Max Frisch has recently been paid tribute in America in the form of honorary doctorates, honorary fellowship in the MLA, the 1985 Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and now the Neustadt Prize. He is a writer whose fame in Europe is already legendary. Frisch's awesome reputation among German-writing authors as the dean of their trade is hard for an American audience to grasp. This exemplifies the difference in critical appreciation that exists between his own country—Switzerland—and Germany, on the one hand, and between Europe and the United States on the other. The tardiness of Frisch's American recognition, in my opinion, has two possible explanations: two unforgivable Broadway flops in 1963 of his plays Andorra and The Firebugs, and a tendency of the American readership to prefer the more obvious or even the flamboyant to the subtle, understated irony that is a trademark of Frisch's narrative work. Frisch, in addition, is hardly suited to be an insiders' tip traded in exclusive literary circles. His work is too open, his reader appeal is too broad to attract les précieuses ridicules. On the other hand, to link the Frisch phenomenon to ups and downs in readership and audience successes is certainly too simplistic an explanation for the status of an author who has become—beyond his fame as a writer—something of an institution, the unswerving moral and intellectual authority among several generations of modern and postmodern writers. “This work, its essays, plays and novels, the two remarkable sets of journals, Sketchbook 1946-1949 and Sketchbook 1966-1971, is hard to characterize,” says George Stade, “largely because of the variousness and individuality, but also because of the elusiveness of the personality, we feel but can't quite find behind the work. ‘I have been serving up stories to some sort of public, and in these stories I have, I know, laid myself bare—to the point of non-recognition.’”¹

In the year of Max Frisch's seventy-fifth birthday it is rewarding to reread the festschrift Begegnungen (Encounters) that was published by the Suhrkamp Verlag five years ago on the occasion of the author's seventieth birthday.² It is an homage by some of the most important contemporary authors in German literature paid to one of their most respected colleagues. A quick survey leads to the amazing conclusion that all of them treat Frisch's work as a natural extension of Frisch the man and his moral and intellectual authority, and that their respect extends to both, treating the man and his work as a single source of inspiration and an uncorruptible testing ground on which they measure their own artistic and personal accomplishments. It is a kind of admiration that resembles worship. Consequently it reveals a complete absence of envy and no need for competition. Frisch's superiority is accepted by all. As Martin Walser puts it: “He knows that one knows that he knows that one knows. … This has a liberating effect” (204). Another author, Peter Weiss, mentions that in his relationship to Frisch he felt “like Van Gogh wooing Gauguin” (217). Christa Wolf, who contributes perhaps the most personal and courageous critical laudatio, points to the denominator of admiration shared by all her colleagues who try to embrace the Frisch phenomenon: “We found one another, each eloquent enough, under the security blanket of silent companions from another dimension, and we met, contrary to the rules and unconditionally, on the ground of Utopia” (221).

It is precisely this latter term that seems to define the lead that separates Frisch from his admiring colleagues and readers. Dieter Bachmann, in another collection of laudationes celebrating Frisch's seventieth birthday,³ refers to the story of the hare and the hedgehog in comparing himself and other young and ambitious writers to their idol Frisch: whenever they believe they have reached another goal of artistic insight and philosophic foresight, they are bound to recognize that Frisch has arrived there long before they did.

Frustrating as this may be for a younger generation of authors, it is also part of the explanation for the fascination that has ensured Frisch a faithful and ever-growing audience among intellectual and popular readers alike. Frisch's simple clarity of expression, together with an instinct for topics—archetypal or futuristic—that concern humanity forever, leads to a synthesis that could almost be called Frisch's artistic trademark: his uncanny talent to lift into one's consciousness a brilliant and conclusive string of thoughts in such a manner as to give the reader the gratifying impression of just having discovered and formulated himself what he had felt, known, and wanted to express all along.

