Max Frisch, a New German Playwright

Author(s): Walter E. Glaettli

Source: The German Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Nov., 1952), pp. 248-254
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German
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MAX FRISCH, A NEW GERMAN PLAYWRIGHT

WALTER E. GLAETTLI

The great break in tradition and continuity which the advent

of Nazism meant for German cultural life can still be felt today,
more than seven years after the collapse of that fateful regime.
German literature was long dominated by an atmosphere of provincialism, stagnation and escapism from which it is only slowly
and painfully emerging. But since 1945 many conscientious writers
have felt the necessity of re-establishing contact with general
European literary trends, or with interrupted traditions of preHitler literature. There is also a strong tendency, however, to seek
new literary forms more expressive of a society which has suffered
the psychological devastation of war. Although this tentative
groping has produced a number of remarkable works, the permanent value of these efforts is most questionable; we can judge only
their validity as literary products expressive of a post-war period.
Nazi suppression in the realm of literature was most evident in
the field of the drama. In consequence, the drama, when compared
with other areas of literary endeavor, is still unusually barren.
The repertoire of the German theatre, apart from the established
classics and the work of such older playwrights as Zuckmayer,
Breelt and Kaiser, is completely dominated by modern French,
English and American plays. One also encountered, in the period
immediately following the war, so-called Heimkehrerstilcke - modern social dramas built on traditional patterns and completely
without originality or stroke of genius. One notable exception,
however, deserves mention here: Wolfgang Borchert's Draussen
vor der Tiir (1947), a play of great poetical beauty which has
made a profound impression abroad as well as throughout Germany.
Unfortunately Borchert, a promising young genius, died in 1947
at the age of twenty-six.
One of the outstanding representatives of modern German
drama whose reputation as a playwright is becoming increasingly
widespread is Max Frisch, a native of Zurich who has thus far
written five plays, Santa Cruz, Nun singen sie wieder, Die
chinesische Mauer, Als der Krieg zu Ende war and Graf Oderland.
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249

We may somewhat discount Frisch's Swiss citizenship as a factor

in his career as a writer, since none of his works has its setting in
Switzerland. It has, on the other hand, no doubt proved an advantage by giving him, in contrast to young authors in Germany, the
opportunity of observing and keeping in touch with the trends of
literature in the West. An architect by profession, Fisch began his
experiments in playwrighting during the war, and so he gained
a lead which made it at least difficult, if not impossible, for his
fellow-playwrights in Germany to overtake him in the years
immediately following it.
I have used the term "experiment " deliberately, not to imply
that Frisch concerns himself principally with technical devices,
but rather to indicate that he attempts in each of his plays to find
the form of expression that will affect the reader or spectator
most deeply. He is aware that the present-day author who does
have something to say can fail utterly to reach his public when he
uses conventional dramatic forms. What Max Frisch has to say is
not new; his message is the eternal one of truth and humanity.
Precisely because he is imbued with great seriousness of purpose,
he has resorted to surrealistic, expressionistic, and other such
techniques to express his ideas.
Die chinesische Mauer, Frisch's third play (first performed in
Zurich in 1946) could, like his first, Santa Cruz, be labeled a
"dream play." He himself calls it a comedy, but what he presents
is a tragedy thinly disguised as a masquerade - a peculiar combination of profound thought and light, playful outward form.
The setting is the court of the Chinese emperor Hwang Ti, who is
giving a garden party at which there is much talk both of the
completion of the Great Wall and of a glorious victory in battle.
Among the Emperor's guests are such historic and fictitious
celebrities as Columbus, Cleopatra, Don Juan, Napoleon, and Romeo
and Juliet, and one can scarcely help noticing that the Emperor's
speech about the unequaled heroism of his army has the empty
ring of Hitler's ravings.
The setting of the play is thus in actuality the entire world; the
time is all times, past and present. This technique is, to be sure,
not altogether new, for as early as forty years ago Strindberg
wrote his Traumspiel, the action of which is built on the irrational

