In his final typescript, in a deeply personal way and in a novel literary form, Max Frisch engaged with the national scandal that rocked Switzerland in 1989 and 1990: almost a million Swiss citizens had been under State surveillance during the Cold War. On individualised index cards or »fiches« the Attorney General’s Office created a chronicle of suspicion, whose grotesque banality served only to exacerbate the scandal.
Frisch began researching his own file in 1991, in the run-up to the controversial 700th anniversary of the Swiss Confederacy. Nearly half a century after the publication of Stiller, Frisch felt compelled to return to the question of the relationship between biography and identity. Armed with scissors, a stapler, and a typewriter, he went to work on the flotsam of the analogue surveillance apparatus. The resulting collage is a devastating indictment of the ignorance at the heart of the state security agency and the country itself. And in this regard, it is as relevant as ever. Frisch’s text has now been published for the first time.
»Why don’t you write another diary?«
»When I came to Berlin in 1973, I […] started keeping a diary again, the so-called Berlin Diary, about fellow authors, Grass, [Uwe] Johnson, about the Leipzig book fair, but also mixed in with very private things. […] I’ve put a hold on it till twenty years after I’m dead: because the people involved, who will have more distance to it by then. But for now it’s in the deep freeze.«
(from: »›I draw from experience‹: Volker Hage in conversation with Max Frisch«, Max Frisch, Sein Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten, Berlin 2011)
Spring 1958: Ingeborg Bachmann – celebrated poet, winner of Literary Prize of Gruppe 47 and cover star of Der Spiegel – is broadcasting the radio play Der gute Gott von...
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»Do you consider yourself to be a good friend? Are you a good friend to yourself?« Twenty-three questions on the subject of friendship lie between these two queries. Max Frisch’s...
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Max Frisch’s literary career began in 1934 with the novel Jürg Reinhart, a summery tale of the road to destiny. Three years later in the German publishing establishment he...
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»I want to describe this day, nothing but this day, our weekend and all of this happened, what happens next, without inventing anything.«
»Max Frisch’s candid story of his...
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Max Frisch‘s Homo faber is one of the most important and most-read books of the 20th century: Engineer Walter Faber believes in a rational worldview that is irrevocably destroyed by a...
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Max Frisch's sketchbook is a survey. His reports from Europe between the years of 1946 and 1949, the accounts of his encounters in the post-war years are of both historic and current...
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