It comes as no surprise that Frisch, like most great world authors and thinkers, is immensely quotable and that some of his sharp and pungent definitions of present human conditions have gained him not only the admiration of his friends but also vitriolic attacks by political opponents in his homeland, leading to a curious situation: universities in the United States, England, Germany, and France have honored Frisch in recent years. Not one Swiss university has bothered to offer an honorary degree to the most important Swiss writer since Gottfried Keller. A prophet in his own land? Or rather, a painful exposure of Swiss provincialism? The roots of this curious and unworthy confrontation go deeper. It seems that Frisch's Utopian thinking at one time entered on a direct collision course with the political myth of Switzerland by exposing its weakness. Whereas, for example, in the early thirties the federal councilor (minister) Meyer still found it appropriate to call Switzerland “the model of a permanent revolution,” the climate since has taken a sharp turn toward an ultraconservative mood. Frisch proved that Switzerland as an idea, as an original political dream, had ceased to move toward a Utopian future once the power bases were covered by those who were interested only in preserving the status quo. A vision of the future has turned into an ideology of the past.

Frisch's road as a writer is marked by a youthful departure full of hope shortly after World War II.⁴ His enthusiasm for a new beginning, marked clearly by the spirit of the time during which he began to write, is reflected in the youthful vigor characteristic of most of his early and mature work. As Peter Demetz put it in 1970: “There is something constantly alive and open about Max Frisch's mind and work, and after more than thirty years of writing he continues to convey a distinct feeling of youthful energy, endless sympathy, and occasional naïveté.”⁵

His first great postwar prose work is a literary diary that plays the role of an artistic and philosophic manifesto. It is the key to Frisch's writing and thinking, yet it has been published in English translation only recently.⁶ A curious combination of notes regarding world events and intimate insights, fiction, and philosophic treatises, it emerges, in retrospect, as a major document of postwar European thought. The diaristic mode that Frisch discovered as a structure of narrative expression greatly influenced his later novels, among them I'm Not Stiller (1954) and Homo Faber (1957). The Sketchbook 1946-1949 also contains, in a nutshell, the outline of Frisch's complete literary work up to this day.⁷ Thus the Sketchbook is a unique program for an anticipated lifework or, in musicological terms, the basic theme of which the novels and plays are variations. It is therefore not a coincidence that Frisch had his collected works published in chronological order rather than in the traditional classification according to genres: this first edition of his collected works follows the structure of the literary diary.

In terms of philosophy, the Sketchbook marks the outline of what has become known as Frisch's concept of Utopia. Frisch intends to free the human mind from the bondage of fatalism by replacing the notion of predestination with the acceptance of chance as the determining factor in man's striving for knowledge, wisdom, and happiness. He starts out with his now-famous interpretation of the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”: to hold a graven image of a person, of an idea, is the ultimate sin, a denial of potential, hope, growth, and opportunity, and, in the last consequence, a denial of life. The opposite is the Utopia of openness, of continuous change, of the perpetual possibilities life has to offer. Thus Frisch declares war on any ideology, be it religious or secular, that promises permanent happiness, be it transcendental or immanent, depriving man of his right to doubt, to propose alternatives, and to explore the potentials of life to the fullest. As he puts it in the Sketchbook 1946-1949:

Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance? In order to explain the power of chance and thus to make its existence bearable it should hardly be necessary for us to call on God; enough, surely, just to tell ourselves that at all times in our lives, wherever we may be, a totality exists. But for myself, whatever I am doing, it is not this totality that determines my behavior, but only those parts of it I can see and hear. This is my potential, of all the rest I am unaware. I am not tuned in to it, at any rate not now—later maybe. The amazing and startling thing about every chance happening is that it brings us face to face with ourselves, chance shows me the things for which I now have an eye, which I am at this moment attuned to hear. If it were not for this simple trust that nothing can change us if we have not ourselves changed, how could we even cross the street without wandering into insanity? Of course it is conceivable that we do not see and hear everything our potential allows us, in other words, there may be many chance happenings that we fail to see or hear, though they are relevant to us; but we experience none that are not relevant to us. In the final count it is always the most fitting thing that befalls us.

(301)

Echoes of Frisch's contemporaries Camus and Sartre seem to prevail in this early postwar manifesto, yet it would be completely wrong to characterize Frisch as a philosophic theoretician in the fashion of the French existentialists. The seriousness of his practical approach to the solution of society's problems, obviously acquired under the influence of his brief but intensive encounter with Brecht, cannot be underestimated.