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THE GERMANQUARTERLY

logic of dreams, for which there are no barriers of time or space,

and since Strindberg a number of playwrights have used similar
devices. Anouilh, a modern French dramatist, introduces the
deliberate anachronism of coffee and cigarettes in a Greek setting
to make clear that one of his plays is not concerned with the
sociological conditions of the ancient world, that the characters
facing the basic question raised by the play could equally well
be living in the twentieth century. Though Die chinesische Mauer
is not a problem play, the innumerable anachronisms perform somewhat the same function. The fusion of all times and places is used
to show that man remains essentially the same irrespective of when
and where he lives. Frisch's characters are, however, by no means
stripped of their personal characteristics and reduced to mere
"existences." They are completely portrayed people whose rich
variety gives the play its comedy-like atmosphere.
The apparently gay mood is heightened still further by the
visors worn by the participants. These masks are the visible
symbols of the spiritual mask that each of us wears. The mask motif
and the concept that "All the world's a stage and all the men and
women merely players" may be derivative, but for Frisch no
divine being assigns roles in the drama of life; man himself dons
his mask and wears it well enough to deceive even himself. Upon
occasion Frisch lifts the veil for a moment: the "actor" falls out
of his role to reveal not a hidden divine order but a bare, meaningless Nichts. Just as the mask is the symbol of man's self-deception,
so the great Chinese Wall is the symbol of all false illusions fettering mankind. But one character in the play wears no mask: the
poet Min Ko, ein junger Mann von heute. He alone is aware of the
falsehood and delusion entangling man and - to return to the
plot - writes revolutionary songs in an attempt to arouse the
nation against the despot who built the Great Wall and hence is
responsible for the general deception. Yet he too fails at the
crucial moment. The tyrannised masses finally rise and storm the
Emperor's palace, but the revolution achieves only the completion
of the fateful cycle: the hero of the people comes to power as the
new dictator, and one may well prophesy the replacement of the
Great Wall with a bigger and better one.
Als der Krieg zu Ende war (1948) is a more realistic drama. It
takes place in 1945, immediately after the war, in the living room

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251

and cellar of a partially bombed house in Berlin. The living room

is occupied by a group of Russian officers and soldiers; the cellar
is the hiding place of the previous owners of the house, Captain
Anders, a Heimkehrer, and his wife Agnes. Discovered by the
Russians, Agnes, in order to save her husband, sacrifices herself by
consenting to visit the Russian colonel each day on the condition
that the cellar is not to be entered. In contrast to the other Russians,
of whom we hear only acts of cruelty and bestiality, Colonel Stepan
Iwanow proves to be a man of noble mind. In the course of time
Agnes' feelings toward him develop into true love. One day Captain
Anders, leaving his hiding place, is caught and identified by a
Jewish Russian soldier as a war criminal of the worst sort. Stepan
Iwanow, believing that Agnes has merely trifled with his love to
protect her husband, leaves the house without speaking to her.
She, on her part, has no full understanding of what has occurred.
The import of the tragedy is apparent when Anders forgives
Agnes her love affair on the grounds that her action was conditioned by the war situation and justifies his own responsibility for the
slaughter of thousands of Jews in Warsaw on the same grounds.
The fact that her husband can so casually equate these two very
differently motivated actions is sufficient to drive Agnes to despair
and suicide.
While Frisch's previous plays were slow in gaining recognition,
Als der Krieg zu Ende war rapidly conquered the stages of Germany and was performed in New York in the winter of 1950-51.
Its success in Germany can be accounted for on the basis of topical
interest. Its lack of equal success on the American stage may be
due, in part, to the lack of subjective experience of the conditions
described and to the time that had elapsed since the conclusion of
the war.
The play is generally understood to report a tragic incident of
the chaotic conditions of the early post-war months and
appears,
at first glance, to have little in common with Die chinesische
Mauer.
On closer inspection, however, we find the basic
problem to be the
same. The relationship of truth and falsehood,
poetically but
vaguely expressed in the bewildering chaos of Die chinesische
Mauer, becomes a far more clearly defined issue in Als der Krieg
zu Ende war. Frisch probes various human relationships to discover
how genuine and honest they are. He reveals the falsehood of

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THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

conventional social life, man's inability or unwillingness to perceive his own or another's guilt, and his tendency to belittle or
even disregard the horrible. The strongest and most dangerous
opponent of truth is the man with convictions; for as Major Bird,
an American officer appearing in the final act, says: " Ein Mensch,
der eine toberzeugung hat, wird mit allem fertig . . auch mit der
Wahrheit. toberzeugungen-es gibt keinen besseren Schutz gegen
Erkenntnisse .
als eine Technik, um die eigene
t. . berzeugung
Wahrheit auszuhalten, um nicht verriickt zu werden, eine Umgangsform mit dem Schicksal-sozusagen."
People do not take the trouble to try to understand their fellowbeings as individuals; the true picture of man is blurred by the
use of stereotyped terms. When Agnes' husband refers to the new
masters of his house as Russenschweine, his wife retorts: "Russenschwein-das erinnert mich so an Judenschweine und an all das
andere, was unsre eigenen Schweine gesagt haben-und getan."
It is this superficiality in modern man's thoughts and language
which stifles truth, just as ultimately the misuse of the term " conditioned by the war situation" brings about the death of Agnes
(a name used symbolically by Frisch to mean "Innocence").
Significantly, the only two characters who see each other as human
beings and hence come to love one another are those with no
linguistic means of communication: the Russian Stepan Iwanow
and the German Agnes. Their love grows although--or perhaps
because-they do not understand each other's language: for them
there are no linguistic ambiguities.
In this apparently more realistic work Frisch has the heroine
deliver a monologue in which she gives expression to a consciousness
transcending that of the individual - one elucidating the plot
and breaking through its surface like that of the chorus of Greek
tragedy. Thus, in spite of all obvious differences, both plays are
typical expressions of Frisch's dramatic work. Both deal with
the same fundamental problem; both reveal the author's profound
pessimism; both embody outstanding experimental techniques.
Moreover, both have similar defects. Die chinesische Mauer has
virtually no coherent plot, and the net of questions in which the
author becomes entangled bewilders the spectator. In Als der Krieg
zu Ende war the basic question is cTearly stated and satisfactorily
solved but Frisch appears to have been so completely occupied

