What was Max Rudolf Frisch's first novel?
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Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt (""Jürg Reinhart. A fateful summer journey"") is the first novel of the Swiss writer Max Frisch (1911-1991). It was started during the winter of 1933 and published in Germany by in 1934. Frisch would later distance himself from this juvenile autobiographical work which was not reprinted as an individual novel, although much later it was included in a compilation of Frisch's collected works. His second novel, , referred back to this first novel, being again centred on the same eponymous protagonist.
Jürg Reinhart
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Between February and October 1933 he travelled extensively through eastern and southeastern Europe, financing his expeditions with reports written for newspapers and magazines. One of his first contributions was a report on the Prague World Ice Hockey Championship (1933) for the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung". Other destinations were Budapest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Istanbul, Athens, Bari, and Rome. Another product of this extensive tour was Frisch's first novel, "Jürg Reinhart", which appeared in 1934. In it Reinhart represents the author, undertaking a trip through the Balkans as a way to find purpose in life. In the end the eponymous hero concludes that he can only become fully adult by performing a "manly act". This he achieves by helping the terminally ill daughter of his landlady end her life painlessly.
Max Frisch
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Max Rudolf Frisch (15 May 1911 – 4 April 1991) was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1986.
Max Frisch
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In terms of the timeline, Frisch's prose works divide roughly into three periods. 
His first literary works, up till 1943, all employed prose formats. There were numerous short sketches and essays along with three novels or longer narratives, "" (1934), it's belated sequel "" ("I adore that which burns me") (1944) and the narrative "An Answer from the Silence" ("Antwort aus der Stille") (1937). All three of the substantive works are autobiographical and all three centre round the dilemma of a young author torn between bourgeois respectability and "artistic" life style, exhibiting on behalf of the protagonists differing outcomes to what Frisch saw as his own dilemma.
Max Frisch
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In 1951, Frisch was awarded a travel grant by the Rockefeller Foundation and between April 1951 and May 1952 he visited the United States and Mexico. During this time, under the working title "What do you do with love?" (""Was macht ihr mit der Liebe?"") on what later became his novel, "I'm Not Stiller" ("Stiller"). Similar themes also underpinned the play "" ("Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie") which in May 1953 would open simultaneously at theatres in Zürich and Berlin. In this play Frisch returned to his theme of the conflict between conjugal obligations and intellectual interests. The leading character is a parody Don Juan, whose priorities involve studying geometry and playing chess, while women are let into his life only periodically. After his unfeeling conduct has led to numerous deaths the anti-hero finds himself falling in love with a former prostitute. The play proved popular and has been performed more than a thousand times, making it Frisch's third most popular drama after "The Fire Raisers" (1953) and "Andorra" (1961).
Max Frisch
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By 1947 Frisch had accumulated roughly 130 filled notebooks, and these were published in a compilation titled "Tagebuch mit Marion" ("Diary with Marion"). In reality what appeared was not so much a diary as cross between a series of essays and literary autobiography. He was encouraged by the publisher Peter Suhrkamp to develop the format, and Suhrkamp provided his own feedback and specific suggestions for improvements. In 1950 Suhrkamp's own newly established publishing house produced a second volume of Frisch's "Tagebuch" covering the period 1946–1949, comprising a mosaic of travelogues, autobiographical musings, essays on political and literary theory and literary sketches, adumbrating many of the themes and sub-currents of his later fictional works. Critical reaction to the new impetus that Frisch's "Tagebücher" was giving to the genre of the "literary diary" was positive: there was a mention of Frisch having found a new way to connect with wider trends in European literature ("Anschluss ans europäische Niveau"). Sales of these works would nevertheless remain modest until the appearance of a new volume in 1958, by which time Frisch had become better known among the general book-buying public on account of his novels.
Max Frisch
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At the end of 1955 Frisch started work on his novel, "Homo Faber" which would be published in 1957. It concerns an engineer who views life through a "technical" ultra-rational prism. "Homo Faber" was chosen as a study text for the schools and became the most read of Frisch's books. The book involves a journey which mirrors a trip that Frisch himself undertook to Italy in 1956, and subsequently to America (his second visit, this time also taking in Mexico and Cuba). The following year Frisch visited Greece which is where the latter part of "Homo Faber" unfolds.
Max Frisch
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Frisch's first public success was as a writer for theatre, and later in his life he himself often stressed that he was in the first place a creature of the theatre. Nevertheless, the diaries, and even more than these, the novels and the longer narrative works are among his most important literary creations. In his final decades Frisch tended to move away from drama and concentrate on prose narratives. He himself is on record with the opinion that the subjective requirements of story telling suited him better than the greater level of objectivity required by theatre work.
Max Frisch
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Jürgen H. Petersen reckons that Frisch's stage work had little influence on other dramatists. And his own preferred form of the "literary diary" failed to create a new trend in literary genres. By contrast, the novels "I'm Not Stiller" and "Gantenbein" have been widely taken up as literary models, both because of the way they home in on questions of individual identity and on account of their literary structures. Issues of personal identity are presented not simply through description or interior insights, but through narrative contrivances. This stylistic influence can be found frequently in the works of others, such as Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T. and in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina. Other similarly influenced authors are Peter Härtling and . Frisch also found himself featuring as a "character" in the literature of others. That was the case in 1983 with Wolfgang Hildesheimer's "Message to Max [Frisch] about the state of things and other matters" ("Mitteilungen an Max über den Stand der Dinge und anderes"). By then Uwe Johnson had already, in 1975, produced a compilation of quotations which he called "The collected sayings of Max Frisch" ("Max Frisch Stich-Worte zusammen"). More recently, in 2007, the Zürich–born artist Gottfried Honegger published eleven portrait-sketches and fourteen texts in memory of his friend.
Max Frisch
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Frisch's second novel, "An Answer from the Silence" ("Antwort aus der Stille"), appeared in 1937. The book returned to the theme of a "manly act", but now placed it in the context of a middle class lifestyle. The author quickly became critical of the book, burning the original manuscript in 1937 and refusing to let it be included in a compilation of his works published in the 1970s. Frisch had the word "author" deleted from the "profession/occupation" field in his passport. Supported by a stipend from his friend Werner Coninx, he had in 1936 enrolled at the ETH Zurich ("Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule") to study architecture, his father's profession. His resolve to disown his second published novel was undermined when it won him the 1938 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer Prize, which included an award of 3,000 Swiss francs. At this time Frisch was living on an annual stipend from his friend of 4,000 francs.
Max Frisch
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In April 1974, while on a book tour in the USA, Frisch launched into an affair with an American called Alice Locke-Carey who was 32 years his junior. This happened in the village of Montauk on Long Island, and Montauk was the title the author gave to an autobiographical novel that appeared in 1975. The book centred on his love life, including both his own marriage with Marianne Oellers-Frisch and an affair that she had been having with the American writer Donald Barthelme. There followed a very public dispute between Frisch and his wife over where to draw the line between private and public life, and the two became increasingly estranged, divorcing in 1979.
Max Frisch