Frisch, in his speech “Der Autor und das Theater” (1964), insists that the “Brechtian-Marxist thesis of the desirability of another not yet available world” is identical with Brecht's personal poetic concept.⁸ Frisch likewise established a poetic model for himself: Switzerland as a Utopian dream. In 1955 he triggers a public discussion with his polemic manifesto “Achtung, Die Schweiz!” Frisch's suggestion to build a completely modern Swiss city instead of the anticipated National Fair of 1964 stands at the beginning of a critical and often heated dialogue about “Swissness” between the author and the representatives of “official Switzerland.” The dialogue is documented in such plays as Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958; Eng. The Firebugs) and Andorra (1961) and in the novel Stiller (1954). Disillusionment follows quickly. Already in 1960 there is a short essay entitled “Switzerland Is a Nation without a Utopia,” where we find the following remarks:

That which hinders, even paralyzes Swiss writers, in my opinion is the lack of a historical dimension in our existence. With this I do not necessarily mean our exclusion from major world events—we could live without that, especially in our time—but rather that we do not have a model for ourselves and therefore have no future. All that matters here is to preserve, to repair, to bring to perfection—without any new concept such as the one we proposed years ago in our little brochure “Achtung, Die Schweiz!” with the concrete example of a model city. I would describe fear of the future as the basic sentiment of my Swiss contemporaries. Did it not occur to you that the word Utopia is used here in an exclusively negative sense? This is exactly the crux of the matter: for Switzerland, Switzerland in particular, had once been created out of nothing but a Utopian idea. Today, however, the average Swiss is weaned not only from Utopia but also from radical desires along with mother's milk, so to speak: whoever has a plan must negotiate with the opposition before he even submits it.

(7:258)

The result is an ongoing feud between Frisch and a great number of the younger Swiss authors, on one side, and the Swiss political and social establishment on the other. Polemics occur on both sides. In 1955 Frisch asked the Swiss establishment whether it still had “any ideas”; ten years later he asked his colleagues whether Switzerland was still a topic for them, thus triggering the so-called “Heimat” debate which is still very much en vogue, not just in Switzerland and not only in literature, but also in the new German and Swiss cinema (Reitz, Murer) and as the subject of international conferences (Toronto, 10-12 April 1986). In his great “Schillerpreis-Rede” (Schiller Prize Address; 1974) Frisch defines his position as a critical patriot in the following way:

A patriot (without quotation marks) would be one who has found or never lost his identity as a person and hence recognizes a people as his people: a Pablo Neruda, a rebel, in the fortunate case a great one, a poet, who recites to his people another language than the language of accommodation and hereby returns or gives to them for the first time their identity—which inevitably, in either case, is revolutionary. For the mass of conformists have no Heimat; they have only an Establishment, complete with flag, posing as Heimat—and owned by the millitary to boot. Not only in Chile. …

(12:515f.)

In the same speech the announcement of a new literary project can be found.

One could talk about Friedrich Schiller—who as a Swabian poet was not obliged to celebrate the historical-real Switzerland—and thus about William Tell. One could expound why this father with crossbow and son (for Hodler, without son but never without crossbow) has to be debunked from time to time—not because William Tell never existed (you cannot blame him for that), but because, as a vital figure of legend (a Scandinavian one) and moreover endowed by Friedrich Schiller with German idealism, he rather gets in the way nowadays of a Swiss self-conception.

The reaction in Switzerland to Frisch's “Wilhelm Tell für die Schule” (“William Tell for the Classroom”) proved Frisch's point. Regardless of the common knowledge that ridiculing a legend of questionable derivation could not even harm tourism or the souvenir business, let alone the Swiss reputation or the national pride, Frisch's skillful and sarcastic Tell story, told from the point of view of Gessler and amply footnoted to mock the guild of Swiss historiographers, caused an uproar. It led to a flood of anonymous threatening phone calls and numerous equally anonymous letters by determined patriots who offered to buy the attacker of their favorite idol a one-way ticket to the moon or to Moscow. The mood in certain circles of the Swiss public turned downright ugly when, in 1973, Frisch offered a critical revision of his early naïve soldier's diary, Blätter aus dem Brotsack (Letters from the Knapsack; 1940): Dienstbüchlein (Service Booklet) is a very sober analysis of yet another sacred institution of Switzerland, its citizens' militia. An American, John McPhee, in his book about the Swiss army, quotes Machiavelli, who said: “The Swiss have no army. They are an army.”⁹ Thus, “the principal cement in the structure of Swiss confederate identity,” as George Steiner calls it, with its “importance in business and banking, indeed even within the academic establishment, of friendships formed and patronage cultivated … (officers tend to belong to a freemasonry of subsequent social and economic preferment),”¹⁰ was exposed by Frisch as the very carrier, procurer, and preserver of a chauvinist ideology that runs against the current of the old Swiss Utopia of vision and change. Frisch was not ostracized by the Swiss public, but he was boycotted by the purveyors of prizes and awards and by the housing office of the city of Zürich, which found it suddenly impossible to locate an apartment for one of its most famous sons.

