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Triptychon: Drei szenische Bilder
German
114 pages, Perfect Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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51 people want to read
About the author
Max Frisch
273 books780 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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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 5, 2020
آخر مسرحية للأديب السويسري ماكس فريش
صور للحياة والموت كتبها وهو في أواخر الستينيات من عمره
حوار بين الأحياء والأموات واستكمال ما انقطع بينهم من صلة وحديث وعتاب
وحوار الموتى في عالم الموت عن حياتهم وأخطاءهم ومعتقداتهم
صور للحياة والموت كتبها وهو في أواخر الستينيات من عمره
حوار بين الأحياء والأموات واستكمال ما انقطع بينهم من صلة وحديث وعتاب
وحوار الموتى في عالم الموت عن حياتهم وأخطاءهم ومعتقداتهم
May 3, 2008
A serendipitous find. I'd read his I'm Not Stiller, Homo Faber, and Man in the Holocene years ago as an undergraduate, but had no idea he'd written this play (which interestingly was meant to be read, not performed). Just browsing shelves and the title caught my eye, made me think of Francis Bacon's paintings—triptychs being a favorite form of his (funny how Bacon is considered a postmodern painter—in part because of how he treats identity—and yet the multiple perspectives approach inherent in triptychs is very much a modernist concern.)
Triptych is a haunting play. A combination of Sartre's No Exit, Beckett of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, with a liberal dose of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence at its darkest (we're doomed to repeat our lives exactly as we've lived them—down to the word, the gesture—forever). But strip away all that intertext and this play is about what we say and don't say to the people we are closest to. It's about wanting someone to talk; and wishing they'd shut up. It's about conversations—and silences—that haunt us. Frisch sets up the conversations quite cleverly—using his conception of eternity to control the logic of who can say what to whom. Along the river Styx, for instance, parents and children, each the age they died, can converse only as they did when both were still alive. Thus a 70-year-old man speaks with his 40-year-old father, but the only conversations they can have are the same ones they had when he was a boy.
I could go on—the tramp who was a Shakespearean actor quoting Hamlet, the lost airplane pilot, the man playing the flute who stops and starts over every time he reaches the difficult passage—lots of great stuff here.
Triptych is a haunting play. A combination of Sartre's No Exit, Beckett of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, with a liberal dose of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence at its darkest (we're doomed to repeat our lives exactly as we've lived them—down to the word, the gesture—forever). But strip away all that intertext and this play is about what we say and don't say to the people we are closest to. It's about wanting someone to talk; and wishing they'd shut up. It's about conversations—and silences—that haunt us. Frisch sets up the conversations quite cleverly—using his conception of eternity to control the logic of who can say what to whom. Along the river Styx, for instance, parents and children, each the age they died, can converse only as they did when both were still alive. Thus a 70-year-old man speaks with his 40-year-old father, but the only conversations they can have are the same ones they had when he was a boy.
I could go on—the tramp who was a Shakespearean actor quoting Hamlet, the lost airplane pilot, the man playing the flute who stops and starts over every time he reaches the difficult passage—lots of great stuff here.
December 12, 2018
I didn't realize these were plays. Shit. Anyway, despite my ignorance, I can't say my premier exposure to Max Frisch was regrettable. The three short plays comprising Triptych all address the issue of death, but one could be forgiven for not realizing this until perhaps the third panel. It does not seem obvious at first that some or many of the characters in each play are in fact dead.
The first panel sees a widow failing to recognize her husband's death, leaning over his casket and demanding that he stop staring at her with such coldness in his eyes.
The second panel finds a dead father visited by his son at the river Styx where he has cast a line into the waters. He periodically checks and re-baits his line despite the fact that there are no fish in the river.
The third is an odd blurring of fantasy and memory in which a man revisits his deceased lover but demands she tell him something she had never said before; an impossible desire.
Despite the reunions between the dead and the living in each panel, there is never any sort of reconciliation, only occasionally perhaps a tragic sort of understanding and acceptance that death has proven any reconciliation impossible. I was particulary taken by the second panel. Though the setting was the river Styx, it seemed to take place in some sad conception of Heaven - one perhaps equally as somber and incredibly lonely as the life certain characters had left behind.
The first panel sees a widow failing to recognize her husband's death, leaning over his casket and demanding that he stop staring at her with such coldness in his eyes.
The second panel finds a dead father visited by his son at the river Styx where he has cast a line into the waters. He periodically checks and re-baits his line despite the fact that there are no fish in the river.
The third is an odd blurring of fantasy and memory in which a man revisits his deceased lover but demands she tell him something she had never said before; an impossible desire.
Despite the reunions between the dead and the living in each panel, there is never any sort of reconciliation, only occasionally perhaps a tragic sort of understanding and acceptance that death has proven any reconciliation impossible. I was particulary taken by the second panel. Though the setting was the river Styx, it seemed to take place in some sad conception of Heaven - one perhaps equally as somber and incredibly lonely as the life certain characters had left behind.
May 21, 2023
deutsche sarte
January 21, 2016
don´t read this while mourning.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews