, no longer just another business trip but a shared experience with his daughter as guide; it becomes a journey of self-discovery.

The film ends with Sabeth's death and omits the second part of the novel, roughly 25٪. Thus the movie audience does not realize that Faber dies approximately six-and-a-half weeks after Sabeth's death, nor do they experience with Faber his decision to record the events of the past three months and, more importantly, his crucial experiences in Cuba. Schlöndorff incorporates the first aspect of the second chapter, Faber's self-reflexive recording of recent events, in the voice-over first-person narrative, the framing device, the inclusion of Faber himself in his home movies, etc. Mirrors also figure prominently in the film. Faber's aging face is reflected in mirrors at the airport restroom and the Paris restaurant, as in the novel, and again in the examining room in his first scene with Hanna at the Athens hospital.

In the episode in Cuba, Max Frisch, the caustic critic of Swiss society and its values, voices his harshest criticism of American values. Faber is unable to supervise the installation of the turbines in Caracas due to the effects of his cancer and then decides to return to Europe by way of Havana rather than have to change planes in New York. He spends four days in Cuba: “Vier Tage nichts als Schauen,” as the narrator puts it.¹⁸ With his European trip with Sabeth as preparation for Cuba, he now learns to experience things and emotions first-hand. In the course of this learning process, he delivers a tirade against the “American way of life.” First his journey to the lands of classical antiquity with Sabeth and now his brief stay among the “primitives” of Cuba cause him to reject the American obsession with youth, the unswerving American faith in technology, and blind optimism. Here Faber confronts and rejects the principles underlying the American lifestyle and much of his own life.

Even though the film omits Faber's explicit criticism of American values in Cuba, Schlöndorff and his co-scenarist Rudi Wurlitzer have managed to subtly incorporate this criticism into the dialogue and the cinematic images. The narrator of the novel spoke of the way makeup was used in the United States to make middle-aged women look like college students and even to make corpses look alive. Faber's succumbing to this philosophy is partially to blame for his seeking to recapture his lost college romance and his own youth through Sabeth. This aspect remains an integral part of the film. In fact, the signs of physical breakdown which signaled the onset of his cancer in the novel appear in the film to be attributed simply to the aging process. (Cf. Sabeth's remark “You're awfully old today” and Faber's difficulty driving at night.)

In the novel, Faber mentions that, after first meeting Sabeth, he expected to see Hanna on the ocean liner but that surely Hanna would never look like any of these rouged and lipsticked mature women in the deck chairs or in the ship's dining room. This is one manifestation of Frisch's characterization of Americans as obsessed with youth and a youthful appearance. In the film, the American women on the ship all wear heavy 1950s-style makeup, as do Ivy and the stewardess.¹⁹ Moreover, the stewardess and Ivy are almost interchangeable voluptuous physical types with brassy personalities. Significantly, the stewardess is putting on fresh lipstick when Faber strikes up a conversation with her on the plane, while Schlöndorff shows Ivy removing her vanity case from Faber's drafting table when he returns home after the crash landing. The importance of makeup, the use of a kind of mask to please and conceal, is thus underscored in the film. Sabeth and Hanna, on the other hand, wear no makeup except for a very subdued shade of lipstick. The film even contains a visual allusion to the use of makeup on corpses in the cut from Sabeth's dead body in the hospital bed to her vibrant form rising up in a hotel bed in a snatch from Faber's home movies.²⁰

Faber urges Sabeth not to become a stewardess. He wants stability for her, and subconsciously he wants something better for her than the aimless, uncommitted roving about the globe that has typified his life and the life of the young stewardess on the plane.²¹ In addition, he may already perceive attributes in Sabeth (spontaneity, candor, unselfishness) which remind him of his first great love with Hanna. The contrast between the qualities which these two European women represent and the ingenuity, artfulness, and materialism which characterize the American characters runs through both the film and the novel.²²

