From the Pool to Poetry: Max Frisch's Voice in Postwar Architectural Discourse

摘要

Max Frisch (1911-1991) was one of the outstanding German-language authors of the twentieth century, an incisive and insistent literary observer of the postwar era and an artist who actively sought to engage with society. As with the Italian neorealist films that he so admired, Frisch's main concern, as a novelist and playwright, was to shine a light on the reality of his times - and not least the reality of an ostensibly unruffled and untouched small state like Switzerland: for Frisch, the local always resonated with the universal. But then in the mid-1950s the publication of two novels appeared to reverse this, suddenly giv- ing the Swiss writer an international readership. I'm not Stiller (1954) was the first title from the still young German publisher Suhrkamp to sell more than a million copies. And Frisch's next book, Homo Faber (1957), translated into more than two dozen languages, proved even more successful. The author had evidently touched on the raw nerve of a whole generation.