Max Frisch

Born Max Rudolf Frisch on May 15, 1911, in Zurich, the second son of an architect father whose business failed during the First World War and a mother who had worked as a governess in tsarist Russia, he grew up close to his mother and distant from his father in a household pressed by money. He enrolled at the University of Zurich to read German literature in 1930, but his father's death in 1932 forced him to leave and write for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung to support the family. In 1936 he began architecture studies at the ETH Zurich, graduated in 1940, and built up a successful practice in Zurich that included the public Letzigraben swimming pool. He kept writing alongside it. The novels and journals of the late forties and early fifties made his name, then in 1954 he closed the architecture office and chose to live by literature. I'm Not Stiller (1954) opens with the line I'm not Stiller as a man under arrest at the Swiss border insists he is not the missing sculptor he obviously is. Homo Faber (1957), the cold technical narrator who falls in love with a young woman who turns out to be his daughter, and Gantenbein (1964), the story of a man who pretends to be blind, completed his great trilogy of identity. The plays The Fire Raisers (1958) and Andorra (1961) brought him to international stages. He had a long, fractious relationship with Ingeborg Bachmann. He died of colon cancer in Zurich on April 4, 1991, at seventy-nine, and was honoured with a secular funeral he himself had drafted.

At twenty-six, disgusted with his first novel and novella, Frisch carried every page he had written into the woods outside Zurich and burned it, vowing never to write again. "I had to make two trips into the woods," he recalled, "there were so many bundles." Two years later he broke the vow, writing about army life instead.