[In the following essay, Stewart assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Antwort aus der Stille by comparing it to C. E. Montague's Action and Frisch's later work, particularly his novel Stiller.]

Max Frisch's early tale Antwort aus der Stille (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1937) is generally thought to contain little of interest beyond its rudimentary prefiguration of later themes, particularly that of self-acceptance.¹ Indeed, it is not included in Frisch's Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge (1976); yet a closer examination suggests that its relationship to some later works is more interesting than is usually allowed.

The story concerns one Dr Leuthold, who feels keenly the loss of youth and its optimism, and clings to the belief that he is no ordinary man, and that everyday life cannot be all there is to experience. He climbs a high mountain alone, expecting thus to achieve a climactic ‘männliche Tat’ (p. 17) or to die in the attempt, but three days later he returns half-frozen and chastened, now able to see that any life is valid if one accepts and lives it gratefully. Antwort aus der Stille is subtitled ‘Eine Erzählung aus den Bergen’, and like the earlier ‘Entwicklungsroman’ Jürg Reinhart (1934) derives its outer structure from an established narrative form, in this case the alpine adventure, the testing encounter between individual and mountain. Countless twentieth-century examples of very varied merit could be cited here: Joseph Ponten's Der Gletscher (Leipzig, 1932), C. E. Montague's Action (London, 1928), Henri Troyat's La neige en deuil (Paris, 1952), even Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1925).² In short, the high alpine world has been a popular setting for decades, and indeed still remains so, as for example Luis Trenker's continued success shows. The reasons are manifold. Mountains represent one of the few credible settings for individual adventure; for those who see exposure to extreme danger as a path to self-knowledge a mountain setting also offers ready symbols—pure whiteness and above all height, which is so frequently associated with the heroic in Western myth.³ A mountain setting can therefore swiftly establish a mood of heightened seriousness; small wonder, then, that in Switzerland Frisch turned to this type of story when seeking an adequate illustration for his theme of self-acceptance, since as Butler shows (p. 26) Jürg Reinhart had achieved little success. Moreover, alpinism as an activity was particularly popular in the 1920s and 1930s; the number of DAV huts, for example, rose from 323 in 1918 to 709 in 1942.⁴ Natural settings generally were of course already popular in fiction, as witness the Heimatkunstbewegung.

Why then has Frisch's story failed on the whole to please either critics or public? Significantly, it is not even to be found amongst the extremely diverse popular holdings of the DAV Library in Munich. A comparison with Montague's story Action may help to answer this question. Here Christopher Bell, a deeply humanitarian businessman of fifty-two, detects in himself signs of impending physical debility, an intolerable fate after a life of deliberately-sought challenge; so he decides on one final great experience and then death. His passion has always been mountaineering: ‘On the high snows it seemed as if magical fires were lit in your blood; something was added to a man as divine as whatever it is that makes its way into the vapid juice of a fruit and turns it into wine’ (p. 6). Now he speculates on the supreme heights of exhilaration which might be attained by paring away that physical safety-margin which even very daring climbers maintain, something which Bell's readiness for death now makes possible. He undertakes a solitary climb, testing himself to the utmost; exhausted yet still somehow lacking the expected fire, he suddenly hears sounds of distress from other climbers. Now, at last, in a desperate urge to help them, he discovers what it means to climb without any thought for safety at all, seeking only speed; and he finds his revelation: ‘… now there was no next move to be consciously planned. … All of the man was one unit at last, and it lived intently and intensely, moved by some force which it had no more desire to question than flames have to ask “Why burn upward?”’ (p. 21). After this experience, Bell no longer wishes to cut short his life: he is ‘sticking on’ (p. 31).

