Max Frisch: This is what Germany missed

No, he didn’t like his compatriots. For him, the Swiss were business-minded opportunists and moral hypocrites. People who had done business with the Nazis and claimed after 1945 that they had always been anti-fascists. But books are often smarter than their authors. Between the lines they reveal things that undermine the author’s credibility and thus his judgments and opinions.

Which of course fits perfectly with “Stiller,” a novel in which credibility is questioned from the start. A first-person narrator who claims not to be who everyone thinks he is. “I’m not Stiller!” is how Max Frisch’s debut novel begins, which became a bestseller when it was published in 1954. The rest is literary history. The number of academic papers about Frisch’s play with identity – who are you actually and can you succeed in reinventing yourself? – should be in the hundreds, yes, thousands. The book has long since entered the canon of world literature and has suffered the fate of all classics: it has been interpreted to death. Secondary literature killed the living book.

The only thing that helps is to stick with Jacques Derrida: you have to deconstruct the book. Reading it against the grain. As if it had never been published. As if it had been found in some estate 70 years after it was created. And act as if Max Frisch and all the things you learned about him and his work in German class were completely foreign to you. Amnesia as an opportunity.

And then you’re amazed. The madness of the Nazi dictatorship, the Second World War and the systematic murder of Jews – all of this of course shaped German and Austrian literature after 1945. All the more so as collective repression set in in public life. In the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria there were suddenly only people who had shouted “Heil Hitler!” against their will. But there was no reappraisal in East Germany either. As early as 1946, the SED allowed former NSDAP members to join the party. In 1949, the newly founded GDR officially became Nazi-free. From then on, fascists only existed in the West. They deliberately ignored the fact that more than a quarter of the SED members had simply exchanged the brown party book for the red party book (as an internal investigation showed in 1954) and that the NDPD bloc party deliberately served as a catch basin for old Nazis.

So it was the writers on both sides who dealt with the German past. Whether Anna Seghers or Hermann Kant, whether Heinrich Böll or Günter Grass, the Nazi era was always present in their books – even if they did not explicitly write about it. The mountain of guilt that had been accumulated in just twelve years gave birth to a leaden literature that was encapsulated in itself. People were busy with themselves; After all, there was more than enough to work through. But what happened beyond Austria and the two Germanys was only learned peripherally, if at all.

For that reason alone, “Stiller” is a blessing. The novel opens itself – in the literal sense – to the world. The protagonists are drawn to “New York”, to Paris, to Toledo, to Mexico. At a time when Germans only traveled by slow train to the Baltic Sea or the Black Forest to spend their annual vacation, Max Frisch’s actors flew to Egypt as a matter of course. They are cosmopolitans long before mass tourism perverted the idea behind it.

But modernity doesn’t stop at travel destinations and means of transport. In Zurich in the early 1950s – unlike in lower-middle-class Federal Republic – a divorce did not result in social ostracism, but was seen as an acceptable option for broken marriages. In Switzerland, abortions are also not punishable if there is a medical indication. More liberal cantons and doctors use the scope for interpretation that this opens up. Therefore, an abortion in “Stiller” takes place without much fuss. It happens because the woman wants it that way. There’s nothing more to say about that.

Women in general. While the West German patriarchs were authorized until 1958 to terminate their spouses’ jobs upon marriage (which many promptly did), a Swiss wife reserves the right to fly to New York and work there for two years. The extraordinary thing about it is the matter-of-factness with which Max Frisch describes such acts of self-determination. A couple decides to have an open marriage – so what! When reading, you always have to make sure that this book was actually published in 1954, and that Max Frisch already had ideas for it at the end of the 1940s. One would not have expected that Switzerland, of all places, would be the epitome of progressiveness.

And yet it is plausible. Today it is all too easy to forget that the Third Reich was not a twelve-year interlude, but rather a turning point that set Germany and Austria back decades in terms of consciousness. Free ways of thinking and living, which had found supporters not only among the bohemians but also among parts of the bourgeoisie in the Weimar Republic, were crushed when the Nazis came to power in 1933. After 1945 there was no longer any intelligentsia or artistry that deserved the name. Germany’s cultural life had emigrated. Disappeared.

In post-war Germany, one looked in vain for Jewish filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Jewish authors like Kurt Tucholsky. Instead, the former Wehrmacht soldiers hijacked the cultural scene. Gone was the lightness of films like “People on Sunday” and stories like “Grissholm Castle”. And it should stay that way for a long time. The severed connection to the culturally wild 1920s and early 1930s was felt in Germany well into the 1980s. Maxim Biller was the first Jewish author who managed to pick up and continue the intellectual thread that was cut off in 1933.

Different in Switzerland. There was no cultural break here, no zero hour. The Confederates had indeed done business with the Nazis, but they had not started a world war and had not gassed any Jews. Their guilt was an anthill compared to Germany’s. And Max Frisch must have felt that way too. His literary self may still complain a lot about his compatriots – it remains a superficial indignation. A compulsory rhetorical exercise so that you can then devote yourself to the big wide world again.

But it is not just the horizon that distinguishes “Stiller” from the German novels published at the time (such as Heinrich Böll’s “House without a Guardian”). It’s the sound and the attitude to life that is expressed in it. It’s easier to write without a ton of guilt. This applies to the tragicomedies of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and especially to the novels of Max Frisch. The calm clarity with which the latter describes the trials and tribulations of his protagonists exerts an irresistible pull – like a road movie that chugs along in a deeply relaxed manner between various adventures. Only the Americans write as relaxed as Max Frisch.

And suddenly you understand the full extent of the intellectual and cultural devastation that fascism has caused in Germany and Austria. All the muddled and muddled books that were thrown up by the literary world in the years and decades after the war were the product of people who were not at peace with themselves. Who did not have the inner freedom to engage with the present because the crimes of their fathers kept dragging them back into the past. Germans had declared war on the world. This awareness made it impossible to write cosmopolitan novels.

The Swiss Max Frisch had to do this on behalf of the Germans and Austrians. Therefore, the joy of “Stiller”, this incredibly young novel, is clouded. When reading, the thought comes up again and again: “Damn, this is what German literature could have been like after 1945 – sophisticated, inspiring, exciting!” But Hitler destroyed that too.

Max Frisch: Quiet. Suhrkamp, ​​448 pages, br., 12 €.

The book has long since entered the canon of world literature and has suffered the fate of all classics: it has been interpreted to death. Secondary literature killed the living book.

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