A fresh translation of the second volume of Max Frisch’s diaries. By the time Swiss author Max Frisch published the second volume of his diaries or sketchbooks, he had achieved international recognition as a writer and dramatist. In this volume, he develops his version of the literary diary as a mosaic of musings on architecture and writing, travelogue, autobiography, and political insight. He considers Cold War tensions as well as the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States. Now middle-aged himself, he looks squarely at men’s evolving attitude to life, love, sex, women, and status. And for all the idyllic descriptions of his new home in Berzona, Frisch becomes increasingly critical of his native Switzerland, in particular the crackdowns on left-wingers and protestors, and receives abuse for his stance. Based on the second German edition that reinstated material that had been removed from the original 1972 version, this fresh and definitive translation brings an important mid-twentieth-century European classic back to life.  

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

The daily journal of a giant of German literature,  touching subjects ranging from everyday life to the political and social conditions in East Germany as viewed from West Berlin. Max Frisch (1911–91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin’s Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an interview that this was by no means a “scribbling book,� but rather a book “fully composed.� The journal is one of the great treasures of Frisch’s literary estate, but the author imposed a retention period of twenty years from the date of his death because of the “private things� he noted in it. From the Berlin Journal now marks the first publication of excerpts from Frisch’s journal. Here, the unmistakable Frisch is back, full of doubt, with no illusions, and with a playfully sharp eye for the world.  From the Berlin Journal pulls from the years 1946–49 and 1966–71. Observations about the writer’s everyday life stand alongside narrative and essayistic texts, as well as finely-drawn portraits of colleagues like Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Wolf Biermann, and Christa Wolf, among others. Its foremost quality, though, is the extraordinary acuity with which Frisch observed political and social conditions in East Germany while living in West Berlin. 

A new translation of one of the earliest volumes of Max Frisch's innovative notebooks. Throughout his life, the great Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911-1991) kept a series of diaries, or sketchbooks, as they came to be known in English. First published in English translation in the 1970s, these sketchbooks played a major role in establishing Frisch as, according to the New York Times, "the most innovative, varied and hard-to-categorize of all major contemporary authors." His diaries, said the Times, "read like novels and his best novels are written like diaries." Now Seagull Books presents the first unabridged English translation of Sketchbooks, 1946-1949 in a new translation by Simon Pare. This edition reinstates material omitted from the 1977 edition, including a screenplay for an unmade film. In this first volume, which covers the years 1946 to 1949, Frisch chronicles the intellectual and material situation in postwar Europe from the vantage point of a citizen of a neutral, German-speaking country. His notes on travels to the scarred cities of Germany, to Austria, France, Italy, Prague, Wroclaw, and Warsaw paint a complex and stimulating picture of a continent emerging from the rubble as new fault lines are drawn between East and West. As Frisch completes his final architectural projects and garners early success as a writer, he reflects on theater, language, and writing, and he sketches the outlines of plays, including The Fire Raisers and Count OEderland. Whatever experience he chronicles in the sketchbook-whether it's a Bastille Day party, an Italian fish market, or a tightrope display amid the ruins of Frankfurt or an afternoon by Lake Zurich with Bertolt Brecht, to take just a few examples-his keen dramatist's eye immerses the reader in the setting while also probing the deeper significance and motivations underlying the scene. This new translation will serve to draw out the immediacy and contemporary quality of Frisch's observations from the shadow of his status as a classic author, bringing his work to life for a new audience.

A playfully postmodern novel exploring questions of identity from a major Swiss writer.   A man walks out of a bar and is later found dead at the wheel of his car. On the basis of a few overheard remarks and his own observations, the narrator of this novel imagines the story of this stranger, or rather two alternative stories based on two identities the narrator has invented for him, one under the name of Enderlin, the other under the name Gantenbein.  

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This novel by esteemed Swiss writer Max Frisch is an exploration of the question: “Why don’t we live when we know we’re here just this one time, just one single, unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world?!� This outcry against the emptiness of ordinary everyday life uttered by the hero of Frisch’s book is countered by “an answer from the silence� he meets when face-to-face with death. When An Answer from the Silence begins, the protagonist has just turned thirty and is engaged to be married and about to start work as a teacher. Frightened by the idea of settling down, he journeys to the Alps in a do-or-die effort to climb the unclimbed North Ridge, and by doing so prove he is not ordinary. But having reached the top he returns not in triumph, but in frostbitten shock, having come dangerously close to death. This highly personal early novel reflects a crisis in Frisch’s own life, and perhaps because of this intimate connection, he refused to allow it to be included in his Collected Works in the 1970s. Now available in English, this distinctive book will thrill fans of Frisch’s other works.

