Biography: a game

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Biography: Ein Spiel is a play by the Swiss writer Max Frisch that was written in 1967 and premiered on February 1, 1968 in the Schauspielhaus Zurich . In 1984, Frisch presented a revised new version. The piece, which Frisch describes as a comedy , takes up one of his central themes: the possibility or impossibility of people to change their identity.

With a biography: A game , Frisch turned away from the parabolic form of his successful pieces Biedermann und die Brandstifter and Andorra and postulated a “dramaturgy of permutation ”. This should not, as in classical theater, focus on meaning and fate, but on the randomness of events and the possibility of their variation. Nevertheless, Biography: A Game is about the impossibility of its protagonist to fundamentally change his résumé. In retrospect, Frisch found the effect of the piece too fatalistic and the implementation of his theoretical intentions as unsuccessful. Although the play was criticized in 1968 as apolitical and out of date and later received a divided reception, it is one of the more frequently performed pieces by Frisch on German-speaking theaters.

Cover of the book edition of Biography: Ein Spiel des Suhrkamp Verlag

content

motto

Frisch put a motto in front of the piece, a quote from Vershinin from Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters : “I think often; what if one could start life all over again with full knowledge? How if the one life that you have already lived through was, so to speak, a first draft, for which the second will form the fair copy! Each of us would then, I think, endeavor above all not to repeat ourselves [...]. "

action

The terminally ill behavioral scientist Hannes Kürmann is given the opportunity to start his life all over again. A registrar guides him through key past experiences and gives him the choice of behaving differently to events and people with the knowledge of the future and thereby changing his biography . In the foreground is Kürmann's desire for a “biography without Antoinette”, his wife, whose marriage to him has broken down after seven years. For example, Kürmann first repeats the evening on which he was appointed professor and met Antoinette Stein at a party. But no matter how he tries to shape the encounter, it always ends in a night for the future couple. The registrar accuses Kürmann of not relating to the present but to a memory and therefore getting into the same story every time.

Kürmann refuses to believe that his life couldn't have been very different. The registrar takes him back to his youth. There, too, Kürmann fails to correct his biography retrospectively: a schoolmate loses an eye because of his snowball, his mother dies during a semester abroad in the United States, when he leaves he abandons the beloved mulatto Helen, in order to forget her he marries his first Woman who commits suicide after an argument . Kürmann claims he got used to his guilt. There is only one point where he is capable of changing his attitude. When a colleague at the university is dismissed for membership in the Communist Party , Kürmann is not satisfied with a second harmless protest note, but joins the Communist Party himself. As a result, Kürmann also loses his professorship.

Kürmann's life reaches the evening of his meeting with Antoinette. This time Antoinette leaves him and seems able to lead a life without him. Only then does Kürmann understand that he has underestimated his wife over the years. Now he doesn't want to let her go anymore. The registrar repeats the encounter until Antoinette stays at Kürmann's side. They get married again and their marriage falls into crisis again. Kürmann tries to curb his jealousy when Antoinette starts an affair with the architect Egon Stahel. The registrar praised his impeccable behavior, as he did not cause any tantrums or slaps. Still, freestyle man Antoinette cannot win back. When the registrar accuses him of having changed nothing in his life, apart from joining the Communist Party and not slapping Antoinette in the face, Kürmann reaches for the revolver with which he wanted to kill himself and shoots Antoinette.

The registrar reverses the act. For a year, Kürmann lived in the shadow of his wife, who had become independent. Then he is admitted to the hospital and learns about his cancer . His condition leaves Kürmann only the choice of how to react to the fact that he is lost. Instead of turning to his Antoinette, the registrar now makes her the offer to change her biography. Once again, both return to the evening of their first meeting. In contrast to her husband's unsuccessful attempts, Antoinette leaves Kürmann without hesitation. The registrar then announced that he was free and had seven years to live.

