Jürg Reinhart
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 is a young man undergoing a journey of self-discovery. In pursuit of his purpose he abandons his studies and travels towards Greece. In a Croatian guest house he meets three women, although he is able to love only one of them, the fatally ill daughter of the guest-house owner. As she lies dying he helps her to commit suicide, in a grown-up action that contributes massively to his own personal development. (It must be stressed that although the Hitler government had come to power in Germany at the beginning of 1933, the concept of “euthanasia” had not yet acquired the negative associations which for Frisch’s generation, especially in German speaking central Europe,