There are obvious similarities here with Frisch's story. Both deal with physical adventure as symbolic action, with both heroes seeking self-confirmation—albeit of differing kinds—through exceptional experience. Yet there are illuminating differences in the relationship between act and meaning, between problem and solution in the two stories. The most obvious one is, of course, that in Montague's story the mountain adventure evolves naturally from the exposition; on the simplest level it is indeed an exploration of the fascination of mountaineering. Physical and symbolic action fuse perfectly. In Frisch's story the choice of setting for the critical deed is arbitrary; Leuthold's attachment to the alpine world is largely sentimental and his concern to achieve ‘die Tat oder den Tod’ (p. 17) unfocused. In other words, the symbolic nature of the action is clearly exposed, our attention is drawn to the theme of semiology itself, and it is here that the problems lie. At first, Montague's story promises nothing beyond a simple picture of lifelong beliefs embodied in action, while Frisch's seems to promise a more penetrating analysis of the act of signifying, yet fails to produce it. Indeed it is Montague's story which in the end is the richer and more thought-provoking. Bell believes in a straightforward equation of action and meaning; readiness for death, loss of fear, will lead to the intensest experience of his human powers. But he is disappointed, his action releases no new joy. The flame-like state of total unity which he seeks arises only when self is overcome, put totally at risk—not by accepting death, but in the desperate urge to serve an aim beyond self. Nothing inexplicable has occurred; on the level of psychological patterning it is simply that the two sides of Bell's life, his humanitarian concern for others and a concern for the heightening of his own powers, have come fully together. Yet the wish for suicide has gone because he realizes implicitly, as is indicated in the final discussion on the possible connexion between self-negation and inspiration, that the value and portent of human action are not easily predicted or measured, nor yet purely dependent on self but rather on interaction. This is what binds Bell to life: a denouement which questions simple assumptions about meaning and opens up interesting new perspectives both for protagonist and for reader.

Antwort aus der Stille seems at first to present a similar pattern, for its central figure also undergoes a radical change of view. Yet the differences become clear with Frisch's refusal to let us share Leuthold's crucial experience on the mountain. While this may indeed avoid pathos and indicate a depth of meaning beyond expression, the dearth of detail, taken together with the arbitrariness of setting, turns the experience not so much into a symbol as into a cliché. The notion of ‘truth from on high’ appears in its barest and so most stereotyped form. But for whom is the cliché operative? Frisch may be using it as a convenient authorial device, but its very convenience is a trap, for it is so very well established as a shape for important experience that the reader cannot but wonder whether the cliché may not also inhabit the character's mind.⁵ How much of Leuthold's ‘truth’ is the creation of expectation? Does his will for significant experience shape the experience itself? And even if expectation is not the father of meaning, is there not a worrying sense in which, though he claims to be humbled, Leuthold is still laying claim to a privileged insight at the end? Though the message has become one of mature resignation, the almost arrogant simplicity of the relationship between signifying act and imputed meaning is not questioned here either by character or by author: a paradox, for one Bildnis (Leuthold's image of himself) is shattered, only to allow another (the cliché of truth through exceptional experience) to stand unchallenged.

Even if one overlooks this awkwardness and accords Leuthold's crisis the reality and depth he claims for it, the precise wording of the ending raises further and not unrelated problems of self-definition. Leuthold claims that ‘er nun weiß, daß es kein gewöhnliches Leben gibt, kein verächtliches, das einfach wegzuwerfen wäre, und daß wohl alles genug ist, was wir wirklich erfüllen’ (p. 129). In other words, he has understandably been cured of his belief that there should be something better than ordinary life; yet this belief emanated from a conviction that he personally was different and special, ‘daß man kein Mensch wie alle andern war’ (p. 11), so that there are two intimately connected but distinct issues here. Are we to assume, as the finality of tone at the end of the story suggests, that Leuthold has been cured both of his looking beyond ordinary life for ‘real’ experience and of his personal sense of distinctness? Perhaps, indeed, through learning to accept life's ordinariness, he will find his view of himself—which must affect all social relationships—equally transformed. However, the particular form of his encounter with truth, his isolation on the silent mountain, emphasizes the very personal, passive nature of his revelation, while relationships surely demand active adaptation—and indeed, as Montague suggests, it is questionable whether self can in any case be defined in isolation. Many details in Antwort aus der Stille itself indicate just that intricate and shifting two-sidedness of relationships which Frisch was to explore more fully later. Irene, a chance encounter, responds to Leuthold and opposes to his doubts about the possibility of unselfish love a creed of total self-giving which raises many questions. In contrast, Leuthold's fiancée Barbara sees that she has related all his behaviour to herself alone and begins to glimpse something of the process of adjustments that must underlie any mature relationship. Indeed, Leuthold's attraction to two such different women is in itself an image of complexity. Has he grasped this? It is hard to accept that Leuthold's claim ‘daß es ein unsagbar ernstes Glück ist, leben zu dürfen’ (p. 130) is an adequate answer to what are social, that is, suprapersonal, problems. It is not, of course, that Frisch's anti-climactic ending is in some way wrong while Montague's more exciting one is right. Where Antwort aus der Stille fails is in internal logic, in making a facile and unquestioning transference of meaning from the personal to the social plane.