Book cover of the new version from 1984

Author's Notes

Max Frisch added a section with comments to the first version. In it he formulated the intention of his piece, which should not deceive the audience that it is playing on a stage. A change of work light and play light should indicate "that a variant is now being tried, a variant of reality that never appears on the stage." The piece remains a rehearsal, it does not want to prove anything. The registrar does not represent a “ metaphysical authority”, but an authority of the theater. "He expresses what Kürmann himself knows or could know." The topic is not the banal biography of Mr. Kürmann, but the question, comparable to the subsequent analysis of a game of chess , "whether and how the game could have been played differently." None The scene fits Kürmann in such a way that it couldn't be imagined otherwise. "Only he can't be otherwise." Frisch concluded with the words: "I meant it as a comedy."

New version from 1984

In the revised version, Frisch removed the notes, but instead emphasized the character of an experimental arrangement, a game of possibilities, in the piece itself. The registrar was given the role of game master. Two assistants to the director played the originally more than 30 supporting roles and thus reinforced the alienation effect of the action on the stage. Frisch deleted the temporal embedding in the 1960s by naming daily political events from Adenauer to Khrushchev . Another typical argument between Kürmann and his son as a representative of the mushroom-head generation was omitted, as was the prison scene after Kürmann's shot. Instead, Frisch added a discussion with his rival Stahel, which at the end was rejected by Kürmann, into the play.

shape

Max Frisch's self-described biography: A game as a comedy. However, the play deviates from the classic comedy structure and corresponds more to the draft of a tragic comedy by Friedrich Dürrenmatt , in which the plot is not heading towards a positive outcome, but emphasizes the comedic nature of the process, the grotesque and paradox of the situation. This turns the piece into a "comedy of action". It is presented as a “game within a game”, as a “ mise en abyme ” in which the audience witnesses the process of creating the game. This is underlined by the change of lighting for the different levels of reality of the registrar and the played biography of Kürmann. Frisch uses a form of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater here . The characters repeatedly “step out of their role”. The registrar interferes in Kürmann's biography, gives instructions or rebukes him; “You know that you behave like a brute.” For his part, Kürmann refuses to play the game he already knows or interrupts it to call the registrar: “Stop! Who turned out the light here? "

Ulrike Landfester sees in biography: A game a "virtuoso modulated" text, a "language game" which in its poetology "pulls out all the stops of the game". Words and stems from Italian, Greek or Latin become consistent motifs, for example when the Italian language in the tradition of Goethe becomes a symbol of the “longing for a poetic existence”, which Kürmann failed in his life. Music also serves as a motivic accompaniment, from repeated piano tinkling in a ballet school, the organ playing at Kürmann's first wedding, a “harmonium with hallelujah” from a nearby sect to Antoinette's and Stahel's spinet playing that accompanies Kürmann's second marriage.

interpretation

Max Frisch (1967)

The title Biography: A Game reveals the program of the piece. He draws the arc from bios , Kürmann's life, to graphein , the registration, and the one game that refers to other possible varieties. The portrayed life of the Kürmann becomes a game in several ways. It resembles the music box that Antoinette is fascinated by in the opening scene: “Figures that always make the same gestures as soon as it strikes, and it's always the same cylinder, but you're excited every time.” At the same time, it is based on the fixed rules played a game of chess in which the pawns cannot go back, but the queen is allowed to do anything, as Kürmann explains in anticipation of his and Antoinette's different abilities to break out of their shared biography.

Another form of play is that of theater. Kürmann's life is subjected to a "theatrical review" on stage. The playful representation of the possibilities with the means of the theater gives back to life what it has lost in the definition of reality: freedom. The stage play becomes a more believable, more appropriate life for the audience. But while Kürmann's name suggests that he has the freedom of choice , he becomes “no longer elected” in the final punch line. With the same irony, when he joined the Communist Party, Kürmann is suspected of wanting to change the world, although in truth he is only interested in changing his biography.

Kürmann's corrections fail because every change in his CV has consequences that he does not want to accept. He does not want to go through “again elementary school”, “again puberty”, “again military”. Thus, it is not a chain of changeable coincidences that determines Kürmann's biography, but his behavior towards them, his personality. He is denied choosing a new one: “That is the only thing I want if I can start again: a different intelligence.” The rules of the game of the registrar only allow variants of his behavior, not variants of his personality. Kürmann's I remains an unchangeable constant.

