[In the following essay, Russell classifies Frisch's Sketchbook 1946-1949 as a nonfiction novel, contending that the way he orders his experiences in the diary “caused novelistic form to rise to the surface.”]

Moving on from a satirist such as Céline, writing of the doomed Vichy French in 1945, to a diarist such as Max Frisch, whose jottings in Sketchbook 1946-1949 (Tagebuch 1946-1949, 1950) carry him through several years, over some of the same ground as Céline—though this during the war's aftermath, readers would be right to suppose that a more ameliorative approach to wartime calamities may be on view.

Starting out at age thirty-five, Frisch undertakes a series of trips from neutral Switzerland to the bomb-damaged cities of war-torn Europe, gaining access to these places by virtue of his dual capacity as a playwright and an architect. Central Europe has heard of him most particularly in the former role, for his best-known drama, a parable called The Chinese Wall, was produced in 1946 and straightaway translated into many European languages. And as for Frisch's reception in Germany, he is—unlike the embattled Céline—made welcome, being known there as a liberal man of letters and of course as one who writes in the Germans' own language. He is ready on these visits to keep his eyes open to what can be seen as the detritus of war and to lend his ear, one might say, to the laments of German survivors he is bound to meet—all this with a sincerely focused effort of comprehending things he could never, as a Swiss author, have experienced firsthand.

The literary sphere we enter with Max Frisch is that of the Tagebuch, the German term for “daybook” or “diary.” But any intention of tallying daily accretion of journal entries is absent here. Frisch, for one thing, is partly concerned with an analysis of his own self. But as Carol Petersen's 1972 study Max Frisch points out, the narrative tone of Sketchbook lacks any hint of self-regard. Petersen makes a telling comparison with one of the author's German contemporaries, indicating that Frisch's method chimes with a premise “that Marie Luise Kaschnitz set down when she decided to keep a diary: that she hoped ‘to be able to live less complacently in it.’”¹

That quotation's sense of uncertainty does square with what the reader senses quite often in Frisch's passages. One might add that, in a diarylike work such as Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, it is noticeable again how provisional are the narrator's goals—he keeps himself on edge in the sense that in the early sections he scarcely makes his destinations clear to his audience. It is Byron's erudition that readers are shown, until his final journey to the Oxus and Afghanistan commences. Max Frisch's confidences to the readers whom he holds in mind will take the place of such erudition. With Frisch, the very notion of a “sketch,” as in the title of his diary, alerts readers to the fact that many issues are going to be left open-ended and unresolved.

Yet both these authors' ways of ordering their experiences will have caused novelistic form to rise to the surface—hence the reason for our study's inclusion of Frisch's double task to try as an architect to lend assistance to some reconstructive ventures in Europe and to interact, as a neutral observer, with those who have suffered while he and his Swiss countrymen have not. Thus the “mosaic” he feels himself constructing definitely approximates a nonfiction novel.²

It is relevant here to mention that in 1984 an intriguing title appeared, proffering an original way to evaluate literary diaries. A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries borrows its title from Virginia Woolf and includes comment on her own famous diary. Why I cite this instructive survey is that its author, Thomas Mallon, had the instinct to subdivide his chosen models in accordance with their instincts as compilers. He begins with “Chroniclers”—which corresponds with what I have instanced earlier as the anatomy form (Céline, for example, always called himself a chronicler). Mallon then moves on to “Travelers,” “Pilgrims,” and “Confessors.”³ Note that each of these section titles suggests a nonfictional arrangement, set in advance by the compiler—a fairly provocative revelation, one can say, from an aesthetic point of view. All four of these titles are accurately classified by Mallon, and we can immediately spot nonfictional parallels with works having different scope. In this study, I have assigned a “traveler's” predisposition to Byron, a “pilgrim's” to Cummings—and also have touched on the confessional format adopted by Victor Shklovsky. Placed at this late position in the text, Max Frisch's Sketchbook sharply corresponds with what constitutes the confessional diary's mode. Juggling a set of analytic assessments, putting ideas under intense scrutiny—these, to use Northrop Frye's terminology, will be largely theoretical factors, put on view to aid any confessional author toward “success in integrating his mind.”⁴

When Frisch permitted his Tagebuch to be called Sketchbook in the English translation, he was already firming up several ideas, such as the inconclusiveness of the “sketch” and the brevity of the “aphorism” that lead to a free-style mode of communication. Frisch understood, on the verge of undertaking his quotidian entries, the enormous changes in aesthetic and political premises that lay before someone like him, coming out of hibernation, as it were, and hoping to hear ideas being circulated by both Western and Eastern parties. He was prepared for partisanship, hoping to keep an open mind and yet aware, as he intimates in one place, of “the disturbing realization that all attempts at communication are dependent on the good will of others.” (115).

Any free-spirited interchanges would have, above all, to be undogmatic. This meant attending to points of view other than his own, and what he developed early in his travels is a notion of “interchangeability,” which recognizes how one person might mentally step into the other person's shoes—in fact, must make an effort to do so. This intellectual cornerstone, present at the outset of Sketchbook, also leads to his counting, more or less calmly, on the other party's reciprocity.

