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Voyager I wanted to focus on my Teutonic inheritance, the 1950s, Existentialism, the question of guilt. —Schlöndorff, “The Last Days of Max Frisch” Almost immediately after the American release of The Handmaid’s Tale, Schlöndorff began production of “Last Call for Passenger Faber,” an adaptation of Max Frisch’s 1957 novel Homo Faber. The project, which was finally released under the title Voyager in the United States and Homo Faber in Germany, was one that Schlöndorff thought about for a long time. Indeed Paramount offered him an opportunity to adapt the novel in 1978, but he turned down the project. On the one hand, he thought incest such a taboo that he doubted it could be presented on screen (Schlöndorff, “Wem wird man” 236; Traub 198; Wetzel). On the other hand, as a member of the German protest generation , the filmmaker had turned to political issues and solutions rather than to the existential questions of guilt and angst (Tobis, Press notes for Homo Faber [13]). Schlöndorff returned to the project after the film rights to the novel again became available in January 1988 (Schlöndorff, “Last Days” 1). The final film was not completed until the Spring of 1991. Frisch’s Homo Faber as Source Material Voyager is thus another adaptation of a renowned literary classic, in this case one of the major German-language novels of the 1950s. Its title, Homo Faber, means “man, the maker,” and it touched the existentialist nerve of that Central Europe of the post–World War II economic miracle in which the “doers” dominated . It linked itself to the romantic element in German cultural tradition that criticized, even despised technocracy as a social norm. At the same time, Homo 24 275 Faber was only indirectly a political novel. It was far more concerned with metaphysical and personal questions. The personal angle, in fact, relates to novelist Frisch’s life and, perhaps in an extension, to that of filmmaker Schlöndorff, as well. Not only had Frisch, an architect and technology-oriented person, turned toward the arts. Frisch, who was in his midforties when he wrote the book, also underwent experiences analogous to protagonist Faber’s life: near-marriage in the 1930s to a Jewish student from Berlin (Frisch, Tagebuch 173; Frisch, “Montauk” 727–29; Bircher 710–75), travels in South America, separation from his first wife, conflicts with her about visitation of their daughter (Tobis, Press notes for Homo Faber [26]). Schlöndorff has claimed Frisch to have modeled the character Sabeth on a woman with whom he maintained a relationship until his death and has described conversations with Frisch in which the author told him specifics about their shipboard romance (“Last Days” 22–23; “Wem wird man” 241).1 Schlöndorff himself has cautiously but repeatedly alluded to connections between the Homo Faber story line and his own private life. The filmmaker writes about how, in 1987, when I was living in New York, separated from my wife, incapable of experiencing another love, hence depressed, nearly 50 years old—then, somewhere on 55th Street, it flashed through my head: Homo Faber! I wrote a letter to Max Frisch, and that’s how it all started. (Tobis, Press notes for Homo Faber [9–10]) The filmmaker has acknowledged the desire to restart life at fifty with another, much younger woman, and he has suggested he realized this during the filming (Interview with Terry Gross). At the same time, Schlöndorff repeats with Voyager a pattern, established with The Tin Drum, Swann in Love, and Death of a Salesman, of choosing a literary source that had impressed him as a youth. “When Frisch’s novel came out in 1957 I was in a Paris café drinking my first espresso, wearing jeans and a black turtleneck sweater—one full generation younger than the author” (“Last Days” 1). Frisch’s novel is composed of a number of disparate elements, which at first glance seem unrelated. The first quarter of the book deals with the main character , Walter Faber, a Swiss engineer of about fifty, employed by UNESCO, who is in a commercial airplane that goes down over the Mexican desert. On the plane with him is Herbert Hencke, the brother of Joachim Hencke, a friend from Faber’s university days. Having survived the plane crash and delayed rescue in the desert, Faber impulsively decides to join Herbert to visit Joachim 276 The Post-Wall Schlöndorff in the Guatemalan jungle, where the...

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