page_title: Max Frisch
section_title: Transience and death
hierarchical_section_title: Max Frisch / Literary output / Themes and motifs / Transience and death
caption_attribution_description: Swiss Commemorative Coin 2011 B CHF 20 obverse
context_page_description: Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. 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.
context_section_description: Death is an ongoing theme in Frisch's work, but during his early and high periods it remains in the background, overshadowed by identity issues and relationship problems. Only with his later works does Death become a core question. Frisch's second published Diary (Tagebuch) launches the theme. A key sentence from the Diary 1966–1971 (published 1972), repeated several times, is a quotation from Montaigne:"So I dissolve; and I lose myself" The section focuses on the private and social problems of aging. Although political demands are incorporated, social aspects remain secondary to the central concentration on the self. The Diary's fragmentary and hastily structured informality sustains a melancholy underlying mood.
  The narrative Montauk (1975) also deals with old age. The autobiographically drawn protanonist's lack of much future throws the emphasis back onto working through the past and an urge to live for the present. In the drama-piece, Triptychon, Death is presented not necessarily directly, but as a way of referencing life metaphorically. Death reflects the ossification of human community, and in this way becomes a device for shaping lives. The narrative Man in the Holocene presents the dying process of an old man as a return to nature. According to Cornelia Steffahn there is no single coherent image of death presented in Frisch's late works. Instead they describe the process of his own evolving engagement with the issue, and show the way his own attitudes developed as he himself grew older. Along the way he works through a range of philosophical influences including Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Lars Gustafsson and even Epicurus.
caption: Max Frisch on a Swiss Commemorative 20 Franc Coin issued in 2011 to mark the centenary of his birth
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