The game's limitations limit Kürmann's creative ability to create a new biography from scratch. Because the game is based on what has already been experienced, from which Kürmann is unable to break free. The game remains a “memory game”. Kürmann's fixation on Antoinette is arbitrary. It becomes his fate because he makes it so himself. When Antoinette wants to leave Kürmann, he holds her back. He couldn't bear to be without her and therefore without fate. He resembles Sisyphus , who also struggles in vain with his beloved “stone” - Antoinette's surname. In the end, your choice condemns Kürmann to freedom - and death. The reality that is thrown back on death becomes the answer to Antoinette's previously mere fake murder.

Intention and implementation

Max Frisch rehearsing in Andorra in 1961

Despite the great public success of his previously composed pieces Biedermann und die Brandstifter and Andorra , Frisch was dissatisfied with the misunderstandings that had accompanied their recording. In a conversation with Heinz Ludwig Arnold he explicitly opposed the parable-like parabola form of the previous pieces: "I simply found that the form of the parabola forces me to deliver a message that I actually don't have."

Based on his novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein , published in 1964, Frisch also turned on the stage to playing with the possibilities, to exploring how an initial situation can be changed through different actions. In his speech for the Schiller Memorial Prize in 1965, he created the term “dramaturgy of chance” or “dramaturgy of permutation” and set it in contrast to the “dramaturgy of coincidence” or “dramaturgy of peripetia ” of classical theater with their “assumption of a meaning “That a fable uses if it gives the impression that it could not have gone any other way. “In fact, wherever life is going on, we see something much more exciting: actions that are often random and always could have been different add up, there is no action and no omission that does not allow for future variations . "

In his published diary 1966–1971 , Frisch elaborated his thoughts in sketches “To the piece”: “Play allows what life does not allow [...]: that we suspend the continuity of time [...] that an action can be interrupted […] And only continues when we have understood its cause and its possible consequences […]. Life is historical, definite in every moment, it tolerates no variation. The game allows them. ”He turned against what Martin Walser called“ Imitier-Theater ”, theater that merely pretends to depict reality, and took sides in favor of a“ consciousness theater ”:“ Representation not of the world, but of ours Consciousness of her. "

In the Schauspielhaus Zurich was a game: Biography on February 1, 1968 premiere

In the spring of 1966, Frisch began working on Biographie: Ein Spiel and presented a first version in March 1967. The world premiere at the Zurich Schauspielhaus was scheduled for October 7, 1967. But the collaboration between Frisch and director Rudolf Noelte ended ten days before the premiere in a scandal and Noelte's dismissal. This had requested extensive text changes, which Frisch recently refused to accept. In particular, Kürmann's entry into the KP caused differences. In a note in his correspondence with Uwe Johnson , who was the editor at the Suhrkamp Verlag at the time , Frisch wrote: “A row with director Rudolf Noelte, who eliminates all political aspects and threatens to leave every time the author does not comply. I'm withdrawing the piece. ”The dispute found a judicial aftermath, in which Noelte tried to sue for co-authorship because of his adaptations, but was unsuccessful. The premiere had to be postponed. The outgoing director of the Zurich theater, Leopold Lindtberg, stepped in as director . The Zurich production was premiered on February 1, 1968 with the participation of Ullrich Haupt , Ellen Schwiers and Peter Frankenfeld as registrar. Two days later premieres of performances in Munich, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf followed. Another 15 stages included the piece in the program in the following season.

Max Frisch was not satisfied with the performances. In his diary he noted in an entry dated February 8, 1968: “Play performed, BIOGRAPHY EIN GAME, with a four-fold victory for the stage (Zurich, Munich, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf) over the author; he denies the fatality, the stage confirms it - playfully. ”In a letter to Walter Höllerer , he continued:“ I was dismayed at work: It will be exactly what I don't want, a fate! ” The audience seemed to confirm his fears: "The audience applauded the honest insight, we can't really change anything about our biography." Frisch's dissatisfaction with his own piece led him to retire from the stage for eleven years before he turned back in 1978 presented a new play with a triptych . In 1984 he created a new version of biography: a game that, despite changes in detail, retained the basic concept of the piece that Kürmann is not able to change the lived biography. The first performance of this version took place on September 15, 1984 in the Ludwigshafen Pfalzbau .

