Answer from the silence

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Eiger , Mönch and Jungfrau in the Bernese Alps

Answer from the Silence is a story by the Swiss writer Max Frisch . The second major literary work by the author after Jürg Reinhart appeared in 1937, when Frisch was 26 years old, by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt with the subtitle A story from the mountains . Frisch later rejected the youth work and did not include it in his edition . It was not until 2009 that Suhrkamp Verlag published a new edition with an afterword by Peter von Matt . While the reviews of the first edition were mostly friendly, 72 years later most reviewers agreed with Frisch's skeptical attitude towards his own work.

The story is about a young man who is conflicted between an extraordinary existence and a bourgeois career. By risking his life through a heroic act, the first ascent of a mountain route, he gains clarity about his future and comes to the realization that even the most ordinary life is worth living. Answer from the Silence is shaped both by Frisch's own life situation, which is dealt with autobiographically in the text , as well as by contemporary historical influences of the 1930s. The style is even more lyrical than in Frisch's later prose . Nevertheless, basic themes of the following work can already be identified in the early narrative, such as the breakout from the bourgeois world and the longing for a temporary love without consequences.

content

View from the north face of the Eiger

Dr. phil. Balz Leuthold is a teacher, 30 years old and is in a life crisis. From his youth he despised the ordinary, the mediocre, considered himself extraordinary and brilliant. The only thing that remained unclear was the area in which his genius would show itself. With the passage of time his contempt for bourgeois life persisted, but more and more attempts to achieve extraordinary things faded away. Although his entire life plan threatens to fail, Leuthold does not even feel despair, just emptiness. Two weeks before the wedding with his 21-year-old fiancé Barbara, Leuthold breaks out and drives into the mountains. Here he finally wants to achieve his extraordinary achievement: climbing a summit over the north ridge , on which all other mountaineers have failed so far, many of whom were killed in attempts. The male act or death, that's how Leuthold formulates his alternatives.

Memories of a previous mountain tour by the then 17-year-old courtship with his older brother are stirred up. Leuthold regrets the decision to have revisited the landscape of his past, which now seems small to him. But during a hike he managed to return to childhood for a moment, he carved a wooden ship and played obliviously on a mountain stream. When he realizes that he is being watched by Irene, a 28-year-old Danish woman from his pension, he breaks off ashamed. From now on he is fixated on impressing the seemingly carefree young woman with constantly happy laughter. He boasts of daring climbing in front of her. She does not understand the meaning of his ambition, but the man, who obviously cannot be happy with his life, moves her.

Irene accompanies Leuthold to the Ochsenjoch, at the foot of the north ridge. There they spend a night of love in the tent. Both feel the longing to break out and live a real life, a life that savored every day and yet includes the separation before it gets used to everyday life. Irene also admits that she leads a life that she wants to leave behind: at home a terminally ill husband is waiting for her return, whose presence, his death in front of her eyes, she can no longer bear. When Irene wakes up the next morning, Leuthold has disappeared. After her confession, he set out that night to climb the summit.

Leuthold remains missing for three days, the weather has long since changed. Local mountaineers are already looking for him to recover his body. Barbara has arrived and at Irene's side is worried about her fiancé, whom she admits she has never been able to love. Leuthold reappears on the third day. He looks like a ghost, several of his limbs are frozen. He dismisses the fact that he has reached the summit. It is more important that he received the answer from the silence: every life is worth living, including the ordinary. Even with amputated limbs, he would still be able to be a good teacher and father. In the end, he feels grace and gratitude for the happiness in life.

shape

The story, Answer from the Silence , which is almost 150 pages long, was a “little novel ” for Peter von Matt . The place and time of the action are not mentioned, the external takes a back seat to the internal processes. The male protagonist is at the center of the story. Two female characters play a supporting role without fundamentally influencing the process. The turning point of the plot, the night in which Leuthold dares to climb, is marked by a line that consists only of dashes. For von Matt "this strange line [...] was a signal that what should be said here cannot be said."