Disregarding these and other clashes between the author and his political opponents and taking into account a number of marital disasters, one cannot escape the impression that the mood in Frisch's writing after 1964 (the year his novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein [Eng. Gantenbein] was published) took a sharp turn toward pessimism. The Sketchbook 1966-1971 (1972), the “narration” Montauk (1975), the “three scenic images” Triptychon (1978; Eng. Triptych), the novella Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979; Eng. Man in the Holocene), and his most recent literary text, the tale Blaubart (1982; Eng. Bluebeard), all deal with old age, failed relationships, shattered hopes, and death. Frisch's brand of pessimism is not of the whining kind, however. In his literary works of the past twenty years he not only reaches the apex of his art but also handles the gloomy topics with a grim yet irresistible sense of humor.

Frisch's observation that “this is not the time for first-person narratives, yet human life happens, or fails, in the individual or nowhere else” is a watershed for his whole work. It marks his position as a writer whose works are both highly personal—in his Sketchbooks and in such stories as Montauk even confessional—and at the same time open and engaged. “Öffentlichkeit als Partner” (“The Public as Partner”) is more than the title of a speech given in 1958; it is a program involving everything that Frisch considers to be the writer's responsibility as a zoon politikon.

The catchword is enlightenment. Frisch believes in the heritage of the European and American Age of Reason. In fact, Frisch's concern with man's chances for survival is intimately related to his belief in the power of rational persuasion. His recent mood of pessimism is far less a result of personal disappointments than of a growing conviction that all signs point at the inability of mankind to learn from its own historical mistakes because of its excessive need for irrational “explanations” and “solutions.” Frisch puts the blame for the interrupted process of enlightenment squarely into the lap of the politicians, regardless of their ideological stance. There are great efforts under way to stop the education and enlightenment of the world population, Frisch claims. To stultify its population, the communist world uses the party line; in capitalist countries the same is done by television.

My impression is that people do not want to know but to believe. In factual necessities [Sachzwänge], for example. And consciousness is not in demand these days. There is no profit in it. It only carries responsibility. And don't we live very comfortably—admit it!—at the expense of the Third World facing disaster that Cassandra too does not know how to handle? So what! If politics are necessary, let them be optimistic: dynamic liberalism; security through the Swiss Banking Corporation; the Muscovites will be stunned should they attack at the Luziensteig; the less state the better; he who asks questions in public endangers the economy. Patriotism is in demand, not ours but the one you find in albums: “Where Mountains Rise,” patriotism all the way down to the lowlands of xenophobia: “Thou Still Hast Thy Sons,” the way it was back in the thirties. A new feature in the fatherland is the dying of forests, which unfortunately cannot be denied by the forest rangers, but one should not exaggerate. Pessimism does not get you any votes. Rational is what is profitable. Doubts are not asked for, yet nostalgia and reincarnation (Indian-American) are available to every citizen and a big hit: the guarantee of the transmigration of our souls disposes of any number of nuclear warheads. On the whole there is no reason for panic and revolt, only reason for rearmament. What else! One does not wish any apocalypse (naturally), yet there it is: the cheerfulness of postmodernism.¹¹

In the best liberal tradition Frisch quotes Kant's declaration of enlightenment: “Enlightenment is man's emancipation from his self-inflicted dependence. Dependence is the inability to use one's reason without someone else's guidance. This dependence is self-inflicted if the origin of it is not lack of reason but lack of determination and of courage to use reason without someone else's guidance.” According to Frisch, Kant's hope has failed in our time.