Frisch in 1946 tries to make amends for early encounters that tend to forego “reciprocation,” recognizing that holding onto fixed ideas can be a difficult habit to break. And as Carol Petersen puts it, “An attachment to something immutable is, for Frisch, unnatural and inhuman, and is at its worst when it leads to a categorizing and a labeling of the human being.”⁵ At the same time, the diarist does not want to underrate the Germans whom he first meets in the spring of 1946 at Munich and Frankfurt. Hence on his return home his confessional inclination leads him to reassess how his new experiences stack up: his immediate entry label reads “Postscript to My Journey.” Two lines of approach are now forthcoming.

First Frisch admits, in Frankfurt, to have been made uneasy despite the compassion he felt for the deprived populace. What was most injurious, he reflects, is that most individual Germans “seek to justify themselves, and, whether we like it or not, make judges of us, with the duty of finding them not guilty. And if we … remind them of certain things which must not be forgotten, we find ourselves being reproached, silently or openly, for behaving like judges” (28; my italics). The Germans' dilemma, in other words, amounts to out-judging the foreigners, like Frisch, whom they would like to find acquitting them and thus behaving like secondhand witnesses to their travail. Frisch understands the catch-22 implications, whereby those who were initially supplicants suddenly turn into hosts, now back in favor.

But this author has, as a second line of approach, a way of coming to terms with the Germans' predicament. He tries putting the shoe on the other foot, using the metaphor of having himself become terminally ill, whereby “My own suffering restricts my consciousness to a single point—myself.” Hence the futility of expecting anyone “to see beyond his own ruin. So long as he is in the grip of his personal distress, how can he come to acknowledge that other distress which his country has brought on half the world?” (29).

Frisch, we may note, has slipped into the “other's” position, that of being reduced to tunnel vision. “Our way out,” the author will say later, speaking as a concerned Swiss neighbor, “was through helping”; meantime, he and his countrymen “had something that the warring countries themselves did not have: a twofold view.” This gift, it really seems, of split attention could result in healing. The idea would be that those distressed could look to those who observed, the latter group being noncontestants who “did not have the participant's distress, or his urge for revenge” (94).

The Frankfurt that Frisch visits on his initial trip has been much more pulverized than Munich: “the ruins … lie submerged in their own rubble. … This is the reality,” he continues, “the grass growing in the houses, the dandelions in the churches”—and he considers forests creeping over future cities, then checks his passive self: “one is astonished to experience no further awakening” (21). That is not affixing blame, just owning up to an honest nonreaction. But later in this same entry, his “other” side reacts. Dozing in a park, and awakened by playing children, he is struck by “the thought that they have never seen a city intact, then … that it is not their fault, theirs less than anyone's. These are times when the only certainty is the need for trust and active undertaking. … above all the need not to see them as felons or outlaws … we must not for a single moment doubt them, or it will be our fault if it all happens again” (22).

We may well see how Frisch has projected his mind in two directions: first, toward the children who have never seen a city; second, toward those who may rule them out on account of what the anarchic young may grow up to be. Disenfranchised, hence governments must enfranchise them, so the author argues—the young must not be shaped into a preconceived image. Frisch forges his way thus into the minds of two generational groups at once; by an act of imagination, he has foreseen the future condition of the youths, who must be given a cooperative chance.

In Frisch's account of another 1946 trip, this one a business flight within the Swiss borders, the reader may be unprepared to hear the “everyman” note that enters the Sketchbook's tone. Now the diarist becomes a ruminator. We recall Frisch has been a professional architect. As he flies over the Lake of Zurich, absorbed by “a little town that looks like one of our architectural models,” he muses:

I involuntarily make the discovery that I could bring myself to bomb it, I should not even require patriotic fervor or years of provocation; all one requires is a little railroad station, a factory with a lot of chimneys, a little ship at a jetty—at once one feels the urge to spatter them with a stream of black and brown spurts. And then it is done … one will just catch sight of the factory chimney as it bends in the middle and sags down in a cloud of dust; one sees no blood, hears no dying cries.

(33)

Interchangeability again has made its way to the author's conceptualizing. The lure is one we all share; the remoteness makes the bombardier's button easy to press: “what I mean is simply the difference between strewing bombs over a model … and standing down there, opening my jackknife, and attacking a human being. … This I cannot imagine myself doing” (33).

As readers we possibly recognize that Frisch has allowed a fantasy to accompany him on an air trip. But a warning about the responsibilities, especially of twentieth-century man's decisions, keeps the entries in the Sketchbook patterns speculative, not all-knowing, and seldom conclusive. Frisch meanwhile has been fitted in among midcentury thinkers, while his mood converges with everyman's. In the “involuntary” discovery on the flight over the lake, the idea of being trained for long-range, dehumanized fighting is one most people would probably agree with: “It is curious that mere distance … should have so much influence over us; that our imagination should not be strong enough to overcome it” (34).

As the 1946 entries conclude, it turns out that a German veteran of Stalingrad has struck up a correspondence with Frisch that is not unlike the unbending exchange between Primo Levi and the unrepentant Dr. Müller, the chemist whom Levi served under at the Auschwitz factory. The German with whom Frisch is corresponding is in no way inclined to concur with a man who has not tasted battle. The author tries to give the benefit of the doubt, but when the Stalingrad corporal insists that “experiencing” is the commanding factor that makes his type “the only ones who can advise … it is we who can help the foreigners, rather than the other way around” (89), Frisch has to discontinue the letters.