The narrative does not have a continuous course, but for the most part consists of an associative sequence of conversations with oneself, thought processes and lyrical sprinkles. Jürgen H. Petersen saw the early Frisch being strongly influenced by Albin Zollinger and his poetic metaphorical style, and not free from epigonal lyricisms. Frisch himself emphasized that writing was “very easy” for him at the time, but in retrospect he distanced himself from supposedly “false poeticization”. His later work was characterized by a much tighter, more unpretentious style.

interpretation

According to Walburg Schwenke, the protagonist Balz Leuthold shows all the external characteristics of a bourgeois existence: by profession a teacher, lieutenant in the Swiss army , engaged, he is about to get married. But his inner goals and longings contradict the outer status: Since his youth he has considered himself something special, wants to counter the monotony of life with the extraordinary and the special deed. Briefly dissuade Irene Leuthold from his plans. Your confidence will take away his self-doubt, transform him. Together they fantasize about an indefinite mutual departure, envision a utopian life. The real situation of Irenes destroy the illusion, show Leuthold his own and the ordinaryness of all people before eyes, an ordinaryness which he believes he can only escape by returning to the plan.

By climbing the mountain, Leuthold surrenders himself to fate. Nature becomes the yardstick of his future; Leuthold could not find the answer to his life within society, but outside it by putting it at risk. The suicidal act reduces the contradiction between an artist and a bourgeois existence to the alternatives of life and death, a fatalism in which the question of whether another life is possible no longer arises. The fact that the hero barely escapes death strengthens his will to survive, the original longing for a better life gives way to the pathetic happiness of being alive at all. The main character escapes the previously inextricable contradiction between artist and citizen through a maturation process. The outcome of the story - the world makes sense and is in order, the hero just has to recognize it, "win" it and accept it - became for Schwenke a strategy of problem suppression instead of problem solving.

Walter Schmitz saw the protagonist as an awkward eccentric at the center of several opposites: youth and old age, profession and calling, love and marriage. Irene and Barbara are two allegorical female figures who complement each other to form the overall picture of a person. Leuthold fails to redeem Irene through his love and takes refuge in the heroically stylized mountain solitude. In his weakness to implement the dreamed promise of life, he flees into the threat of death. When the person believed dead returns, a part of himself has died: physically his hand as an earlier tool of action, and psychologically the part of himself that had striven for complete autonomy . Now Leuthold needs the partner to complement him, and Barbara has gone through the same maturation as he himself. In his commitment to the teaching profession, the refined is not only subordinate to the rules of society, but will propagate them himself in the future.

background

Autobiographical reference

Although in 1937 he was four years younger than his main character Balz Leuthold, Max Frisch found himself in a comparable situation at the time the story was written: “A friend, when we were considering getting married, was of the opinion that I had learned nothing to be one Can call a profession, and she was not wrong; also she only said what I thought myself; but it was a shock, it was for the first time the serious idea that life can fail. ”The friend was Kate Rubensohn, the role model for Hanna from Homo Faber who would later become . Max Frisch's reaction was the abandonment of the German studies course and the move towards a technical career. In 1936 he enrolled at the ETH Zurich to study architecture . This too was accompanied by self-doubt: "Over time it became difficult as an elder to sit around among the almost boyish students, and the feeling of having missed his time grew into an inferiority fear."

The story Answer from Silence enabled Frisch for Walburg Schwenke to play through a clinging to the writer's life plan. By letting Leuthold radically question bourgeois life at the beginning, Frisch formulated his own objections to his choice. In the end, Leuthold accepted the fate that was first experienced as an outside determination, but the strategy of suppressing the problem, with which a question about alternative ideas about life was avoided and instead the bourgeois existence was affirmed together with life itself, still left Frisch's resistance to the existing resistance own decision become evident. For Walter Schmitz, the young Frisch distanced himself from literature at times with the outcome of Answer from Silence . With his hero speaking out against the longing for the special, the writer Max Frisch also decides against the claim to originality. The prospect of a journalistic-literary future in firm, reproductive paths remains, which suggests that Frisch should reorient his career. In an interview with Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Frisch explained his life's decision : “I then decidedly committed to a bourgeois existence, and then got married in a very bourgeois manner. So I was a conscious citizen, someone who wants to be a citizen ”.

