THE PLAYS OF MAX FRISCH ©Michael Butler 1985 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1985 978-0-333-36276-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1985 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters Ltd Frome, Somerset British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Butler, Michael The plays of Max Frisch. I. Frisch, Max-Criticism and interpretation I. Title 832'.912 PT26ll.R814Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-17855-1 ISBN 978-1-349-17853-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17853-7 For Jean, julian, Emma and Minna Note on References All page-references to Frisch's work are taken from the standard Suhrkamp edition in six volumes ( 1976). Roman numerals refer to the volume, Arabic to the page. In the case of Triptych. Three Scenic Panels, the first edition of 1978 has been used. Vlll Preface My aim in writing this book has been to provide a clear and succinct introduction to the plays of Max Frisch which will be of interest and use both to the general reader and the specialist. My analyses are firmly based on the texts themselves and supported by ample quotation in the original German and in English translation. I have grouped the notes at the end of the volume where they can be conveniently bypassed by those who do not wish to pursue the argument into secondary areas. The bibliogra phy has been compiled with the needs of the specialist in mind. Although not exhaustive, it includes all the major items concern ing Frisch's work as a dramatist. I wish to thank the following for permission to quote from Frisch's published work: in German, the Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main; in English, Michael Bullock and Methuen London Ltd (The Great Wall of China, Don juan, Count Oederland, The Fire Raisers, Andorra, Biography), Geoffrey Skelton and Methuen London Ltd (Triptych). I would like once again to express my gratitude to the Swiss Council for the Arts Pro Helvetia for a generous subsidy towards the costs of publishing this book, to the British Academy and the University of Birmingham for research grants to enable me to carry out preliminary work, and to the editors of German Life & Letters and Text+ Kritik where versions of Chapter lO first appeared. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Ian Donaldson and his colleagues in the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, where I spent a stimulating period as a Visiting Fellow at an early stage in the composition of this study. I should also like to thank friends and colleagues who have helped me in numerous ways: the staff and students of the German Department in Birmingham University, especially Ron Speirs, Wilfried van der Will and Wolfgang Worsch, Gerhard P. Knapp of the University of Utah, Uschi Miiller of the Suhrkamp Verlag and Walter Obschlager of the Max Frisch Archiv, Zurich. Birmingham M.B. lX 2 The Plays of Max Frisch European culture that it brought the latter fundamentally into question. Picard, in particular, argued that although National Socialism was a moral sickness most clearly seen in Germany, other nations should be aware of similar propensities within themselves.1 Such sentiments were fully shared by Max Frisch who in an important essay, Kultur als Alibi (1949), and in many entries in his Tagehuch 1946-1949 ( 1950, Sketchbook 1946-1949) showed himself to be only too well aware of the problematical nature of a culture with which he was so emotionally and linguistically identified: Wenn Menschen, die gleiche Worte sprechen wie ich und eine gleiche Musik lieben wie ich, keineswegs gesichert sind, Unmenschen zu werden, woher beziehe ich fortan meine Zuversicht, daB ich davor gesichert sei? (n, 340) Ifhuman beings who speak the same language as I do, love the same music as I do, are in no way protected from becoming monsters, where do I draw my confidence from henceforth that I am so protected? At the same time, Frisch was concerned not to side-step the huge task of facing up to the consequences of the German catastrophe via broad generalisations-a moral evasion based on the dubious principle of safety in numbers - however well-meaning and sympathetic such an endeavour might be. In his Sketchbook 1946-1949 and in a series of essays, speeches and reviews in the immediate post-war years he argued both against a certain type of defiant German arrogance which sought to disqualify the com ments of individuals who had not personally suffered the ravages of war, and against the simplistic belief of many of his countrymen that such a disaster could not have happened in their own model Republic. Indeed, Frisch's first performed play, Nun singen sie wieder (1945, Now They Are Singing Again) was written entirely in this spirit of mediation between opposing poles. Far from being an 'evasion of commitment',2 Frisch's refusal to damn either side exclusively sprang from a humane concern for a new start in Europe which could only be based on mutual respect and a willingness to learn from past errors. The tension between Frisch and his environment, visible in all his work, was certainly increased by the inclination he saw on all sides to forget the immediate past. Travelling widely in Eastern Introduction 3 and Western Europe once the borders were reopened, Frisch roundly condemned what he saw as a refusal to face up to the uncomfortable truth of individual and collective cowardice and opportunism. In Switzerland this took the form of a convenient amnesia, for example, on the question of the sympathy shown for Hitler in the 1930s by the 'Frontier' or the treatment of refugees after the controversial declaration, 'the boat is full', which led to many, especially Jews, being turned back at the frontier to an all too obvious fate.3 None of these matters, of course, can be compared with Nazi atrocities, but the reluctance to discuss them and other sensitive areas openly is one of the major sources of Frisch's persistent ambivalence towards his native country. This has found sharp and sometimes bitter expression not only in his diaries, novels and plays, but above all in such polemical essays as Die Schweiz ist ein Land ohne Utopie ( 1960), Unbewiiltigte schweizerische Vergangenheit ( 1965), the two contributions to the controversy over foreign workers in Switzerland, Uberfremdung I and II ( 1965, 1966), as well as