The horrific experience, of course, had not been shared by neutrals such as the Swiss, but Frisch penetrates the surface of this monocular vision of one's having been “tempered” on the field of fire, as it were—his correspondent all the while leaning on the cliché of having fought. “Misery brings maturity,” Frisch writes in one draft but then decides not to honor that cliché: “that may be true in some cases,” he says, but he has spotted the fallacy that would “admire misery for itself. … Repugnant as it is, one can become proud of one's misery” (91).

What the confessional author has refused to do is countenance the hand-me-down homilies that prevent individual thought from prospering—it amounts to one more version of life's imitating art. “The idea,” he says witheringly to the Stalingrad corporal, “that ordinary people are changed, deepened, and sublimated by having to live among dust and ashes is a hope with which such literature has made us familiar. A dangerous hope, which has perhaps influenced you: you are … the man who took part, and as such superior to all others, who have experienced nothing because they have not experienced war” (91).

Concluding this encumbered correspondence, Frisch commits to his diary the last words (like Primo Levi) that he can offer the nonresponsive other. It is here he inserts his notion of the “twofold view” that the contestants in a world war could not be made privy to: “The combatant sees the scene only when he is present at it; the onlooker sees it all the time. Of course we had our passionate longings, but we did not have the participant's distress. … Perhaps that is the true reward that falls to those who remain unscathed and determines their function. They would have the privilege, now rare, of remaining just. And even more: they must be allowed to have it” (94; my italics).

Now, with the 1946 section ending, there are phrases that lend credence to Frisch's entire project and its forthcoming shape, or pattern, enfolding as nonfiction novels often enfold. The phrase “twofold view” squares with the premise of reciprocity that seems to be rife in this text, as it does in the others thus far treated. And to have “the privilege” of near-at-hand participation with Europe's recuperation is a privilege not leading to aggrandizement but rather to rumination on what prevails in situation after situation to come that can be characterized as justness. It is a wish carried through the entire Sketchbook, involving the compiler's eagerness to witness what is just, though he is quite modest in expressing it.

It happens that in 1986, an appropriately titled book on postwar German literature—After the Fires—was published. Its author, Peter Demetz, devotes a twenty-page chapter to Frisch. Earlier in that study Demetz quotes Christa Wolf's assessment of the Swiss author as being “that analyst of the most private feelings.” Then, much later, Demetz returns to his own final assessment, which concurs with Wolf's stance. Both Wolf and Demetz have happily targeted the correct genre—the confession form remains in force, as Demetz sees Frisch's work as “an essential confession, for as an observer of the sensitive self and its painful consciousness of social pressure, he has no equal among his fellow writers in German.”⁶

TRIPTYCH

In the foregoing section I emphasize the German visitations first (there will be more) because of Frisch's sensing how contentious the defeated survivors could become. New factors enter the 1947 section, especially in Czechoslovakia and later in Poland, Frisch's drama The Chinese Wall having been presented in both of these countries. More important to him than seeing his own play on the boards is the astuteness with which he can detect latent drama in the apparently open-minded welcomings the Iron Curtain countries seem to provide.

What results, for the reader, can be called a sort of narrative overtake, changing the modus operandi of the diary and bringing its documentation straight into the realm of the nonfiction novel. Frisch in effect becomes a narrator, not a diary keeper. There are a couple of reasons for this speed-up, as it might be termed. One involves the author's own physical activity, for he is obliged to keep returning to Zurich. The Sketchbook headings even refer to this fact. He makes a jump from Eastertide, 1947, by way of an entry entitled “Home Again”—then another time jump to interpolate thoughts from a visit to one of his favorite bistros at home: “What I notice, when I return from abroad, is the inhibitedness of my Swiss compatriots … [and their] unreflecting obeisance before all things foreign … [as opposed to] the way the Swiss treat their artists, how the best they can do is to pat them on the shoulder with a sort of grudging recognition” (108-9). He is airing a grievance here toward those pusillanimous fellow-citizens of his who shrug off the European question that so clearly warrants activity. But as for the diary's acceleration, the main reason lies with architecture. It happens that Frisch, young architect that he is, has won a national competition for building a vast public-recreation complex at Letzigraben, highlighted by a huge swimming pool.

The task will form a leitmotif for the Sketchbook—in truth a novelistic subplot, due to the circumstances, for he is totally involved in constructive work, on peaceful ground, in apposition to the architectural nightmare of his swings through the near-demolished cities of the still-recent war. He is not only touring but working in his mind as he passes from boundary to boundary. And when it comes to his Easter invitation to visit Prague, we find him making an analogy to what I have earlier called the idea of “remoteness”—caused by distance and by boundary lines—which enabled humans cold-bloodedly to demolish their enemies with monocular callousness. The reason I repeat this motif here is that Frisch visits the Terezin death camp outside of Prague. His long Sketchbook commentary contains one of the five or six great narrative segments of the entire journal-keeping enterprise.

What Frisch repeatedly keeps in view as he is ushered through the camp by a French-speaking guide is the number of courtyards, connected by alleys, flanked by high red walls—these all creating lines of demarcation so that the Jewish captives (when not in their cells) can be, in effect, cordoned off from the German proprietors. It is a method of erasing them, as it were, through physical boundaries, keeping them separate from unrecognizing eyes. There is one tiny gallows square, for instance, with primitive wooden trapdoors set below two hooks, and not far from this is “the spot where the shootings took place”; the victims stand in front of a retaining wall that Frisch describes as a “fascine to stop the earth into which the bullets plunged from slipping down” (102).