Frisch sealed his departure from art with a symbolic burning of all previous manuscripts in the autumn of 1937: “Once everything that had been written was tied up, including the diaries, and everything was given to the fire. I had to go up into the forest twice, there were so many bundles [...]. The secret vow not to write was not seriously violated for two years. ”Urs Bircher saw a reason for Frisch's departure from literature also in the fear that as a writer he would not be enough. The story Answer from Silence had previously been rejected by both close friend and patron Werner Coninx and Hermann Hesse , to whom Frisch had sent it for assessment. It was not until 1939, after he was drafted into the Swiss army as part of the mobilization , that Frisch relapsed as a writer and began a diary that was published under the title Leaves from the Bread Sack .

Historical influences

For Alexander Stephan , Answer from Silence was a typical story for the time it was written. Concepts such as “emptiness”, “nothing” on the one hand, “longing”, “answer” and “completion” on the other hand are characteristic expressions of the mood of crisis and the pessimistic existentialism of the time. A retreat to nature is also typical, which is what enables urban dwellers to feel real. Jürgen H. Petersen saw an even more extensive recourse to the feeling of emptiness that had been present in German literature since Georg Büchner . Max Frisch himself later described the answer from the silence as a "very epigonal story".

The north face of the Eiger, view from the northwest

The topic of climbing the north ridge of a mountain alludes to the first ascent of the Eiger north face . This alpine challenge became a real cult in the 1930s, and various mountaineers were killed in attempts to climb it. The narrative, however, remains unclear about the exact location. The mountain is not named, the allusion to the French language in the text refers to the Alps of Valais . Emil Zopfi , on the other hand, demonstrated similarities between the landscape described and the Central Switzerland and Glarus Alps , which Frisch knew from his own mountain tours. With the topic of the first ascent of the Eiger north face, Frisch also took up a topos of Nazi propaganda . So was Adolf Hitler issued the aim of seeing a German as the first climbers on the summit. However, Peter von Matt pointed out in the afterword of the new edition that the ascent of Leuthold would not be celebrated as a heroic act in the spirit of the time, but would be dealt with incidentally. It remains a surrogate for the search for the meaning of life.

According to Urs Bircher, the young Frisch imposed a Swiss “ethical neutrality” on himself for a long time against National Socialist Germany. On a trip to Germany in 1935 he made a strict distinction between the people of poets and thinkers and the National Socialist leadership and expressed weak requests that the Third Reich “no longer take the racial question to extremes”. Despite German book burnings , Frisch published until the merger in 1938 with the National Socialist Erler Verlag at the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, so even in 1937 Reply from the Silence . And in this story, too, Bircher saw the zeitgeist find its way into Frisch's originally apolitical work. With the active integration of the individual and his subordination into the community, Frisch approached the ideas of spiritual national defense that were emerging in Switzerland , which also determined the following sheets in the bread sack , and from which Frisch only spoke in his later work, especially in the service booklet , violently distanced.

Position in Frisch's factory

For Urs Bircher, the answer from the silence was the alternative to Frisch's debut, Jürg Reinhart . While the protagonist was “pure” and “tough” at the time, Leuthold turned out to be kind to everyone in the end. The decision in Jürg Reinhart to live as an artist, at that time still Frisch's own decision, is now being revised by a yes to bourgeois existence. Both texts have in common the heroic act in which the main male character has to prove himself. According to Walter Schmitz, the answer from the silence followed the structure that Frisch's debut had sketched out. As a refutation, the topics are now turned into their opposite: The journey leads to the mountains instead of to the sea, as with Jürg Reinhart , the deed is sought instead of falling to the hero, instead of killing someone else it is about killing the self Instead of gain through action, renunciation follows; instead of confession to the self, merging into the partnership.

Many analyzes looked for traces of the later work in the early narrative. For example, Jürgen H. Petersen found a central theme of Frisch designed for the first time in response to the silence , the breakout from the bourgeois world. The utopia to which Leuthold and Irene want to flee in their dreams in order to live a real life, later returned in Bin or The Journey to Beijing in the form of the Chinese capital, in Santa Cruz as Hawaii, in Count Öderland with the name Santorin . Peter von Matt saw in the motif of the temporary, fulfilled love between Leuthold and Irene the love without guilt between Max and Lynn from Montauk anticipated. For Alexander Stephan, Leuthold's outbreak was comparable to that of the sculptor Anatol Stiller in Stiller . After Leuthold's return, Stephan found the final mountain idyll in a modified form in the final tableau of Frisch's second mountain narrative, written over 40 years later, Man appears again in the Holocene .