In the novel, the stewardess seems primarily a sort of siren who calls Faber back to his flight and thus prevents him from avoiding the crash landing, the encounter with Herbert Hencke, the revelations about Joachim and Hanna—the whole sequence of chance events which lead him back to Sabeth and to Hanna. He notes that the stewardess could be his daughter, foreshadowing his unknowing incestuous relationship. In the film, the stewardess fulfills several functions. Her role has been expanded, and her character is listed above Ivy in the final credits. She and Faber flirt with each other and “neck” in the plane's galley area, which provides us with a visual example of the fleeting nature of his romantic attachments. She conceals her true self behind a bright smile and thick makeup. She is symbolic of the kind of woman to whom Faber has gravitated over the years and the very antithesis of the more natural and substantial Sabeth.²³ Along with Ivy, she represents negative American values.²⁴ The film audience should find Faber's warning to his daughter not to become a stewardess more effective, thanks to the concrete example which the stewardess character provides.

The first questioning of American values in the film occurs when the Super-Constellation, the symbol of American technology and “bigness,” is forced to make an emergency landing. Following the plane crash, the stewardess serves as an example of American efficiency, come what may. American technology is capable of transforming the landscape, as the films which Faber shows at the conference in Paris graphically illustrate, and of providing refreshments for airline passengers, even in the desert. The wonders of American technology are parodied in a new scene in the film in which the stewardesses are “proud to bring” the passengers beverages and pastry in the desert—and inform them when they can remove their life jackets—as if technology had not failed in the case of the airplane's engines. The stewardess's call to breakfast is made over a bull horn, calling to mind the efficient but impersonal “friendly service” to which travelers like Faber have grown accustomed. Technology fails again when, on the night before his sea voyage, Faber has trouble with his electric razor, although the connection between its malfunction and his booking passage on the same ship as Sabeth is unclear in the film.²⁵ The film is very clear, on the other hand, in conveying the engineer's inability to “count nine months” and realize that Sabeth must be his child. In several instances, therefore, the film retains the novel's criticism of technology, despite Faber's brief, impassioned speech in the ship's dining room, which concludes “It isn't art or religion that's keeping us all from drowning [i.e., keeping the ship afloat]; it's technology—American technology.” The function of this speech within the film is not to defend technology but rather to alert the audience to the film's criticism of Faber's philosophy.

Finally, American optimism—Faber's American optimism—is shattered in the scene at the Athens Airport which frames the film. In the novel, Faber wanted to tear out his eyes like Oedipus after he had realized that he had slept with his daughter. In the film, Faber sits in the airport waiting room thinking of Sabeth's hands, “that no longer existed anymore … her lips, her eyes, that no longer existed.” Similar thoughts occur as narration in the novel (188-90), as Faber shows his home movies at the Hencke-Bosch Company in Düsseldorf to document Joachim's death. The screenplay takes these lines and uses them as voice-overs in the waiting room scene. Faber sits there motionless and wearing dark glasses, figuratively with his eyes blacked out, as he contemplates the magnitude of his loss.

An engineer who deserted his pregnant sweetheart indulges in the improbable fantasy that he can repeat the student romance at age fifty. Eventually the physical attraction for the twenty-year-old girl is mixed with and replaced by a father's affection for his daughter. And finally, both the sweetheart and the child are snatched away by fate. Faber's soliloquy on the transitory nature of life and happiness is repeated in the same voice-over at the beginning and the end of the film in a firm rejection of American optimism by Schlöndorff's American engineer.

