Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: How many plays did Max Rudolf Frisch write?
I'm Not Stiller started with a print-run that provided for sales of 3,000 in its first year,[77] but thanks to strong and growing reader demand it later became the first book published by Suhrkamp to top one million copies.[80] The next novel, Homo Faber, was another best seller, with four million copies of the German language version produced by 1998.[81] The Fire Raisers and Andorra are the most successful German language plays of all time, with respectively 250 and 230 productions up till 1996, according to an estimate made by the literary critic Volker Hage.[82] The two plays, along with Homo Faber became curriculum favourites with schools in the German-speaking middle European countries. Apart from a few early works, most of Frisch's books and plays have been translated into around ten languages, while the most translated of all, Homo Faber, has been translated into twenty-five languages.
Working with the theatre director Hirschfeld enabled Frisch to meet some leading fellow playwrights who would influence his later work. He met the exiled German write, Carl Zuckmayer, in 1946, and the young Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1947. Despite artistic differences on self-awareness issues, Dürrenmatt and Frisch became lifelong friends. 1947 was also the year in which Frisch met Bertolt Brecht, already established as a doyen of German theatre and of the political left. An admirer of Brecht's work, Frisch now embarked on regular exchanges with the older dramatist on matters of shared artistic interest. Brecht encouraged Frisch to write more plays, while placing emphasis on social responsibility in artistic work. Although Brecht's influence is evident in some of Frisch's theoretical views and can be seen in one or two of his more practical works, the Swiss writer could never have been numbered among Brecht's followers.[12] He kept his independent position, by now increasingly marked by scepticism in respect of the polarized political grandstanding which in Europe was a feature of the early cold war years. This is particularly apparent in his 1948 play As the war ended (Als der Krieg zu Ende war), based on eye-witness accounts of the Red Army as an occupying force.
The literary legacy of Max Frisch makes up the core of the holdings. These include his letters and notebooks, manuscripts and typescripts, plans and business documents from his time as an architect, as well as various personal documents. An extensive collection of newspaper and magazine articles, photographs, film recordings, theatre posters and programmes documents the international resonance and reception of his work. Hence, the Max Frisch Archive serves as a main source for literary studies and commentaries in the field. French literary scholar Ruth Vogel-Klein wrote for instance about "Montauk": "The writing process can be reconstructed because Frisch gave his various typescript versions to the Max Frisch Archive that he founded in Zurich in 1981."
(Status: 1 January 2017)
Frisch himself acknowledged that the part of writing a new play that most fascinated him was the first draft, when the piece was undefined, and the possibilities for its development were still wide open. The critic Hellmuth Karasek identified in Frisch's plays a mistrust of dramatic structure, apparent from the way in which Don Juan or the Love of Geometry applies theatrical method. Frisch prioritized the unbelievable aspects of theatre and valued transparency. Unlike his friend, the dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Frisch had little appetite for theatrical effects, which might distract from doubts and sceptical insights included in a script. For Frisch, effects came from a character being lost for words, from a moment of silence, or from a misunderstanding. And where a Dürrenmatt drama might lead, with ghastly inevitability, to a worst possible outcome, the dénouement in a Frisch play typically involved a return to the starting position: the destiny that awaited his protagonist might be to have no destiny.[40]
The Max Frisch Archive is an independent research institution that belongs to the Max Frisch Foundation and is based at ETH Library. It curates the literary legacy of Swiss author Max Frisch and is available for academic, journalistic and artistic research.
In the 20th century the plays of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch impressed readers beyond the borders of Switzerland. There are a great number of regional dialects, especially in the German language. Even though standard German is commonly used for writing, there is a living dialect literature in many areas.
At the University of Birmingham in Britain, the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant assigned two refugee physicists—Frisch and Rudolf Peierls—the task of investigating the feasibility of an atomic bomb, ironically because their status as enemy aliens precluded their working on secret projects like radar. Their March 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum indicated that the critical mass of uranium-235 was within an order of magnitude of 10 kg, which was small enough to be carried by a bomber of the day. Research into how uranium isotope separation (uranium enrichment) could be achieved assumed enormous importance. Frisch's first thought about how this could be achieved was with liquid thermal diffusion.
His preferred place to write was in the Zürich's cafés, where he travelled from Oerlikon by tram after school. During the 1930s, his little marble table at the Café "Terrasse" achieved some local fame. There he met other Zürich writers, e.g. professor of literature Fritz Ernst, literary reviewer Bernhard Diebold, his friend Traugott Vogel or Rudolf Jakob Humm.
Three weeks before his death at the age of 46, Zollinger met the young Max Frisch on the Pfannenstiel. Frisch mentioned the meeting in his diary (“Tagebuch 1946-1949“).
