Max Frisch took revenge on a difficult client by putting him in a play
Before he was famous as a playwright, Max Frisch was a Zurich architect. A shampoo magnate sued him over a staircase in the country house Frisch designed, and the writer later used the man as the model for the hero of The Fire Raisers. Identity, responsibility and irony ran through everything he wrote.
Frisch was born in Zurich on 15 May 1911, the son of an architect whose finances collapsed after he lost his job during the First World War. He began German literature at the University of Zurich in 1930, but when his father died in 1932 he turned to journalism to support his mother, writing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His first freelance essay that year was titled What am I? In 1933 he travelled through Prague, Budapest, Istanbul, Athens and Rome, paying his way with articles, and the journey fed his first novel, Jürg Reinhart, in 1934.
His Jewish girlfriend Käte Rubensohn, who had left Berlin because of Nazi race laws, shaped his politics; on a 1935 visit to Germany he recorded and criticised the antisemitism he saw. Disillusioned with writing, he burned the manuscript of his second novel and had the word author removed from his passport, then studied architecture at ETH Zurich from 1936 with support from his friend Werner Coninx. Awkwardly, the disowned novel won the 1938 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer Prize. During the war he served 650 days as a Swiss army gunner.
In 1943 he beat 64 rival applicants to design the Letzigraben swimming pool in Zurich, delayed by wartime shortages and opened in 1949; it is now a protected monument called Max-Frisch-Bad. Of more than a dozen buildings he designed, only two were built. Mornings went to the studio, and most of his energy to writing.
Encouraged by Kurt Hirschfeld at the Zurich Playhouse, then thriving on talent exiled from Germany and Austria, he turned to the stage. Now They Sing Again examined the guilt of soldiers following inhuman orders, and the NZZ attacked it on its front page. The Chinese Wall of 1946 imagined humanity wiped out by the atomic bomb. In 1974 he wrote that Switzerland had accommodated Nazi Germany too readily. He co-founded Gruppe Olten, won the 1986 Neustadt Prize and died on 4 April 1991.
Source: Max Frisch