Two further horrific boundaries catch the architect's eye—the first, almost a stage device, comprising “a water-filled ditch, which separated the riflemen from the victims” (102). It is as though a barrier separates two different genres of men, the ones who are to be wasted by draconian policy and the ones who carry out the policy, not even knowing that those beyond the running ditch are humans at all.

But that retaining wall, as Frisch is guided past it, proves to have a reverse slope, angled upward. Thus he writes that, once on the other side, “we are suddenly confronted with an immaculate swimming pool.” And on the adjacent slope, “whose other side we have just seen, there is even a little alpine garden … where in summer the German wardens spent their leisure hours together with their wives and children” (102). It strikes the reader that the German children can look down from their roped-off swimming pool to see the tops of heads of Jews about to be killed by firing squads. Imagine, at the point of digesting these horrors, this secondhand witness Max Frisch is himself involved, at firsthand, in the construction of a swimming pool. He holds his peace as the French interpreter bustles him past the architectural abomination, leading him to a bridge from which they can view the larger area before leaving the camp.

Down they look, upon a canal the guide calls the Jews' Trench—another boundary, but one created for the recreation of anyone wishing to watch from the bridge. But watch what? And the answer resounds: an old ladder. “Ten Jews were sent down it, each armed with a hayfork, and with the promise that the last two survivors would be given their freedom. From the iron bridge on which the watchers stood, one looks down as if into a bear pit. The freedom for the two survivors … consisted of a shot in the back of the head” (102-3). It is no wonder that Frisch, in leaving the concrete reminders of Terezin, confesses something that might make the Czech government in charge feel slighted. It concerns the display of urns that have been kept, each in the form of “a bag of strong paper, each inscribed, after being filled, with a handwritten number. The concentration camp of Terezin … had twenty thousand such paper bags in stock when it was liberated. Naturally we took off our hats, but it would be a lie to speak of feeling moved” (103).

Looking at that last sentence, readers will likely realize how they can put their trust in a writer like this. It is not that he has flinched from the assemblage of paper urns with their ashes; it is that he has been benumbed by the surfeit of details he has been thrown up against. And the one living protest he can hang onto (as Isak Dinesen and E. E. Cummings might have found themselves doing) has riveted him—this being “the whipping grass on the red walls”—as though nature herself has rendered anathema this wretched edifice of brutality, posing as a monument.

Frisch's ingenuity in framing the remembrance by letting his mind's eye focus on architectural shapes makes us, after one hundred pages of other sorts of entries, visualize the fervor with which he testifies, and it will happen, as we shall see, that the negative climax of the Sketchbook pivots around Terezin. In the meantime, there has been one further way for the Sketchbook to take on novel form, and it is the method that the narrator finds to assuage himself. It is also the reason the present section of this study has the heading “Triptych.” Frisch actually wrote a play called Triptych, which involved a stage setting wherein three revolving panels demarcated the play's action. There is no reason for us to pursue the drama's tableau-like progressions, except to say that three-part sequences happen to infiltrate the diary in a fairly regular way. They afford the author a chance to combine “reflection” on, say, a certain state of events, with anecdotes chosen to keep the topic alive, plus fictional sorties that rush into the writer's head and are jotted down for potential use in the future.

Several of Frisch's plays actually took root as the author finds himself inventing scenarios during the course of his writing the Sketchbook: a rather amazing fact in that side-steps appear—or we might as well say bricolage is brought into operation, since these “triptych” digressions in the Sketchbook take the same radical paths we have become used to in nonfiction novels.

A fine example in the book can be seen late in 1947 when Frisch, about to set off for Europe again, joins a group of Zurich writers devising a manifesto in the interests of peacemaking. He actually has little faith in the officious tone of the propagandists. “Do not both [East and West],” he asks, “assure us that they want peace? But not, of course, peace with the enemy”—this is charade enough to prompt us “to take up our pens,” to find real hope “has all ebbed away before the last signature is quite dry” (137).

These reflections of his are most aggravated by the fatuous wording of the manifesto, so he sees fit to break company with the signatories. But stopping off again in Frankfurt soon after this, he is caught in the same syndrome. Not reflecting now, he singles out confirming anecdotes. “I read the public placards,” he begins, “appeals for the rebuilding of Goethe's birthplace … a cabaret, surrounded by a desert of small advertisements … Wanted, Who can supply information about my son? Coupled with a photograph: the smiling face of a healthy soldier, the unshadowed confidence of a young face, to be seen nowadays only on advertising pillars; it is moving, yet at the time depressing” (137-38). Note how this sequence of anecdotes, a series of forlorn hopes, could have been transposed back to the self-important declaration signers from whom the author had broken away. Likewise the placard of the father advertising for his son—also hopeless—the picture is of a young man fully committed to the Nazi cause. Frisch thinks of the boy and realizes (maybe even anticipating the parent) “we should never have understood one another” (138).

Capping off these thoughts, Frisch now invents an entry for his diary by visualizing himself back at a Zurich café. The passage includes an invented companion, to whom Frisch passes his newspaper—and its support of the group of zealous writers. This alter ego turns the pages silently, till “Frisch” addresses him.