Andorra is a play written by the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch in 1961. The original text came from a prose sketch Frisch had written in his diary titled "Der andorranische Jude" ("The Andorran Jew"). The Andorra in Frisch's play is fictional and not intended to be a representation of the real Andorra located between France and Spain. Frisch has stated that the title "Andorra" had only been intended as a working title but later liked using the term "Andorrans" so much he kept it. 
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.[1] 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.
Old age and the transience of life now came increasingly to the fore in Frisch's work. In 1976 he began work on the play Triptychon, although it was not ready to be performed for another three years. The word triptych is more usually applied to paintings, and the play is set in three triptych-like sections in which many of the key characters are notionally dead. The piece was first unveiled as a radio play in April 1979, receiving its stage premier in Lausanne six months later. The play was rejected for performance in Frankfurt am Main where it was deemed too apolitical. The Austrian premier in Vienna at the Burgtheater was seen by Frisch as a success, although the audience reaction to the complexity of the work's unconventional structure was still a little cautious.
Franz Rudolf Frisching was the son of Vinzenz Frisching (1689–1764) who was Master of Schlosswil. In 1748 Franz Rudolf Frisching became a member of the Swiss Guard of the Netherlands where he achieved the rank of a colonel. In 1764 Frisching became a member of the Grand Council of Bern. In 1770 he became bailiff in the Vallemaggia, in 1780 bailiff in St. Johannsen and in 1793 office holder in Wimmis. He was lieutenant colonel of the Bernese Jäger Corps.
Franz Rudolf Frisching (1733–1807) was a Bernese patrician, officer, politician and industrialist.
Flesch flourished as a writing teacher, plain-English consultant, and author. He published many books on the subject of clear, effective communication: "How to Test Readability" (1951), "How to Write Better" (1951), "The Art of Plain Talk" (1946), "The Art of Readable Writing" (1949), "The ABC of Style: A Guide to Plain English" (1964), and "Rudolf Flesch on Business Communications: How to Say What You Mean in Plain English" (1972).
In the author's Swiss homeland, too, critical reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Writing in Der Bund, Hugo Marti found "the young Parzival from Zürich" excessively garrulous, but the encounter was nevertheless essentially characterized by sympathy and empathy. Robert Faesi, who had himself taught Frisch at Zurich University, published a supportive review of "Jürg Reinhart" in the Basler Zeitung, and the newspaper nominated Max Frisch as a "Travel talker" (""Reiseplauderer""). Characteristically harder to impress was , the long-standing literary editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) (for which Frisch himself wrote regularly) who refused to serialize the novel, insisting that "Jürg Reinhart" was not a novel for the younger generation and that for him personally the subject matter did not seem to be in keeping with the times. Instead, the NZZ published a fictitious interview, and later Korrodi pushed a gloss regarding Frisch, concerning a young author who scanned the windows of all the book shops looking for his own first novel.
His next play Biography: A game (Biografie: Ein Spiel), followed on naturally. Frisch was disappointed that his commercially very successful plays Biedermann und die Brandstifter and Andorra had both been, in his view, widely misunderstood. His answer was to move away from the play as a form of parable, in favour of a new form of expression which he termed "Dramaturgy of Permutation" ("Dramaturgie der Permutation"), a form which he had introduced with Gantenbein and which he now progressed with Biographie, written in its original version in 1967. At the centre of the play is a behavioural scientist who is given the chance to live his life again, and finds himself unable to take any key decisions differently the second time round. The Swiss premier of the play was to have been directed by Rudolf Noelte, but Frisch and Noelte fell out in the Autumn of 1967, a week before the scheduled first performance, which led to the Zürich opening being postponed for several months. In the end the play opened in the Zürich Playhouse in February 1968, the performances being directed by Leopold Lindtberg. Lindtberg was a long established and well regarded theatre director, but his production of Biografie: Ein Spiel neither impressed the critics nor delighted theatre audiences. Frisch ended up deciding that he had been expecting more from the audience than he should have expected them to bring to the theatrical experience. After this latest disappointment it would be another eleven years before Frisch returned to theatrical writing.