Near the end of his life, Frisch still considered Faber a 1950s figure, while Schlöndorff associated that decade with his own experiences and his interest in Existentialism. “When Frisch's novel first came out in 1957,” Schlöndorff has recalled, “I was in a Paris cafe drinking my first espresso wearing jeans and a black turtleneck sweater—one full generation younger than the author.” In the director's mind, the novel was always connected with his “Teutonic inheritance, the 50's, existentialism, the question of guilt.”²⁶ During their first meeting, he asked Frisch how important it was for the story to take place during that period in history. Frisch replied:

There are many reasons why Faber, with his faith in technology, belongs to the 50's … back then we believed that reservoirs and dams like the one in Aswan were a blessing for the third world. Eisenhower's Americans were No. 1 across the globe, machos were still self-assured men, girls wore ponytails … and, above all, time was divided into before and after the war. Without this, there could be no story of the Jewish woman Hanna Landsberg; nor could there be the related guilt of the guiltless Swiss Walter Faber. Today you can no longer find such humanitarian ‘technologists’. …²⁷

As Mona Knapp pointed out in 1986, Walter Faber's “neurosis—technomania” is even more relevant to the present than it was to the late fifties, especially when one considers “disasters caused by such … technofantasies as space shuttles and nuclear reactors.”²⁸ Making Faber an American obscures the question of a Swiss national guilt but at the same time places a greater emphasis on Faber as a representative of American leadership in the field of technology.

Like the director himself, Hans-Bernhard Moeller regards the films which Schlöndorff made in the United States between 1985 and 1990 (Death of a Salesman, A Gathering of Old Men, and The Handmaid's Tale) as a continuation of the peculiarly German themes and concerns which characterized his earlier films. His Death of a Salesman, for example, exposes the flaws of capitalism and the American dream. Just as Schlöndorff's version of the play emphasizes that the stereotypical American traveling salesman Willy Loman has spent his entire life pursuing “the wrong dream,”²⁹ his film version of Frisch's novel demonstrates that the personally uncommitted, narrowly scientific engineer Walter Faber is also guilty of pursuing the wrong dream. What helps make Voyager a German film is the fact that its central character is an American and even more unequivocally a representative of the awful “American way of life” than he was in the novel.

As early as 1966, in the foreword to his screenplay Zürich-Transit, Frisch stated: “Verfilmung von literarischen Werken, die sich schon in Sprache verwirklichen und ohne das bewegte Bild auf der Leinwand bestehen, ist üblich und selten glücklich.”³⁰ In an interview with Günter Kunert conducted nearly twenty years later, he was willing to accept Kunert's characterization of a cinematic adaptation as merely one possible interpretation of a literary work: “eine Interpretation …, eine Möglichkeit unter anderen” and, since he realized that most readers were unwilling to accept the task of visualizing their own version of a literary work, he acknowledged that the film version could help them.³¹ Reportedly Frisch was pleased with Schlöndorff's production of Homo faber. Of course, it has not satisfied those who view the novel primarily as a metaphor for the role played by Switzerland in the history of the 1930s and 1940s since the film version lacks a Swiss protagonist and virtually any connection with Switzerland. However, apart from the practical considerations for making Faber an American, this alteration also makes the film more accessible for the non-European viewer. Schlöndorff's version retains the fateful love story and conveys the criticism of America and American technology, as the director put it in connection with Der junge Törleß in the mid-sixties, “with plastic and acoustic means.”³² In an age of nuclear meltdowns and shuttle disasters, this is no small matter in a commercial film. It is also another sign that Schlöndorff the social critic and chronicler of German history has not abandoned his ideals.

Notes

1. Volker Schlöndorff, “The Last Days of Max Frisch,” The New York Times Book Review 5 April 1992: 23.

2. Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin: U of Texas P, 1983) 71. Gollub calls Schlöndorff's characterization of his first major film Der junge Törleß the key to his subsequent films as well: “the attempt to represent an ‘atmosphere’ and behavior patterns ‘per se’—not through abstractions but rather with plastic and acoustic means.” “Tribüne des Jungen Deutschen Films, I. Volker Schlöndorff,” Filmkritik 6 (1966): 309, quoted in Christian-Albrecht Gollub, “Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta: Transcending the Genres,” New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Ungar, 1984) 274.

