Max Frisch. Sein Werk im Kontext der europäischen Literatur seiner Zeit by Herausgegeben von Régine Battiston und Margrit Unser (review)

Max Frisch has of course become one of the celebrated European authors of modernity. His literary texts are and remain as poignant today as when they were written; likewise his engaging and polemical essays continue to provide insight into Swiss culture and into the nature of democracy. In their volume the editors Battiston and Unser, both noted Frisch scholars, have gathered and published a collection of fourteen essays from notable (and mostly European) Germanists who place Frisch’s many-faceted work—novels, stories, essays, theatrical works, journals, and speeches—within the context of the literature of his contemporaries, be they authors or philosophers. As always one might quibble about the choice of topics selected based on a myriad of influences and crosscurrents that Frisch or any author experiences over a lifetime. I shall refrain from that here. In this illuminating volume we come to view Frisch’s œuvre in the light of those whose ideas and philosophies had influenced him, such as C.G. Jung, Thomas Mann, Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard in his early years. Then there are contemporary authors whose work he much admired, such as Luigi Pirandello, T.S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Döblin, Ludwig Hohl, and Paul Celan, among others. This volume published on the twentieth anniversary of his death and the hundredth anniversary of his birth offers the reader the first opportunity to read interpretations of Frisch’s literary and essayistic work in the context of his time.

Beatrice von Matt opens the volume with a stunning chapter on the influence of the Sicilian author Luigi Pirandello, particularly his novel Mattia Pascal (1904), on Frisch’s novel Homo Faber. Melanie Rohmer shows how Eliot’s comedy The Cocktail Party influenced both Stiller and Homo Faber and how Eliot’s The Family Reunion with its femininity, spirituality, and illness are reflected in Homo Faber. Katrin Bedenig compares the paths of Thomas Mann and Frisch as they develop from being apolitical to becoming critically engaged political statesmen. Bedenig reveals Frisch’s admiration for Mann’s political stand. In her essay, Barbara Lafond-Kettlitz compares Ludwig Hohl’s story “Bergfahrt” with Frisch’s story “Antwort aus der Stille,” revealing Frisch’s admiration of and support for Hohl’s fiction, which was to remain under-appreciated by a broader public. Robert Cohen illuminates the correspondence between Max Frisch and Paul Celan with regard to Celan’s poetry and Frisch’s works such as Andorra, a correspondence that is further complicated by both authors’ friendship with Ingeborg Bachmann. Cited also is Jelinek’s book Briefwechsel zwischen Celan, Bachmann and Frisch. In his essay, Philippe Wellnitz places Frisch’s Don Juan in the context of the Don Juan literature to reveal how Frisch in his version of the famous story enables the comic aspects of repetition and mistaken identities to grow into a tragic existential dimension. In a second essay on Don Juan, Eric Lysoe compares Frisch’s text with those of postwar artists Andre Obey, Charles Bertin, and Henry de Montherlant. Lysoe contends that the greatest stories that pose important social questions are in reality new editions of older myths. In a time in which myths are suspended, one can read Frisch’s Don Juan as the story of one tortured soul which has been nurtured by the catastrophes of the Second World War and its aftermath. In the next essay, film director Dirk Schulz describes the difficulties that he encountered staging Frisch’s Graf Oederland recently in Gießen and explains what he did to make the production more successful than it had been in the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Ruth Vogel-Klein’s essay concentrates on the publication and reception of Frisch’s œuvre in the GDR. Four dramas, Biedermann und die Brandstifter, Andorra, Don Juan, and Nun singen sie wieder, were all published in the GDR...