There is no question that we owe a lot to the natural sciences: up to a certain limit. Where does the deficit begin? Science without any ethical reason, and therefore scientific research for whose consequences no one feels responsible, is more than a deficit; it is the perversion of enlightenment that is supposed to emancipate us. Today enlightenment is a revolt against the superstition of technology, which makes humanity look antiquated, as Günter Andres put it, and which leads to our impotence opposite technology. All this is alarming enough but not effective as alarm in a society insisting that rational is what is profitable. …

Thus, at the end of enlightenment there is not, as Kant and all the other enlighteners hoped, emancipated man but rather the Golden Calf, known to us already from the Old Testament.

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”—biblical references again in this public statement, Frisch's most recent one! Yet any resemblance to theology is purely coincidental. Frisch's eschatology is thoroughly secular, in the tradition of the Age of Reason, but also of Heine and Brecht. The transcendental concept of eternity has been reversed by Frisch: “To be eternal: to have been” (Homo Faber).

What about the principle of hope? Frisch's reference to Cassandra sounds thoroughly pessimistic. So does his assessment of man's ability to use his reason for survival. Still, there are traces of optimism in Frisch's recent work, even in the above-quoted speech, where he says:

(What is the direction of our hope?)

I find solidarity with all those who, anywhere in the world and therefore here too, offer resistance—that also means resistance against the cop-outs of the constitutional state—resistance with the goal that the spirit of enlightenment will succeed and will succeed in time: not as a historical repeat performance, I think, but awakened by historical experience to new and different experiments of association of emancipated men. And there are beginnings of this. Perhaps there is not much time left for our species, not another worldwide millennium: without any break-through to an ethical reason, which can only come about through resistance, there will be no next century, I'm afraid. Today an appeal to hope is also an appeal to resistance.

What is needed for the survival of the human race is no less than a revolution of enlightenment: “Whether the species's will for survival will be sufficient for the conversion of our societies into ones capable of peace, I do not know. We hope it will. It is urgent. Prayer does not absolve us from the question of our political dealings with this hope, which is a radical one. The belief in a possibility of peace (and therefore in the survival of mankind) is a revolutionary belief.”¹² These words were spoken at the Saint Paul's Church in Frankfurt in 1976 when Frisch received Germany's most prestigious literary award, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Hope, however, is neither an ideology nor a program we can build upon. In view of mankind's historical record, it means the chance that man could still change; or, to repeat Frisch's words, “If it were not for this simple trust that nothing can change us if we have not ourselves changed, how could we even cross the street without wandering into insanity?”

Notes

1. George Stade, “A Luminous Parable” (on Man in the Holocene), New York Times Book Review, 22 June 1980, p. 35.

2. Begegnungen: Eine Festschrift für Max Frisch, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1981.

3. Schweizer Monatshefte, 61:5 (1981).

4. To be sure, Frisch's career as an author started as early as 1931 with his contributions to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, his youthful early novels Jürg Reinhart (1934), Antwort aus der Stille (Answer from Silence), and J'adore ce qui me brûle oder Die Schwierigen (I Adore What Burns Me, or The Difficult Ones), as well as a soldier's diary (1940) and a novella (Bin, 1945). His mature work, however, begins in 1945 with his plays and with Sketchbook 1946 1949.

5. Peter Demetz, Postwar German Literature: A Critical Introduction, New York, Pegasus, 1970, p. 112.

6. Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1946-1949, Geoffrey Skelton, tr., San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

7. Cf. Rolf Kieser, Max Frisch: Das literarische Tagebuch, Stuttgart, Huber, 1975.

8. Max Frisch, Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, 12 vols. (paperback edition), Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1976, volume 5, p. 345. This and subsequent translations are my own, with volume and page numbers given in parentheses.

9. John McPhee, La Place de la Concorde suisse, New York, Faber, 1985.

10. George Steiner, “What Is ‘Swiss,’” Times Literary Supplement, 7 December 1984, p. 1399.

11. Max Frisch, “Am Ende der Aufklärung steht das goldene Kalb” (At the End of the Enlightenment Stands the Golden Calf), speech held for fellow writers in Solothurn (Switzerland) on 10 May 1986 and published in Die Weltwoche (Zürich), 15 May 1986, pp. 57f.

12. Max Frisch, “We Hope,” William Riggan, tr., in this issue of WLT, pp. 536-40.