The essential weakness is, then, the discrepancy between problem and solution, between signifying act and hidden meaning, brought about perhaps by Frisch's concern for popularity, for the striking incident above all; yet it is this that makes the story ultimately fruitful. In Frisch's next major narrative work, Die Schwierigen (1943), he is already attempting to investigate human relationships more searchingly, but it is with Stiller (1954) that Antwort aus der Stille has the most interesting links. For precisely the weaknesses of the latter help positively—whether by conscious intention or not—to define the themes and shape the structure of the former. To take firstly the question of cliché: as we have seen, the reader of Antwort aus der Stille remains uncertain as to whether the central cliché is simply a structuring device or an aspect of the protagonist's experience. In Stiller, however, Frisch consciously builds precisely this awkward and unclear relationship between preformed cliché and intense experience into the very fabric of the novel. It becomes, in fact, a novel about the problem of how to relate meaning and form. Stiller returns endlessly to the problem of giving expression to what is intensely personal, both structurally (in the shifting, as it were experimental, nature of his writings) and explicitly. To convey das Unaussprechliche, the spiritual and intimate, Stiller finds he has to use images and phrases with established literary connotations, and even his experience of exotic, challenging places has so many antecedents popularized by the media that, in the very telling, the experiences are deprived of the personal intensity which he most wants to convey. But does he protest too much? Clichés, known patterns of experience, may also initiate responses to events, or add spurious significance in the retelling, and in the course of the novel the reader becomes aware that Stiller is a far from naive story-teller. His apparently random jottings are also conveniently obfuscatory, and the bright colours of many key experiences are later disturbingly reduced. Is Stiller then the victim of cliché or its master? The interplay between these two possibilities, on two levels of time, is one of the most fascinating and profoundly serious elements of this novel about the problems and dangers of the search for self-realization. In other words, Frisch has fully recognized what was wrong with Antwort aus der Stille, where he exploits in his very choice of genre the fact that we easily accept categorized experience, yet fails to acknowledge this in the mind of his central character.

The second interesting connexion between the two works is that Frisch's facile movement from the personal to the social in the earlier tale is developed positively as a theme in Stiller, for now it is the main figure who has to try to relate the two. Frisch has chosen his symbols here much more carefully. Where Leuthold's personal experience of isolation is clearly at odds with the social effect Frisch accords it, Stiller's encounter with his Engel is in itself much more ambiguous, for it seems to combine the idea of deeply personal revelation with that of absolute, quasi-religious validity. If Stiller then fails with Julika, is it because he has not yet after all accepted himself totally, or because the personal experience, Selbstannahme, is only a beginning? Or a red herring? Just how does personal truth relate to the social context? How is the transition to be made? Is there indeed an essential personality, or is self to be defined—like the words Stiller seems to distrust so much—only by interrelationships? These problems are fundamental to the novel, and are directly reflected in the structure, the transition from first-person view to outside comment, the social sphere. In reworking basically similar themes Frisch seems to have derived these questions from specific weaknesses in Antwort aus der Stille which have helped to give the novel Stiller its particular shape, as a negative to a fully-defined print.