A reissue of a comic and tragic play that asks just how much of our life we could—or would—change if we got another chance. In this play by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, a middle-aged behavioral researcher Kürmann is given the opportunity to start his life over at any point he chooses and change his decisions and actions in matters both serious and mundane—He could save his marriage, become politically active, take better care of his health, or even change the color of his living room furniture. Despite his intention to apply the wisdom he has acquired with age, Kürmann finds himself inexorably trapped in the same decisions. Ultimately proving fatal, Kürmann’s life game interrogates how much of our own path is shaped by seemingly random factors and how much is in fact predetermined by our own limited, conditioned selves. The play’s central idea—that our lives are nothing but a self-conscious play with imaginary identities—is brilliantly captured in Biography’s dramaturgical form, setting up a theatre rehearsal as the metaphor for the endless possibilities and variables of the game of life. Frisch’s own revised, dramatically heightened version of his play celebrates not only the theatre as a form of self-expression but also the human condition in all its potential and limitations as it showcases both comic and tragic outcomes that define all our lives.

Max Frisch (1911 91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an interview that this was by no means a "scribbling book," but rather a book "fully composed." The journal is one of the great treasures of Frisch's literary estate, but the author imposed a retention period of twenty years from the date of his death because of the "private things" he noted in it. From the Berlin Journal now marks the first publication of excerpts from Frisch's journal. Here, the unmistakable Frisch is back, full of doubt, with no illusions, and with a playfully sharp eye for the world. From the Berlin Journal pulls from the years 1946 49 and 1966 71. Observations about the writer's everyday life stand alongside narrative and essayistic texts, as well as finely-drawn portraits of colleagues like Gunter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Wolf Biermann, and Christa Wolf, among others. Its foremost quality, though, is the extraordinary acuity with which Frisch observed political and social conditions in East Germany while living in West Berlin.

This screenplay by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch was developed from an episode in his 1964 novel Gantenbein, or A Wilderness of Mirrors. At the center of both works is Theo Ehrismann, a man who cannot seem to change his life no matter how many times he resolves to do so. Chance comes to Theo one day upon returning from a trip abroad-he arrives home to read his own obituary in the paper. He shows up just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, and especially not to his wife. "How does one say that he is alive," wonders Theo. Life, as Frisch said, "is the sum of events that happen by chance, and it always could as well have turned out differently; there is not a single action or omission that does not allow for variables in the future." Zurich Transit presents Frisch at the height of his dramatic powers and exemplifies his ardent believe in a dramaturgy of coincidence rather than causality.

New York...I HATE IT...I LOVE IT...I DON'T KNOW...". These are the reflections of Max Frisch, writing from his apartment in the Big Apple near the end of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1946 and continuing until his death at the age of eighty, the man whom many see as Switzerland's greatest writer kept a series of sketchbooks to record his reactions to events of the time and people he encountered in his daily life. Neither a commonplace book nor a diary, these volumes contain the seeds for many of Frisch's most famous works - including Homo Faber, I'm Not Stiller, and Man in the Holocene - as well as his cynical meditations, fictions, incidents, conversations, meetings, newspaper headlines, and dark fantasies - anything, in short, that the author found significant. Drafts for a Third Sketchbook treats the reader to an even more personal document. Unpublished at the time of Frisch's death, this collection was edited by Peter von Matt, president of the Max Frisch Foundation, with an eye toward expanding our knowledge of this legendary writer's last days. Ranging from a couple of sentences to several pages, the sketches collected in this volume recall the United States of the Reagan years and the author's own growing sense of age as both the threat of nuclear war and some of his most treasured friendships pass on. Representing an unusually personal vista onto the world as Frisch knew it, this is a wonderful self-portrait of an extraordinary intelligence.

Together Max Frisch and Friedrich Durrenmatt are not only two of the most esteemed Swiss writers of the twentieth century, but arguably two of the most important European writers since World War II. The remarkable letters gathered here document their unique, unlikely, and extraordinary friendship.

This collection of correspondence offers a picture of two temperaments that could not have been more different. As their letters show, at first their friendship was tentative, both critical and respectful, as one might imagine of two contemporary literary giants. Then, under the pressure of their increasing fame, Frisch and Durrenmatt's letters became more teasing in spirit and began to carry a noted undertone of irony. Finally, perhaps inevitably, the friendship became seriously endangered and failed.

Available in English for the first time, this collection includes an introduction by Peter Ruedi that places the letters within the context of the authors' lives and works, as well as the larger historical events of the time. Detailed notes, a chronology, photographs, and facsimiles of the original letters complete the book, which will be engaging reading for admirers of Frisch and Durrenmatt as well as fans of modern German writing in general.

Arrested and imprisoned in a small Swiss town, a prisoner begins this book with an exclamation: "I'm not Stiller " He claims that his name is Jim White, that he has been jailed under false charges and under the wrong identity. To prove he is who he claims to be, he confesses to three unsolved murders and recalls in great detail an adventuresome life in America and Mexico among cowboys and peasants, in back alleys and docks. He is consumed by "the morbid impulse to convince," but no one believes him. This is a harrowing account part Kafka, part Camus of the power of self-deception and the freedom that ultimately lies in self-acceptance. Simultaneously haunting and humorous, I'm Not Stiller has come to be recognized as "one of the major post-war works of fiction" and a masterpiece of German literature.

The unabridged version of a haunting story of a man in prison. His wife, brother, and mistress recognize him and call him by his name, Anatol Ludwig Stiller. But he rejects them, repeatedly insisting that he's not Stiller. Could he possibly be right-or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one? Translated by Michael Bullock. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book