In 1970 Biography: A Game was filmed in a television version by the Hessischer Rundfunk . In this version, too, there were substantive differences in the collaboration between Frisch and director Rolf Hädrich . While Frisch tried to emphasize the model character of his play, the director put his focus on the authenticity of the characters involved. For example, his registrar became a “humanly feeling confidante”.

reception

In 1968, the year it was premiered, Biographie: A Game based on the previously politically interpreted parables was understood as Max Frisch's “retreat into private life”. In the West German criticism in particular, the piece was labeled as “out of date” and “radical internalization” and the author was criticized and partially discredited for his “withdrawal from political engagement” and “turning to the aesthetics of pure play”. Hellmuth Karasek saw the play as a "bourgeois drama", in which political steps are only taken because of their private impact, and a general impotence in relation to politics is expressed. However, there were also attempts to interpret the play politically. Marianne Biedermann did not see any break with Biedermann and the arsonists or Andorra and drew the conclusion: “As in the parables, the accusation against dubious conditions in our society and among individuals, with the aim of perhaps long-term on the way to the Reflection by the audience to create the ground for possible changes. "

At the center of many later evaluations was Frisch's own admission of failure because of his intentions. Jürgen H. Petersen saw the “fundamental deficiency of the piece” in the fact that the viewer is overlaid with the representation of a past reality. This distinguishes the play from the success of the novel My Name is Gantenbein , in which the variants always remain recognizable as fiction, as something thought, due to the narrative situation. Hans Heinz Holz questioned the relevance of the initial situation for a game of possibilities: "Can't you imagine fates that are more important than the life lie of an ego-centered professor, and in which more choice, possibility, and chance may appear?" For Hans Mayer Biography seemed : A game "cannot bear the comparison [...] with the wasteland , the honest man and with Andorra." Beda Allemann saw in the play "a hidden form of fatalism" emerge, which is also found in Frisch's prose Stiller or Homo Let Faber be found again.

Other voices did not see the failure of Frisch's intention as a failure of the piece. This is how Klaus Müller-Salget judged: “If you leave Frisch's original intention aside, then biography: A game can be considered a successful sarcastic comedy of repetition”. For Hellmuth Karasek it spoke for "Frisch's impartiality towards his own views" that the piece did not come to the same clear result as the author in his utterances. Biography shows "how little 'fair copies' can succeed, even if they are made possible by the theater." Walter Schmitz saw "the question of whether the practice now confirms or refutes Frisch's theoretical considerations, [...] wrongly put". The poetology is "not a prerequisite but a part of the work" as an investigation "how a piece that corresponds to the theses presented can be composed." The fact that the "dramaturgy of permutation" cannot be realized is "not a surprising by-product, but the answer to the theoretical question of the 'game' biography ”. For Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer, the fact that Frisch as an author “has to prove the opposite of what he wants to prove” turned the play into a self-deprecating comedy. In a conversation with Dieter E. Zimmer, Frisch himself drew a parallel between his own role and that of the Kürmann: “This registrar could also say to the playwright: Why do you choose the same topic every time? To which I would like to say like Kürmann: Let's start again! "

Biography: A play did not have the public success of Biedermann und die Brandstifter or Andorra , but the play advanced to the fourth most-performed play by Max Frisch on the German-speaking stages after Don Juan or Die Liebe zur Geometry . Nevertheless, literary research on the piece has not been very extensive so far.

literature

Text output

  • Max Frisch: Biography: A game . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1969, ISBN 3-518-01225-8
  • Max Frisch: Biography: A game. New version 1984 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-01873-6