the hard-hitting speech Die Schweiz als Heimat? (1974). If anything, the 1980s have seen an even more critical involvement in local and national Swiss politics which has not endeared Frisch to the current Establishment in the Confedera tion.4 At the same time, given the critical decision in 1939 to remain neutral, Switzerland's position as a small country surrounded by the hostile Axis powers was indeed a difficult one. The so-called 'Igel-Stellung' ('hedgehog-posture') was in effect the only defence the country could adopt. Its passive nature, however, contributed to a general sense of impotence which Friedrich Diirrenmatt, for example, has recently described as a 'curse' inflicted on the nation in return for the privilege of being 'spared' .5 For Frisch, this 'curse' manifested itself most clearly in terms of Sartrean bad faith. Thus, whereas on his own admission he had tried to portray the Swiss bourgeoisie in a positive light in his early novel,j'adore ce qui me brule oder Die Schwierigen (1943),6 his post-war work - especially in the theatre- constitutes a harsh dissection of abject failure, both in Switzerland and abroad, to defend and develop humanist ideals. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, impotence and anger vis-a-vis bourgeois society colour much of Frisch's attitude as a dramatist. In the context of twentieth-century Switzerland such a stance has a long and distinguished provenance. Indeed, Frisch 6 The Plays of Max Frisch THE DEVELOPMENT OF FRISCH'S DRAMATURGICAL IDEAS The emergence of Max Frisch as a leading European dramatist is unthinkable outside the context of one theatre: the Schau spielhaus in Zurich. Until 1933 this privately owned institution had been largely devoted to light entertainment and was hardly distinguishable from any other provincial theatre in Switzerland. But the proprietor, Ferdinand Rieser, clearly had wider ambi tions for this enterprise, and with an unrivalled commercial and artistic instinct he seized the opportunity offered by Nazi oppression after 1933 to attract to his theatre the cream of German (and after 1938, Austrian) directorial and acting talent. Kurt Hirschfeld, Kurt Horwitz, Leopold Lindtberg, Leonard Steckel, the designer Teo Otto, Therese Giehse, Ernst Ginsberg, Emil Stohr and Wolfgang Langhoff (the latter rescued from a German concentration camp) were some of the illustrious theatri cal refugees from Hitler's regime who came to Zurich where they proceeded to create for the first time in Switzerland an ensemble and a theatre of world stature. By 1938, when Rieser sold up and the Neue Schauspielhaus A. G. was founded (amidst some controversy) under the direction of Oskar Walterlin, 11 the Schauspielhaus was well on the way to becoming the undisputed artistic centre of opposition to fascism in the German-speaking countries. Under Walterlin's inspired leadership, the Schauspielhaus not only staged important plays by Claude!, Giraudoux, O'Neill, Sartre and Thornton Wilder, premiered Brecht's Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Szechuan and The Life of Galileo, but it also placed at the heart of its anti-fascist programme refreshingly new readings of the classics ofGerman humanism: Lessing's Nathan der Weise, Goethe's lphigenie auf Tauris and both Parts of Faust, Schiller's Maria Stuart, Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell. In addition, exciting productions of Buchner's Dantons Tod, of Shakespeare, Gorki and Ibsen ensured that the Schauspielhaus became and remained the most important German language theatre through out the war years and the only one to keep up with international ideas and trends.12 Apart from Walterlin himself, the key figure in this rich period was undoubtedly the Dramaturg, Kurt Hirschfeld. For it was Hirschfeld who guaranteed the continuity of direction under Introduction 7 Rieser and Walterlin and helped to shape the extraordinary repertoire of the Schauspielhaus which restored the theatre to its traditionally German role as a moral institution. Both men sought to establish the urgent relevance of the classics whilst boldly supporting new modern plays with contemporary themes. Against the bombastic irrationalism of the Nazi stage they set what Hirschfeld called a 'humanistic realism'.13 Such a theatre was the initial inspiration and subsequent home for Max Frisch (as it was for Friedrich Diirrenmatt); it encouraged indigenous talents and ensured that their first plays would be staged in a theatre which saw its function in uncompromisingly social and political terms. Whilst the Schauspielhaus provided Frisch with a congenial and stimulating framework, the greatest impact on his dramatur gical thinking was made by Bert Brecht. Given the Schaus pielhaus's international significance during the war - a pre eminence merely underlined when Goebbels closed all the German theatres in 1944-it was only natural that when Brecht returned to Europe in 194 7 he should settle temporarily in Zurich. The conversations that Frisch was able to have with Brecht during his six-month stay, in particular the discussions over the preliminary draft of Brecht's Short Organon for the Theatre (1949), decisively influenced his development as a dramatist. What attracted Frisch to Brecht, however, was not so much his Marxist ideology (which he never found convincing), but Brecht's intense seriousness of purpose, the constant sense of discovery and intellectual excitement that surrounded him. Brecht was both a highly skilled listener and an inveterate poser of questions, whether in the theatre or on the building site to which Frisch once took him to demonstrate the technical problems his daily work as an architect presented. It was this attitude of critical questioning coupled with an artisan's down-to-earth approach to the craft of writing that most caught Frisch's imagination. What he could not accept - and the fact kept him from cooperating with Brecht on any theatrical project despite a warm invitation14 - was the carapace of Marxist certainty behind which Brecht sheltered. Brecht's basically optimistic conviction that man and the world can and should be changed is entirely lacking in Frisch whose deep-seated scepticism creates an ironic tension, a dark shadow, in his otherwise classical stance as an enlightened humanist. That Frisch's scepticism has increased rather than diminished