3. Cf. Schlöndorff's comments on financing and distribution in Barbara Bronnen and Corinna Brocher, Die Filmemacher, zur neuen deutschen Produktion nach Oberhausen 1962 (München: Bertelsmann, 1973) 82-84.

4. Thomas Elsaesser, The New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989) 123.

5. See, for example, Andreas Kilb, “Die Fälschung: ‘Homo Faber’ oder Die Liebe zur Literatur. Volker Schlöndorff verfilmt Max Frisch,” Die Zeit 29 March 1991: 18.

6. Süddeutsche Zeitung 3 September 1985.

7. Eric Rentschler, “Specularity and Spectacle in Schlöndorff's Young Törless (1966),” German Film & Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York & London: Methuen, 1986) 189.

8. Hans-Bernhard Moeller, “Volker Schlöndorffs neuere Literaturverfilmungen,” Vier deutsche Literaturen? Literatur seit 1945—nur die alten Modelle? Medium Film—das Ende der Literatur? Kontroversen, alte und neue: Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses Göttingen 1985, ed. Albrecht Schöne, vol. 10 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986): 327.

9. Urs Jenny and Hellmuth Karasek, “‘Wem wird man schon fehlen?’ ‘Homo Faber’-Regisseur Volker Schlöndorff über seinen Film und seine Begegnungen mit Max Frisch,” Der Spiegel 18 March 1991: 236.

10. Jenny and Karasek 245.

11. John Tagliabue, “A Director Who Pursues the Inner Demons,” The New York Times 26 January 1992: H22.

12. Ibid.

13. Jürgen H. Petersen, Max Frisch, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989) 119-20.

14. Schlöndorff 23.

15. Tagliabue H22.

16. Schlöndorff 23.

17. Quoted in Hans Müller-Salget, Max Frisch, Homo faber (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987) 130.

18. Max Frisch, Homo faber. Ein Bericht (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1977) 172.

19. In the novel, Ivy chose the color of her car and her entire wardrobe to match the color of her lipstick. She has been characterized as the stereotypical American woman. See, for example, Müller-Salget 23 and 180 and Anita Krätzer, Studien zum Amerikabild in der neueren deutschen Literatur: Max Frisch—Uwe Johnson—Hans Magnus Enzenberger und das “Kursbuch” (Bern: Lang, 1982) 54-56. Sigrid Mayer, “Zur Funktion der Amerikakomponente im Erzählwerk Max Frischs,” Max Frisch. Aspekte des Prosawerks, ed. Gerhard P. Knapp (Bern: Lang, 1978) 220, has pointed out the role which Ivy plays “als Repräsentantin einer Gegenwartswelt, die für Faber nicht mehr zusammenhält.”

20. During his very first visit with Frisch, in January 1988, Schlöndorff suggested an epilogue after Sabeth's death consisting of “a montage of Faber's own home movies” (Schlöndorff 23). In the finished film, scenes from Faber's home movies are interspersed with other parts of the action as well.

21. On the plane Faber tells the stewardess: “I fly all over the place, just like you.” Later, in his apartment, Ivy tells him it is time he settled down: “You can't go on roving around the world.”

22. Cf. Walter Schmitz's statement in his Max Frisch, “Homo faber”: Materialien, Kommentar (München: Hanser, 1977) 65: “Amerika … kontrastiert als Land ohne Tradition, das die Natur herrisch unterwirft und ihre Ordnungen zerstört, mit Europa, dem Erdteil der geschichtlichen, erdverbundenen Kontinuität.” Schmitz cites the following stereotypes in European literature with regard to the New World: “Amerika … ist das Land der Technik, … hat keine Seele, hat keinen Geist, … hat kein Verhältnis zum Tod, … ist das Land der Jugend” (60).

23. As Manfred Jurgensen, Max Frisch. Die Romane. Interpretationen, 2nd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1976) 141, has pointed out, Sabeth experiences life “voller, tiefer, unproblematischer” than does Faber.