Secondary literature

  • Hellmuth Karasek : Max Frisch. Friedrich's playwright of the world theater volume 17 . Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1974, pp. 90-97, 124-127
  • Jürgen H. Petersen: Max Frisch . Metzler, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-476-13173-4 , pp. 137-150
  • Walter Schmitz : Max Frisch: Das Spätwerk (1962–1982). An introduction . Francke, Tübingen 1985, ISBN 3-7720-1721-5 , pp. 67-75
  • Ulrike Landfester: A desk that doesn't belong to the room . In: Davide Giuriato, Martin Stinglin, Sandro Zanetti (eds.): System without General. Writing scenes in the digital age . Wilhelm Fink, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7705-4350-5 , pp. 65–85 ( online version )
  • Cegienas de Groot: Time management in Max Frisch's drama: The technique of visualization in “Santa Cruz”, “The Great Wall of China” and “Biography” . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1977, ISBN 90-6203-150-1

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), p. 5
  2. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), p. 119
  3. ^ Beda Allemann: The structure of the comedy in Max Frisch . In: Walter Schmitz (Ed.): Max Frisch , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-38559-3 , p. 333
  4. ↑ Landfester: A desk that does not belong to the room , pp. 65–67
  5. ^ Allemann: The structure of the comedy in Max Frisch , p. 328
  6. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), p. 26
  7. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), p. 28
  8. ↑ cf. de Groot: Zeitgestaltung im Drama Max Frischs , pp. 185–192
  9. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), p. 76
  10. ↑ See the section: Landfester: A desk that does not belong to the room , pp. 73–75
  11. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), pp. 8–9
  12. ↑ See the section: Landfester: A desk that does not belong to the room , pp. 68–70
  13. ↑ See section: Karasek: Max Frisch , pp. 90–97
  14. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), p. 32
  15. ↑ Frisch: Biography: Ein Spiel (1969), p. 30
  16. ↑ See the section: Petersen: Max Frisch , pp. 140-142
  17. ↑ See section: Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Spätwerk (1962–1982) , pp. 69–75
  18. ↑ Quoted from: Lioba Waleczek: Max Frisch . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-423-31045-6 , p. 127
  19. ^ Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976, Volume 5, ISBN 3-518-37905-4 , pp. 366–369
  20. ^ Max Frisch: Diary 1966–1971 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-518-36756-0 , pp. 89-90
  21. ↑ Twice the life . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 1967, p. 182 ( online ).
  22. ↑ Quoted from: Landfester: A desk that does not belong to the room , pp. 83–84
  23. ↑ Noelte loses to Frisch . In: Die Zeit , No. 14/1968
  24. ↑ a b evening with Antoinette . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1968, p. 136 ( online ).
  25. ↑ Frisch: Diary 1966–1971 , p. 111
  26. ↑ Max Frisch: Dramaturgical. An exchange of letters with Walter Höllerer . Literarisches Colloquium, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-920392-17-5 , p. 28
  27. ↑ Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max fresh . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-39734-6 , p. 193
  28. ^ Marianne Biedermann: Political Theater or Radical Internalization? . In: text + kritik 47/48, ISBN 3-921402-10-7 . P. 44
  29. ↑ Karasek: Max Frisch , p. 96
  30. ^ Biedermann: Political theater or radical internalization? , Pp. 55-56
  31. ↑ See Petersen: Max Frisch , pp. 144–150
  32. ↑ Quoted from: Lioba Waleczek: Max Frisch , p. 128
  33. ↑ Hans Mayer: About Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch . Neske, Pfullingen 1977, ISBN 3-7885-0081-6 , p. 123
  34. ^ Allemann: The structure of the comedy in Max Frisch , pp. 328–329
  35. ↑ Klaus Müller-Salget: Max Frisch . Reclam, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-15-015210-0 , p. 34
  36. ↑ Karasek: Max Frisch , pp. 96-97
  37. ^ Walter Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Spätwerk (1962–1982) , pp. 69, 73
  38. ↑ Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , pp. 196–197
  39. ↑ Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 199
  40. ↑ Volker Hage: Max Frisch , Rowohlt, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-499-50616-5 , p. 82
  41. ↑ Landfester: A desk that does not belong to the room , p. 67.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on January 4, 2009 .