“If writers and poets really had any influence,” I say, “perhaps many things in the world would be different.”

He turns to another page.

“Do you think so?” he merely replies. …

“When I was still a student [in Germany],” he goes on, “we were sitting in my room in front of the radio—just before a Hitler election—and we heard the voices of two people who were using their fame to tip the scales: Gerhart Hauptmann and Max Schmeling.”

“What of it?” [asks Frisch].

“What of it!”

“What are you trying to say?”

“If our writers have no real influence,” he says, his eyes again on the newspaper, “maybe it's a pity, yes, but maybe not. … Even fame can only be sold once—and as for … real influence—well, I think you can only influence things you know something about when you've already proved to the world you know something about it.”

(138-39)

Probably the most important element in this playlet is that Frisch consigns all the merit in the argument to the make-believe character who is chatting with him. We, the readers, give that man credit, but it is Frisch, after all, who imagines the radio broadcast, somehow knowing that a Nobel Prize author (Hauptmann) and a world heavyweight champion (Schmeling) together have once lent themselves to a Hitler campaign. Here is a perfect example of factual adequacy, developed through a fictional Sketchbook entry that came along to complete a stunning triptych.

Such a three-part plan, which seems to come naturally to Max Frisch, serves, as I have said, as a form of assuagement. If something wholly contradictory to his own realm of thought comes to haunt him, his instinct is logically to do battle—or to invent a corollary stance that might point to a solution. It does not always happen that he can assuage himself, however. In 1948, events that he has nearly prophesied lead to his Sketchbook's earliest and most negative climactic moment. When he visits Prague in 1947, the comradeship displayed by the Czechs rouses the author's optimism for their democratic future. But a year later, that hope is dashed.

Frisch does not actually see the 1948 revolution coming; however, he does notice a distinct coolness on returning to Czechoslovakia. The openness is gone, political topics are forbidden, his erstwhile friends seem to be testing “the last bridges of personal friendship” (164). He is disturbed enough to ponder reflectively, in a long diary entry, on Europe's apparently irrecoverable condition. He senses the continent's aging and wonders whether a new “world never yet described” would have to be ignited through some sort of new epic awakening: “The epic is concerned with [fresh] information, not with argument,” he tells himself, “a terra incognita which might fundamentally change our outlook” (165). Indeed, epic may have appealed to him because of his friend Bertolt Brecht's endorsement of that sort of change-bringer. But his closing thoughts deliver a sudden jolt, the trouble being that “the world … brought to light by epic discovery is not a new one: it is just the ruined face of the old world we already know” (166).

Frisch winds up with that skeptical entry in early 1948 on a return trip to Switzerland. And no sooner does he seat himself on the terrace of the Café Odeon than a newspaper headline arrests his attention: “Revolution in Czechoslovakia. It all happened very quickly. As always when a house of cards collapses. … The self-satisfied grins of people to whom I had always held up Czechoslovakia as a model of social democracy” (166). This swiftly deployed anecdote goes beyond complaining about fair-weather friends—what is to come is the book's most sinister revelation, as Frisch is suddenly baffled, recognizing he has suffered a memory lapse.

Precisely a year back, at the Terezin death camp, his French-speaking guide has shown him, along the dark cell-blocks, one tiny cell for twenty Jews, containing no toilet—“sans aucune installation sanitaire!” Only now does Frisch recall what he saw in 1947. The 1948 Communist takeover has now jarred the experience into existence: a “spick-and-span toilet, newly installed.” “Pourquoi ca?” he remembers having asked. “No answer” (166). The factual adequacy of this terrible memory owes itself to the sudden vision that was implanted on his retina in 1947. “Why a toilet here?” he then asked. The implication has escaped him till now, five hundred miles away from Prague. The toilet is there to be used—Terezin, all cleaned up and swept down, has been ready a year and more for occupation again. In a manner true to what happens in novels and in life, events experientially true—such as this misremembered “installation sanitaire”—change the face of a whole prerecorded event. Frisch has written of that tortuous place, but the camp, unbeknownst to him, was in readiness for more of the same—with Stalin's pictures in place to insure draconian discipline now.

What third panel of the triptych, moving from epic to degradation, does the author resort to? The answer seems a place toward which he all but physically lunges. Terrorism is what the Prague revelations yield. Not expecting that, he draws up a fictional scenario, the entry called “Burlesque.” In it, Frisch invents a well-meaning householder who admits to his barn for a night's sleep two very suspect-looking hoodlums. The host continually congratulates himself on his goodness, while the young men take taunting control of his house and barn, flourishing pyrotechnic equipment that they know the man is afraid to take away from them.

The whole set piece becomes a parable (it will resurface ten years later as a play called The Firebugs). Its theme is cowardice masquerading as the liberal's desire to help one's inferiors to better themselves—“and next morning, there you are, you see: you are burnt to ashes and can't even feel surprised at your own story” (172). The point of the parable, nailed down a couple of entries later, is that it is futile to try to assess yourself as being peaceably minded (as in the case of Terezin's spick-and-span toilet) and that one should be forewarned that temperate behavior will inevitably lead to the “outcome of terrorism: the villains slip through its net. For terrorism reckons on a certain amount of morality,” he adds (176). The upshot of the long meditation at the Zurich café amounts to this axiom: the virtuous are strait-jacketed by their own inbred sense of nonretaliation. Frisch in his meditation is opting for something different: open counterattack.

Max Frisch is on the move again after all this, and his 1948 visit to partially restored Frankfurt will—accidentally, as so often happens in nonfiction novels—serve up to him a way of positioning himself that will cancel the negative climax that so unnerved him when the Czech city of Prague became muffled by the Iron Curtain. The most positive of entries emanating from Frankfurt therefore takes special form, for it chronicles a festival on a springtime night in 1948 and the group of spectators whom the author joins. They are watching a troupe of trapeze artists who are performing above the rubble between the Frankfurt town hall and the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, where a maze of wires and nets has been suspended. In a catch-as-catch-can manner, these performers eke out their livelihood from such crowds, who are drawn by the loudspeaker's announcements and the “crossing of searchlight beams” (176).

Suddenly we readers realize that we are listening to a different narrator, for Frisch changes course and apostrophizes the moon, visible through the trapeze artists' net. It is hardly like him to turn romancer: “the moon, a lantern for lovers, a street lamp for vagabonds … a solace in strange lands … but above all a guarantee that the universe does not lack poetry—the universe, night, death, not lacking in poetry, not lacking a heart” (176). Everything we have already become accustomed to on these urgent trips abroad has been lacking in this one; the last phrase quoted above dispels such loss. Max Frisch's prose serves up an answer to the arsonists, to the vile keepers of that pseudomuseum at Terezin. His text had brought him to a nadir, but his arrival at this nighttime festival has conducted him directly up to a zenith.

Frisch becomes captivated by aerial events that the announcer routinely describes. After a lull, the spectators are alerted to a taut wire fixed to the spire of the Nikolaikirche for the final event, memorializing the troupe's founder, whose name the microphone blares out: “Camilla Mayer … much-loved founder of our troupe, was the first to achieve this uniquely daring feat. One evening she plunged before our eyes to her death, but at her graveside we vowed that again and again we would perform this acrobatic masterpiece to which she sacrificed her life.” The music now stops to herald “Camilla Mayer's Death Walk.”

Frisch anxiously describes the young girl who “climbs up from the red ruins, a white pole in her hands. … There is no net beneath the wire: that is the unique feature.” He conjectures the scene if she fell: “a dull thud in the rubble … [an] unbelieving cry from … onlookers … a curious, lifelong memory from various individual people, a good death, an individual death, a death of one's own, better than death in a concentration camp, better than being shot without witnesses … a personal death, a gambler's death.” Completely relieved from his own badly managed mental balance at the time he wrote “Burlesque,” Frisch refocuses on things benign. The girl does not falter; he fixes on “her thighs … her little skirt like a parachute. A Degas seen from below” (178).

Everything has meshed in this world of provisional art. The novel's situational climax has changed the tone of the book—it has answered those who deal death. This moment parallels Céline's, where a couple, vulnerable to the Nazi liquidation methods, are saved by art—utilitarian art, a sculpture of Neptune pressed into service in the Castle hideaway. Frisch ends his anecdote by mentioning an American Negro in uniform. As the “Degas girl,” now on even keel, waves to the onlookers, the young Negro is still in his seat. “He is not clapping. He gropes in his top pocket, takes out a cigarette” (179). I think this registers a note of noncoercion. It is not that the soldier is unaffected; it is that there are no boundaries, no cordons, no dividing lines in still-ramshackle Frankfurt, and above all, no tunnel-visioned posturers; rather, at this high point, it is camaraderie that prevails and brings Frisch to balance.

One fact is perhaps worth observing. From here to the end of the Sketchbook there is much dispersion. This does not mean that the pace flags. Rather—as in the case of Isak Dinesen and her “Immigrant's Notebook,” the narrator seems to need a structural hiatus to give both self and audience a breathing spell. A six-page entry titled “Theater” takes him straight away from Frankfurt to reflect on the subject of drama, of all things. And another diverted entry—bringing his mind to his swimming-pool contract back home—seem reminders of his dual role as playwright and architect, whereby the reader can follow his more normalized thoughts while the drama of the acrobat troupe can temporarily be allowed to fade.

THE DEFERENTIAL DIARIST

When I say there is dispersion in the latter part of the text of Frisch's Sketchbook, I refer to the fact that the author now, with 1949 close by, takes many more sidesteps—almost mental vacations—to examine subjects that have not figured in the narrative heretofore. I have mentioned the “Theater” insert. In an aside a bit later, he brings actors up for survey. As a relatively virile young man, he spends several pages pondering his subject in a piece he titles “Jealousy” and surprisingly tries that exercise again with “More on Jealousy.” But in terms of the Sketchbook's mainline concern—one man's role as observer in the European capitals that have experienced war—there are four further excursions that combine to link up (though not as consecutive entries) and thus to resume the narratorial cohesion that carries the documentary from 1946 to mid-1948.

