Max Frisch
Swiss playwrighter and novelist (1911-1991) · Switzerland · Writers · Died at 79
Max Frisch is read about 574 times a day, in 55 languages.
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Something wrong?A Swiss writer who spent half a century asking the same question in different keys: who are you when no one's watching, and does it matter? Frisch's plays and novels strip identity down to the frame, then ask what holds when the frame breaks.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 12
Frisch's 10-metre-high diving board at Max-Frisch-Bad
Zürich Playhouse (Schauspielhaus Zürich)
Bertolt Brecht in 1934. Brecht exerted considerable influence on Frisch's early work.
Translated into 25 languages, Homo Faber (1957) was Frisch's top selling novel, with four million copies produced in German alone by 1998.
Biedermann und die Brandstifter was Frisch's most successful German play to date, with 250 productions up till 1996
The writer and literary scholar Adolf Muschg was on the Board of Trustees of the Max-Frisch-Archive between 1979 and 2010.
First page of the file about Max Frisch (in German)Awards
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Max Rudolf Frisch was born 15 May 1911 in Switzerland and built a career interrogating the gap between who people say they are and who they become under pressure. His post-war work leaned hard on irony, using it as a lens to examine responsibility, morality, and the weight of political choice. He co-founded Gruppe Olten and collected three major prizes over two decades: the Jerusalem in 1965, the Grand Schiller in 1973, the Neustadt International in 1986. He died 4 April 1991, leaving behind a body of work that never stopped tightening the screw on individuality and what it costs.
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