“New York . . . I HATE IT. . . I LOVE IT. . . I DON’T KNOW. . .” These are the reflections of Max Frisch (1911–91) writing from his apartment in the Big Apple near the end of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1946 and continuing until his death at the age of eighty, the man whom many see as Switzerland’s greatest writer kept a series of sketchbooks to record his reactions to events of the time and people he encountered in his daily life. Neither a commonplace book nor a diary, these volumes contain the seeds for many of Frisch’s most famous works—including Homo Faber, I’m Not Stiller, and Man in the Holocene—as well as his cynical meditations, fictions, incidents, conversations, meetings, newspaper headlines and dark fantasies—anything, in short, that the author found significant. Drafts for a Third Sketchbook treats the reader to an even more personal document. Unpublished at the time of Frisch’s death, this collection was edited by Peter von Matt, president of the Max Frisch Foundation, with an eye toward expanding our knowledge of this legendary writer’s last days. Ranging from a couple of sentences to several pages, the sketches collected in this volume recall the United States of the Reagan years and the author’s own growing sense of age as both the threat of nuclear war and some of his most treasured friendships pass on. Representing an unusually personal vista onto the world as Frisch knew it, this is a wonderful self-portrait of an extraordinary intelligence.
Author
Max 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