Paris is the first of these sites, Breslau and Warsaw come next, and then very late, the North Sea island of Sylt, a resort hardly touched by World War II. Frisch's 1948 Parisian visit occurs on the right day, July 14. There are parades, jubilation, dancing in the streets and subways, and he is entranced by these. But it is a group of non-Parisians who deliver the impact that evokes something new. One is a Chinese girl reminiscent of the Frankfurt acrobat: “beneath Chinese lanterns … inexpressibly wonderful, a young Chinese girl is dancing. … Beside the band sit three mulatto girls, all in glaring green silk; I see they will remain unforgettable. … The three mulattoes sit and smoke, little animals wearing earrings, silent and beautiful … mysterious creatures” (190-91). Our minds are taken back to the American soldier, also smoking, also black, at the aerial “Death Walk.” Though the term “Third World” has not come into vogue, Frisch is thinking along those lines. The exotic presences bode something valuable.

At this point the author makes an extraordinary transition: he has been moved to write a six-page “Autobiography.” Why?

The single answer that may be inferred is that he is acting in deference to the Chinese and the mulatto girls—as if he were an elder statesman, ready to stand aside and have these young foreign visitors forge their way toward something new. His epical idea of “change” seems to have unrolled itself—visitors like these are to be inheritors.

A reason why this should not sound farfetched can be shown by way of a second entry from Paris, where the opening sentence hints at a subtext to the Third World principle: the late war “made it obvious, that the time when European nations could quarrel among themselves for world dominion is dead and gone” (197). To this Frisch adds a wonderfully deferential admission: “It is the outcome of any long-lasting dominion … gradually the ruler must lay down his weapons,” and thanks to the Europeans' worldwide circulation of their discoveries, these latter have put “aging Europe itself completely out of the running” (197). The lightsome tone of the bemused elder statesman indicates how entirely at home he is with the prospect of those migrants from the Tropics and the Far East readying themselves for future occupancies.

Frisch's subsequent move from Paris to Breslau entails a different sort of deference. He is one of a large party of writers invited to a conference, where almost instantly he detects that the hosting Russian delegates will take over and refuse to let their former allies have any real participation. Breslau, once German, and part of Silesia, has been ceded to the Poles, so that the huge German population has been deported: “a question of reparations,” Frisch notes in the diary. And while interested in the Poles' adaptation to their new territory, he decides this writers' conference will get nowhere because all its Western proposals are going to be undercut by the Russians. Without any apologies, he bolts to Warsaw.

Eyebrows are raised over this absenting of himself, but he feels that no deference is owed to the Soviet sponsors—he even reserves a neat quip for his diary when he sees the main contingent of writers and artists themselves arriving in Warsaw. His two-line aside, sent like a dart in their direction, is memorable: “Arrival of the intellectuals. Why is there always something unquestionably comic about intellectuals en masse?” (212).

The Warsaw residents, though, hold his attention; fraternizing is what he is game to try, and he finds the Poles wonderful as reciprocators. Of one woman guide, though, he has to make a demurral. Her name is Wiska, and her job is “to show us there is no such thing as an Iron Curtain.” She is a zealot, no less, and thus inquiries put to her are not answered. However, Frisch changes his position when he learns she is a medical doctor who served with the Communist International Brigade in the Spanish war. Not only that, but both her husband and her brother were killed fighting with the Allies against the Germans. “Wiska returned to Warsaw, the sole survivor of her family and … a confirmed Communist” (213). The author must retract what he thinks about this woman. Circumstances alter situations. This “very friendly” doctor of medicine—who nonetheless regards Frisch and his comrades as belonging “among those whom it had not been worthwhile inviting here” (220)—has had her duty dictated to her.

Frisch could hardly be more self-effacing than we see him here, but he has been elated by the insouciant energy of the Poles he has met. As we listen, we hear one of the confirmative moments of the book. These people are free-spirited. Their robust days of working on reconstruction in no way diminish their late-night recreation. The author concludes his diary entry on the night before he leaves Warsaw:

One feels the strength within them, [an] unquestioning delight in living, in dancing, eating, chatting, or singing. … In the streets too, during the day, their faces are happier than ours at home. … The dancing by night, the bridgebuilding by day, between them there is no dividing line; behind everything that human sagacity devises and provides or destroys there is something preternaturally blind which no destruction can deter, an unquestioning will to live which blossoms of its own accord … an entity that the death of individuals can wound but not kill.

(220-21; my italics)

My reason for italicizing “no dividing line” in this fine rhetoric is that it repeats Frisch's most powerful motif: work, play, meditation, all are self-expressive without hints of boundaries.

And it is boundaries that—from the time of his airplane flight, when he thinks he can bomb the tiny town below him, to his witnessing the deliberative boundary-making of the Terezin camp—have always haunted this artist. The arbitrary separations, or compartmentalizations, that officially wall off one type of human being from another—Max Frisch's voice reviles those who perpetuate such ill will. The Swiss writer whom Frisch admires most, Albin Zollinger, has—on the single occasion of his meeting him—alerted him to “the disturbing realization that all attempts at communication are dependent on the good will of others” (115).

In a subsequent entry, with Poland now behind him, Frisch reiterates the social posturings that owe themselves to archness and cultivated vanity, and he excoriates “aesthetic culture”—whose hallmark “is detachment”—as something that can result in “a form of moral schizophrenia.” The reason is that detachment “sets a clear dividing line … between talent and character, between reading and living, between the concert hall and the street” (231; my italics).

Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior: this is what the author has been alerted to and marks down in his four-year diary. The man of talent who has no character, the concert-goer who execrates those in his way on the street—such types are constitutionally self-exempted from interchange with others. One may wonder whether Frisch has overexplored the European world that beckoned to him in his thirties. Is he a man who never rests? Virtually, yes, it seems legitimate to say. He does, for instance, complete that swimming pool and recreation site at Letzigraben in the summer of 1949. However, the wrapping up of that project gives him the opportunity for a leisurely seaside jaunt—the Swiss, he says more than once, being intoxicated by the sea.

This excursion takes him to Sylt, a North Sea resort in the Frisian Islands, which are under the German flag. The tidal forces are so severe there that when he sees the beaches' wooden palings standing almost submerged in the waves, he needs to be reassured: “Neighbors say the water will not rise any higher. All the same, it gives one an inkling of Noah's flood” (253). The starkness of the North Sea outpost draws repeated attention. How easy to forget in Switzerland that one is living on a planet, he muses, but “Out there on the sand dunes one does not forget it for a single moment” (255).⁷ The reason for such extended focus on vanishing land is owing to a fact that Frisch could not have imagined what would appear before his eyes on this hideaway island. The surprise comes with a transition that baffles the reader: “A visit, at last, to the barracks,” says the diarist, “constantly visible [like the sunken palings] in the distance. A transit camp for Silesian refugees … children, tin plates, people without jobs … isolated like medieval pest-houses. The state alone takes care of their needs. People never speak of them. … Nearby there are people in brightly colored beach robes, gleaming limousines, once again with German number plates” (257; my italics).

What astonishes the reader is that makeshift barracks have been built near the sand dunes for German refugees: offscourings, in fact. The key to the whole episode lies in Frisch's recent encounter in Breslau, where he learns that thousands of Silesian refugees—Germans whose borders have been ceded to Poland—have now in 1949 become displaced persons anew. Some of them have come to the pleasure island of Sylt, where, under barrack detention, they are ostracized by other Germans—where one more artificial boundary line isolates these scum of the earth, as their betters consider them to be.

Hence the author of the nonfiction novel has made it possible for us to see a form of concentration camp once more—a mini-Terezin, though, of course, executions are excluded. But again the backs of lounging Germans are turned, as if this tidemark community is not really there. Frisch the vacationing architect is appalled by what a blackout (or Coalsack, to recall Isak Dinesen) he finds. Yet he is civil enough to accept the invitation of a German hostess, once the bellwether of a 1930s coterie of Nazi sympathizers, now a permanent resident of Sylt. The diary entry he fashions could be read as the book's thematic climax:

Tea-time conversation in a spick-and-span country house, style of the good old thirties, with painted tiles … cast-iron banisters, Berlin porcelain, camel-hair rugs. …

“Switzerland did not suffer at all,” [says this hostess].

“No,” I say.

“It would not have done you Swiss any harm,” the lady says, “particularly the Swiss. Suffering is good for you, you know—”

We are sitting in a spick-and-span garden, which in the good old thirties, as I later heard, had played host to many high-ranking uniforms, both brown and black; the view is splendid; only far away on the horizon can one see the barracks of those Silesian refugees, those innocent victims of treacherous foreign powers.

(259; my italics)

Note the shrewd metonymies—the garden played host to uniforms. Also, the hostess is now blaming other countries (as Frisch gets up to leave) for the eyesore in front of her—Germans bivouacked in rabbit hutches on the high-tide mark at Sylt.

But from the standpoint of the nonfiction novel, the very best echo that Frisch could have produced, leaving it to the reader to make a final judgment, is the idiomatic phrase “spick-and-span,” twice used. That his translator, Geoffrey Skelton, catches the English rhythm is outstanding. For we must shift from the 1930s spick-and-span country house and garden, where the hostess has served SA and SS officers and has just now told Frisch how suffering is such a good experience.

Our own memories will be jogged because Frisch has paralleled the negative climax of the novel with its predecessor in Terezin—for what has jogged his memory when he read of the Czech revolution is the fact of the spick-and-span toilet's having been put in a Terezin cell and readied for service, almost like a gun mount.

Haughtiness is what interferes with perception, as the Sketchbook entries often enable us to discover. “We who experienced the war” is a cut-off phrase at the very end of the author's travels—he assigns it to the woman of Sylt and breaks away from her homilies. Hauteur usually prevents imagination; that is another of his disclosures. Failing to imagine can result in failing to experience. So that, on that same “exit” page I just spoke of—leaving the Frisian Islands—Frisch makes a haunting last notation, a confession concerning graven ideas that might well stand as the book's epigraph, concessive without being too sure: “A confusion between two ideas: experiencing and being present” (266).

Notes

1. Carol Petersen, Max Frisch (New York: Ungar, 1972), 52.

2. Frisch, considered among the leading exponents of German writing in the latter half of this century, actually wrote three nonfiction novels—the later two, which are set in America, being Sketchbook 1966-1971 (1974) and Montauk (1976).

3. See Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984).

4. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 308.

5. Peterson, Max Frisch, 41.

6. Peter Demetz, After the Fires: Recent Writing in the Germanies, Austria, and Switzerland (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 156, 312.

7. Frisch describes the tininess of human living space as he sees it from the air during his plane flight. “We nest in an accident, [in a] precarious balance” (34), he says. This edge-of-the-world lookout post of his makes one realize that Frisch would be regarded as an environmentalist today, though the term had not been invented at the time of his Sketchbook.