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Three Plays: The Fire Raisers / Andorra / Triptych
Three contentious and enduring plays about the clash of the individual and society
Fire Raisers (1958) tells the tale of a respectable bourgeois whose house is one day visited by three strangers. It "is successful on every level; the story is as gripping as an adventure story; each line is fraught with several meanings: as an allegory it is unique" (Edna O'Brien); Andorra is based on the author's own experience of anti-semitism in Switzerland and is about Andri, a young man who is believed to be a Jew and who is persecuted by his community as a result; Triptych is a portrait of a writer grappling with his own mortality.
The flexible and contemporary translations by Michael Bullock (The Fire Raisers, Andorra) and Geoffrey Skelton (Triptych) are here complemented by an introduction by Peter Loeffler.
Fire Raisers (1958) tells the tale of a respectable bourgeois whose house is one day visited by three strangers. It "is successful on every level; the story is as gripping as an adventure story; each line is fraught with several meanings: as an allegory it is unique" (Edna O'Brien); Andorra is based on the author's own experience of anti-semitism in Switzerland and is about Andri, a young man who is believed to be a Jew and who is persecuted by his community as a result; Triptych is a portrait of a writer grappling with his own mortality.
The flexible and contemporary translations by Michael Bullock (The Fire Raisers, Andorra) and Geoffrey Skelton (Triptych) are here complemented by an introduction by Peter Loeffler.
356 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
Max Frisch
274 books781 followersMax Rudolph Frisch was born in 1911 in Zurich; the son of Franz Bruno Frisch (an architect) and Karolina Bettina Frisch (née Wildermuth). After studying at the Realgymnasium in Zurich, he enrolled at the University of Zurich in 1930 and began studying German literature, but had to abandon due to financial problems after the death of his father in 1932. Instead, he started working as a journalist and columnist for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), one of the major newspapers in Switzerland. With the NZZ he would entertain a lifelong ambivalent love-hate relationship, for his own views were in stark contrast to the conservative views promulgated by this newspaper. In 1933 he travelled through eastern and south-eastern Europe, and in 1935 he visited Germany for the first time.
Some of the major themes in his work are the search or loss of one's identity; guilt and innocence (the spiritual crisis of the modern world after Nietzsche proclaimed that "God is dead"); technological omnipotence (the human belief that everything was possible and technology allowed humans to control everything) versus fate (especially in Homo faber); and also Switzerland's idealized self-image as a tolerant democracy based on consensus — criticizing that as illusion and portraying people (and especially the Swiss) as being scared by their own liberty and being preoccupied mainly with controlling every part of their life.
Max Frisch was a political man, and many of his works make reference to (or, as in Jonas und sein Veteran, are centered around) political issues of the time.
information was taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Frisch
Some of the major themes in his work are the search or loss of one's identity; guilt and innocence (the spiritual crisis of the modern world after Nietzsche proclaimed that "God is dead"); technological omnipotence (the human belief that everything was possible and technology allowed humans to control everything) versus fate (especially in Homo faber); and also Switzerland's idealized self-image as a tolerant democracy based on consensus — criticizing that as illusion and portraying people (and especially the Swiss) as being scared by their own liberty and being preoccupied mainly with controlling every part of their life.
Max Frisch was a political man, and many of his works make reference to (or, as in Jonas und sein Veteran, are centered around) political issues of the time.
information was taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Frisch
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