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253

with it that he has either overlooked or purposely neglected the

questions arising in the reader's mind about the motivation of
Agnes' deceit of her husband and about the extent to which her
love for Stepan is more than physical desire. Such unanswered
questions weaken the effectiveness of the drama. This same weakness appears in all of Frisch's works; all suffer from a certain
lack of clarity because the basic problems are overshadowed by
vaguely defined secondary problems which the author fails to
solve satisfactorily.
In his latest play, Graf Oderland (1951), Frisch attempts a
forceful solution of the basic conflict. In earlier plays the protagonists of truth do nothing but protest against distortion of
values, battle mainly on an intellectual level, and finally perish in
their incapacity to live in a world of falsehood. The hero of Graf
Oderland, a Staatsanwalt faced with the same conflict as Min Ko
and Agnes, fights not with words but with an axe. A restless,
energetic man highly esteemed by society, he does not even attempt
verbal protest. Unable to continue an existence limited by a shallow
mechanized social life, he breaks its bonds and, carrying an axe,
forcefully destroys all obstacles that frustrate his desire to live a
life whose core is not rotted by false values.
It is obvious that in this play Frisch has finally succumbed to the
ideas of existentialism and nihilism. What the Staatsanwalt is
fighting against is no longer one particular type of falsehood - it
is the ennui that tortures modern man. Like the Kassierer in Georg
Kaiser's Von Morgen bis Mitternachts, the Staatsanwalt shouts:
"Wenn ich Tag fiir Tag an diesem Schreibtisch hocke, Mensch, und
man hiilt mir die Gurgel zu, dass ich nicht mehr schnaufen kannund eines Tages halte ich es nicht mehr aus, ich springe den
andern an die Gurgel, damit ich nicht ersticke: was gibt es da zu
erkliiren? Leben will ich. Wozu eine Idee? Leben will ich !" And
like the Kassierer, to whom the sight of a beautiful woman merely
gives the final impulse to break with a life of torturing ennui, the
Staatsanwalt has actually no material motives for his sudden decision. Unlike the "hero" of Kaiser's play, however, he is profoundly aware that there is something wrong with our "secure"
world of daily routine; and his growing consciousness of this, as
well as his final decision to abandon his family and career is

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almost comparable to the horrible awakening of Gregor in Kafka's

"Metamorphosis."
A typically existentialist element, the absurdity of fate, brings
about the culmination of the drama. The Staatsanwait's destructive
acts against society end in a chaotic revolution which completes
the cycle of fate; for, as the hero of the revolution and the new
governor, he finds himself again behind the very desk from which
he tried so hard to escape. Faced with the impossibility of defeating
fate, he kills himself. The atmosphere pervading the play is that of
a Kafka-like nightmare. Frisch's idea that everything in life repeats
itself is skillfully expressed in the arrangement of scenes and
characters: several roles, for example, are played by the same
actor, giving the Staatsanwalt a vague-and the spectator a very
definite-sense of the parallelism of the situation. In this respect,
as well as in certain others, Graf Oderland is reminiscent of the
masquerade at the court of the Chinese emperor.
It would not be difficult to point out a number of modern
authors, other than the ones referred to, who have influenced
Frisch. His plays are amazingly rich in surprising and stimulating
aspects in the treatment of subject material. However, the very
diversity of his "experiments" makes it apparent that Frisch is
still groping for a new type of drama of which he does not seem
to have a clear idea. It is therefore probable that he is only for the
moment an important figure on the literary scene-the view of the
competent critic Emil Staiger. Although it remains to be seen
whether Frisch will succeed in overcoming his weaknesses in the
future, we must acknowledge him as one of the outstanding-if
not the greatest-young German playwright of the present day.
Northwestern University.
Evanston, Illinois