The diary became a very characteristic prose form for Frisch. In this context, diary does not indicate a private record, made public to provide readers with voyeuristic gratification, nor an intimate journal of the kind associated with Henri-Frédéric Amiel. The diaries published by Frisch were closer to the literary "structured consciousness" narratives associated with Joyce and Döblin, providing an acceptable alternative but effective method for Frisch to communicate real-world truths.[23] After he had intended to abandon writing, pressured by what he saw as an existential threat from his having entered military service, Frisch started to write a diary which would be published in 1940 with the title "Pages from the Bread-bag" ("Blätter aus dem Brotsack"). Unlike his earlier works, output in diary form could more directly reflect the author's own positions. In this respect the work influenced Frisch's own future prose works. He published two further literary diaries covering the periods 1946–1949 and 1966–1971. The typescript for a further diary, started in 1982, was discovered only in 2009 among the papers of Frisch's secretary.[24] Before that it had been generally assumed that Frisch had destroyed this work because he felt that the decline of his creativity and short term memory meant that he could no longer do justice to the diary genre.[25] The newly discovered typescript was published in March 2010 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Because of its rather fragmentary nature Frisch's Diary 3 (Tagebuch 3) was described by the publisher as a draft work by Frisch: it was edited and provided with an extensive commentary by Peter von Matt, chairman of the Max Frisch Foundation.[24]
Between 1750 and 1777 the Frisching family was in the possession of the large "Lorraine Gut," a former country estate which is now part of the city of Bern. Franz Rudolf Frisching’s ancestor, Samuel Frisching (II), built the Frisching-Haus, now known as the Béatrice-von-Wattenwyl-Haus on the Junkerngasse in Bern.
These three reports, the first Hahn-Strassmann publication of 6 January 1939, the second Hahn-Strassmann publication of 10 February 1939, and the Frisch-Meitner publication of 11 February 1939, had electrifying effects on the scientific community. Because there was a possibility that fission could be used as a weapon, and since the knowledge was in German hands, Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner jumped into action, persuading Albert Einstein, a celebrity, to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a letter of caution. In 1940 Frisch and Rudolf Peierls produced the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which first set out how an atomic explosion could be generated, and this ultimately led to the establishment in 1942 of the Manhattan Project. Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" Meitner said that Hiroshima had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented."
In 1978, Frisch survived serious health problems, and the next year was actively involved in setting up the Max Frisch Foundation (Max-Frisch-Stiftung), established in October 1979, and to which he entrusted the administration of his estate. The foundation's archive is kept at the ETH Zurich, and has been publicly accessible since 1983.
Frisch was already a regular visitor at the Zürich Playhouse (Schauspielhaus) while still a student. Drama in Zürich was experiencing a golden age at this time, thanks to the flood of theatrical talent in exile from Germany and Austria. From 1944 the Playhouse director Kurt Hirschfeld encouraged Frisch to work for the theatre, and backed him when he did so. In Santa Cruz, his first play, written in 1944 and first performed in 1946, Frisch, who had himself been married since 1942, addressed the question of how the dreams and yearnings of the individual could be reconciled with married life. In his 1944 novel J'adore ce qui me brûle (I adore that which burns me) he had already placed emphasis on the incompatibility between the artistic life and respectable middle class existence. The novel reintroduces as its protagonist the artist Jürg Reinhart, familiar to readers of Frisch's first novel, and in many respects a representation of the author himself. It deals with a love affair that ends badly. This same tension is at the centre of a subsequent narrative by Frisch published, initially, by Atlantis in 1945 and titled Bin oder Die Reise nach Peking (Bin or the Journey to Beijing).
Overall Frisch designed more than a dozen buildings, although only two were actually built. One was a house for his brother Franz and the other was a country house for the shampoo magnate, K.F. Ferster. Ferster's house triggered a major court action when it was alleged that Frisch had altered the dimensions of the main staircase without reference to his client. Frisch later retaliated by using Ferster as the model for the protagonist in his play The Fire Raisers (Biedermann und die Brandstifter).[10] When Frisch was managing his own architecture studio, he was generally found in his office only during the mornings. Much of his time and energy was devoted to writing.[11]
The Max Frisch Archive was preceded by the launch of the Max Frisch Foundation in 1979. Together with his publisher Siegfried Unseld and the other members of the Board of Trustees (Peter Bichsel, Adolf Muschg and Peter von Matt), Frisch decided to "create a Max Frisch Archive to be located in Switzerland as a place of research". After the author’s death, the Foundation was to take over “the administration of his literary legacy with all the rights and responsibilities”.
Buclin, Hadrien. Surmonter le passé?: les intellectuels de gauche et le débat des années soixante sur la deuxième guerre mondiale, in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 2013/2, S. 233–249. Butler, Michael (1976) The Novels of Max Frisch (London) Butler, Michael (1985) The Plays of Max Frisch (London) Butler, Michael (1994) Andorra, Grant and Cutler Study Guide, 2nd edition, London Kieser, Rolf, ed. (1989) Max Frisch: Novels, Plays, Essays, The German Library Series, Continuum, New York.
Franz Rudolf Frisching was the founder of the Frisching Faience Manufactory in Bern.