The element of popular entertainment is also still important in the later work, of course. Is White Stiller or not? But here it underlines and focuses attention on a crucial and complex question presented in many other ways, instead of bearing alone—and so oversimplifying—the main theme. Similarly, the mountain setting is still there, in the sanatorium and Stiller's later home, but what was once so obtrusively significant has now become also a fully realistic setting. Yet it has interesting overtones, for these two places with their associations unobtrusively bring the notion of searching for ‘truth’ to bear on two of the most problematic and crucial areas of the novel—the deeper meanings of Julika's illness and of Stiller's essential loneliness.

It is interesting to see that in Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979) a mountain setting is again employed, with further exploitation of its possibilities. Again it is a work specifically concerned with a search for truth. Cut off by landslides and isolated in his mountain village, Geiser—a retired businessman—occupies his time by trying to assimilate knowledge of the earth's history from such books as he has. There seem to be at least two levels of enquiry here. On one level Geiser, made self-aware by isolation, is trying to come to terms with his new role of lonely old age, so to speak at the point of retreat from the social into the private world, a new but perhaps not unexpected area of interest for Frisch. By exercising memory in an almost Rilkean way, Geiser seeks to acquire new substance, which is ironic and fascinating in view of the attempts by Frisch's earlier characters to evade all external definition.

The particular mental ballast Geiser chooses also points to another level of enquiry; it represents an urgent search for the specific identity of humanity within the earth's history, a search which perhaps can begin only where the technological world is held at bay—there are obvious echoes of Homo Faber (1959)—and which is rendered urgent in Europe at least by the constant encroachment of ‘civilization’ upon nature, represented here by life further down the valley. Now the mountain setting becomes more than a realistic background, an emotional catalyst, and a symbolic framework: it is also a direct source of truth. Geological formations draw attention to pre-human history and enshrine the earliest signs of life, acting as a kind of collective memory. Equally the unpredictable mountains record something of Man's battle for self-definition in the difficult history of their colonization.

So does Geiser reach some kind of new insight? Frisch has not made the mistake of returning to the easy certainties of Antwort aus der Stille. The search for both personal and human understanding is seen with seriousness and compassion, yet also with detachment and humour, as though Frisch is asking not so much ‘What does this life mean?’ as ‘Is this after all the place to be looking for meaning?’. What he has in a sense done is to restore to the alpine adventure the detailed basic content, Man measuring himself physically against Nature, which has enabled this experience to function for so long as a symbol of truth encountered, and in so doing he has not so much confirmed its validity or usefulness as drawn attention to the process of symbol-creation, of searching for a hold on meaning itself. What was naively assumed in Antwort aus der Stille—that adequate shapes exist to embody meaning—is shown here to be a distant and problematic objective. Of course both Stiller and Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964) are concerned with the mechanisms of self-understanding, but in Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän the central figure is less eccentric, more generalizable, and the choice of an alpine setting draws attention very specifically to popular symbolism and so to the universality of the problem of finding a structure for life. There are no simple answers here, nor yet any tragic failures: Frisch gently and wittily mocks Geiser's attempts to capture fundamental human truths as he shows the often fruitless efforts to get snippets cut from encyclopædias to stick on the walls for contemplation. Frisch's latest alpine adventure is a wry, mature view of our need to give shape to life—and of the scientific and literary languages we create (his own earlier symbols included) in trying to do so.

Notes

1. See, for example Monika Wintsch-Spiess, Zum Problem der Identität im Werke Max Frischs (Zürich, 1965), passim; Michael Butler, The Novels of Max Frisch (London, 1976), p. 158; Hans Jürg Lüthi, Max Frisch (Munich, 1981), p. 11.

2. I am indebted to Professor L. W. Forster for drawing my attention to the story by Montague.

3. See Lord Raglan, ‘The Hero: A Study’, in Tradition, Myth and Drama (London, 1936).

4. See Karl Erhardt, Der alpine Gedanke in Deutschland, Werdegang und Leistung 1869-1949 (Munich, 1950).

5. There is a very comic example of living by clichés, specifically in the form of an absurdly staged mountaineering adventure, in Urs Widmer's novel Die Forschungsreise (Zürich, 1974).