Switzerland remembers Max Frisch

Frisch received many prestigious awards for his writings Keystone

The 10th anniversary of the death of Max Frisch is being marked this month with a series of radio and television programmes celebrating the work of one of the country's leading literary figures of the 20th century.

Born in Zurich in 1911, Frisch studied architecture at the city’s Federal Institute of Technology and after gaining his diploma began a university course in German studies.

During the 1930s he became a freelance journalist, reporting from Germany and Czechoslovakia for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper during the years leading up to the Second World War.

At the same time, Frisch was developing his literary career. His first book – “Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schickalfahrt” – was published in 1934.

Frisch was profoundly influenced by events which in Europe before and during the war – which he spent doing military service in Switzerland.

He is considered a great writer who throughout his career expressed the concerns and fears of his contemporaries. His plays – along with those by his fellow-Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt – had a strong influence on the German-language theatre scene.

Recurring themes in his books and plays are identity, innocence and guilt, and self-image. Another leitmotif of both his literary and political writing was Switzerland, whose own self-image and the attitudes of its citizens he repeatedly questioned.

But he tended not to pass judgement, and avoided the “pointed finger” ideologies of contemporaries such as his friend Bertold Brecht.

Frisch was a moralist whose novels and plays let readers and theatre audiences explore the depths of the human soul, while leaving them to draw their own conclusions. His works were aimed at promoting self-recognition rather than ideology.

During the course of his life, Frisch travelled widely. He received many prestigious awards for his writings – and was even honoured for his work as an architect in Zurich.

Frisch spent most of the last period of his live at Berzona in Canton Ticino, and died in Zurich shortly before his 80th birthday in 1991.

by Richard Dawson