In retrospect, Frisch distanced himself from the main work of his youth work. This is how he called Jürg Reinhart a “very youthful novel” that “got stuck in the autobiography”. He revised the leaves from the bread sack in the later publication Dienstbüchlein . Nevertheless, the rejection of no other text was as strong as that of the silent answer . While Frisch included his other early works in the collected work edition in 1976, he completely suppressed answers from the silence and was reluctant to admit his support for the story. In an interview with Heinz Ludwig Arnold, he described it as a "very bad" book, while speaking to Volker Hage he called it "just a junk".

reception

Contemporary reviews

Reply from the Silence , published by a German publisher, was largely praised in German literary criticism in 1937. In the literary journal Die Literatur , for example, Leonhard Beringer drew a comparison with the native poet Josef Ponten , who was popular in the Third Reich, because of the descriptions of nature , even though Frisch did not quite achieve “the intensity of this high model”. The tones of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung were more critical . The Swiss daily saw the story in the tradition of German films, "in which the young men, because they find reading books, humane education, even being mentally difficult and unnecessary, take the pimple and climb three-thousanders". However, it was admitted that Frisch was more concerned with the description of “mental states” than a “parforc piece of the muscle”. But Frisch also found recognition in his home country. In 1938 the beginner, who at that time only emerged through a novel and the short story Answer from Silence , was awarded the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer Prize .

Reactions to the new edition

72 years after its first review, the NZZ reviewed the story a second time in 2009. Roman Bucheli saw the answer from the silence “not just a literary historical document” that shows “the writer as a beginner”. In the story he already found “almost everything later laid out in the core”: “Here the pathetic characters, suffering in themselves and the world, are sketched out, which Frisch later, albeit in subtle transformations, let appear under the names Stiller, Gantenbein or Geiser. Here you can observe the first attempts in bold, almost cinematic cuts of the narrative flow. And last but not least, the book gives an idea of ​​how Frisch decorates the mental life of his female characters with fantasies and projections of his men. This new edition was long overdue. "

Pia Reinacher, on the other hand, saw the new publication as "an unfortunate decision in view of the weakness of this early text [...]." The narrative is nothing more than a "finger exercise by a bullying, testing young writer" who "enhances it with a mixture of excessiveness and pathos." want and implemented in a more or less naive language ”. She appears "today extremely kitschy and sentimental" and gives new readers "a lopsided picture of the important writer". For Lothar Müller, the answer from the silence was “the epigonal echo of a style that had already been exhausted in the 1930s and which hungered for metaphysical large-scale concepts”. He drew comparisons to Hans Carossa and Ernst Wiechert and came to the conclusion: “It was a necessary act that Max Frisch rejected this Berger story. Because it shows the reasons for this, this new edition is welcome. "

For Hermann Schlösser “the young Max Frisch managed to make some beautiful psychological detailed drawings, but it is just as obvious that the book contains an abundance of pathetic and sentimental passages”, so that he could not ignore Frisch's later assessment of “Schmarrn”. Helmut Böttiger judged: “Linguistically, this story by the 25-year-old Frisch is pathetic and wooden and at the same time very simple. It is only interesting as a preliminary stage to his later work. Anyone who is not an outspoken fresh fan will rub their eyes in amazement. "Ingeborg Gleichauf, on the other hand, recommended:" Perhaps you get the most out of this text when you forget what belongs to your own fresh socialization and just add something to the vortex the beginning of a writer's life. "

Christopher Bartmann described the story as “Frisch's youthful sin”, and he said: “In this book, not only is everything pre-war in terms of gender. Frisch shares the problems at stake with the fin de siècle , the language probably comes from Gottfried Keller somehow , that is, it is, sometimes and again and again, very beautiful. "Frisch shares the" hero cult of this time " , but refer it “exclusively to his own existential needs [...]. The questions that drive Frisch's writing, the now famous questions about the identity of our identity from Stiller to Gantenbein and up to the wonderful old work Man appears in the Holocene , are all pre-figured in the little, unfortunate answer from the silence . ”So got Bartmann at the end “I want to read Frisch again, even if not necessarily the early one.” Marcel Hänggi finally thought about the author: “Anyone who is interested in Max Frisch and has read everything else from him will do the two hours of reading not regret. But the author, who would be embarrassed, is a little bit sorry posthumously. "

literature

Text output

  • Max Frisch: Answer from the silence. A story from the mountains . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1937. (first edition)
  • Max Frisch: Answer from the silence . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42128-4 .

Secondary literature

  • Walter Schmitz : Max Frisch: The Work (1931–1961) . Studies on tradition and processing traditions. Peter Lang, Bern 1985, ISBN 3-261-05049-7 , pp. 52-57.
  • Walburg Schwenke: What am I? - Thoughts on Max Frisch's early work . In: Walter Schmitz (Ed.): Max Frisch . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-38559-3 , pp. 63-91, to Answer from the Silence pp. 79-85.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter von Matt : Afterword . In: Frisch: Antwort aus der Stille (2009), p. 149.
  2. ↑ a b Alexander Stephan : Max Frisch . Beck, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-406-09587-9 , p. 26
  3. ↑ Schwenke: What am I? - Thoughts on Max Frisch's early work , p. 81.
  4. ↑ Frisch: Answer from the Silence (2009), p. 118.
  5. ↑ von Matt: Afterword . In: Frisch: Antwort aus der Stille (2009), p. 166.
  6. ↑ a b Stephan: Max Frisch , p. 28
  7. ^ Heinz Ludwig Arnold: Conversations with writers . Beck, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-406-04934-6 , p. 14.
  8. ↑ Jürgen H. Petersen: Max Frisch . Metzler, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-476-13173-4 , p. 28.
  9. ↑ a b Schwenke: What am I? - Thoughts on Max Frisch's early work , pp. 80–84.
  10. ^ Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Werk (1931–1961) , pp. 54–57.
  11. ↑ von Matt: Afterword . In: Frisch: Antwort aus der Stille (2009), pp. 153–154.
  12. ↑ von Matt: Afterword . In: Frisch: Antwort aus der Stille (2009), p. 156.
  13. ^ Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Werk (1931–1961) , p. 57.
  14. ↑ Heinz Ludwig Arnold : “What am I?” About Max Frisch . Wallstein, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-89244-529-X , p. 23.
  15. ^ Max Frisch: Autobiography . In: Diary 1946–1949 , collected works in chronological order. Second volume . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-06533-5 , p. 588.
  16. ↑ Urs Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 . Limmat, Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-85791-286-3 , pp. 70-75.
  17. ↑ a b Petersen: Max Frisch , pp. 26-27.
  18. ^ A b Arnold: Conversations with Writers , p. 11.
  19. ↑ von Matt: Afterword . In: Frisch: Antwort aus der Stille (2009), pp. 162–164.
  20. ^ Max Frisch: Small diary of a German trip . In: Collected works in chronological order. First volume , p. 91.
  21. ↑ See Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 , pp. 60–66.
  22. ↑ Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 , p. 46.
  23. ↑ Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 , p. 81.
  24. ↑ Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 , p. 67.
  25. ^ Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Werk (1931–1961). P. 54.
  26. ↑ von Matt: Afterword . In: Frisch: Antwort aus der Stille (2009), pp. 166–167.
  27. ↑ Stephan: Max Frisch , p. 27.
  28. ↑ Volker Hage : Max Frisch . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-50616-5 , p. 28.
  29. ↑ Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 , p. 71.
  30. ↑ Quoted from: Stephan: Max Frisch , p. 28
  31. ^ Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Werk (1931–1961) , p. 52.
  32. ↑ Roman Bucheli: In the preschool of pathos . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from October 13, 2009.
  33. ↑ Pia Reinacher: Kisses in the summit hut . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of December 3, 2009.
  34. ^ Lothar Müller: The summiteer as a mass man . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 5, 2009.
  35. ↑ Hermann Schlösser : Just a junk? In: Wiener Zeitung of December 5, 2009.
  36. ↑ Helmut Böttiger : Pathetic, wooden mountain novel . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from November 5, 2009.
  37. ↑ Ingeborg Gleichauf: Why don't we live? In: Badische Zeitung of October 2, 2009.
  38. ↑ Christopher Bartmann: Pre-war prevails over all peaks . In: Falter , book supplement from October 14, 2009.
  39. ↑ Marcel Hänggi : But should you read that too?  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www2.woz.ch   In: The weekly newspaper of October 22, 2009.