24. Sigrid Mayer has emphasized the need to view the portrayal of America in Frisch's works in connection with the narrator of the specific work. Faber's uncomfortableness with Ivy, the stereotypical American woman, can be regarded as his discomfort, despite his years in the United States, in his American surroundings (Mayer 220).

25. Faber's obsession with shaving is a reflection of his constant determination to avoid nature in the raw, metaphorically of his tendency to avoid the sincere expression of emotions. His “honeymoon” with Sabeth is framed in a sense by instances where he fails to shave, where he is as it were less guarded, more open and vulnerable. If Faber had gone out to a restaurant as Ivy wished instead of staying in the apartment to repair his electric razor, he would have missed the phone call informing him that he had to go to the cruise line office with his passport that same evening: “Hätte ich das Apparätchen nicht zerlegt, so hätte mich jener Anruf nicht mehr erreicht, das heißt, meine Schiffreise wäre nicht zustande gekommen, jedenfalls nicht mit dem Schiff, das Sabeth benutzte, und wir wären einander nie auf der Welt begegnet, meine Tochter und ich” (63-64). The day of Sabeth's accident in Corinth, Faber has no time to shave.

26. Schlöndorff 1. To underscore the relevance of Existentialism to the plot for American audiences, the screenplay has Sabeth read Camus on the ship (rather than Tolstoy, as in the novel) and, when she mentions Sartre, Faber asks if he was “the Existentialist writer where everybody wears black and drinks espresso.”

27. Schlöndorff 22.

28. Mona Knapp, “Tempus fugit irreparabile: The Use of Existential versus Chronological Time in Frisch's Homo Faber,” World Literature Today 60 (1986): 574.

29. Hans-Bernhard Moeller, “Schlöndorffs amerikanische Filme: Deutsche Probleme und US-Gegebenheiten,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of German, Baden Baden, 19-22 July 1992.

30. Max Frisch, Zürich-Transit: Skizze eines Films (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1966), quoted in Pierre Lachat, “Ein Phantasieverstärker für impotente Leser: Filme nach und um Max Frisch aus vier Jahrzehnten,” Film Bulletin 34 (August 1992): 20.

31. Max Frisch, Blaubart: Ein Buch zum Film von Krzystof Zanussi, ed. Michael Schmid-Ospach and Hartwig Schmidt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985) 153. Lachat maintains therefore that Frisch regarded the cinematic adaptation of literature as little more than “ein Phantasieverstärker für impotente Leser.” Since the early days of cinema, authors and critics have debated the value of putting literary works on film. Concerning the “Literaturverfilmungsdebatte” of the 1970s, the decade when Schlöndorff directed Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Der Fangschuß, and Die Blechtrommel, see especially Eric Rentschler, “Germany before Autumn: The Literature Adaptation Crisis” in his West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, NY: Redgrave, 1984) 129-57 and John Sandford, “The ‘Literaturverfilmungswelle’,” After the “Death of Literature”: West German Writing of the 1970s, ed. Keith Bullivant (Oxford: Wolff, 1989) 155-75. Some of the more important studies of Schlöndorff's adaptations include Moeller (note 8); Rentschler (note 7); David Head, “‘Der Autor muß respektiert werden’—Schlöndorff/Trotta's Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum and Brecht's Critique of Film Adaptation,” German Life and Letters 32 (1979): 248-64; David Head, “Volker Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel and the ‘Literaturverfilmung’ Debate,” German Life and Letters 36 (1983): 347-67; William R. Magretta and Joan Magretta, “Story and Discourse: Schlöndorff and von Trotta's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) from the Novel by Heinrich Böll,” Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta (New York: Ungar, 1981) 278-94; and Volker Schlöndorff, “Die Blechtrommel”: Tagebuch einer Verfilmung (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1979).

32. See note 2.