Search results for ""Author Max Frisch""

A renowned novel of self-deceit and self-acceptance. 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, and 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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