From the Berlin Journal
From the Berliner Journal is the title of a literary diary by the Swiss writer Max Frisch , which was published in 2014 by Suhrkamp Verlag . It consists of records from 1973 and 1974. They form only part of the entire Berliner Journal , which spans the period up to 1980 and for which Frisch has set a blocking period of 20 years - beginning with his death on April 4, 1991 . The focus of the book is on Frisch's move to Berlin and encounters with colleagues from the literary business in the western and eastern parts of the city. Omissions about Frisch's private life were deleted, which the editor Thomas Strässle justifies with personal rights .
content
The recordings begin on February 6, 1973 with Frisch's move to Berlin-Friedenau to an apartment at Sarrazinstrasse 8. 61-year-old Frisch left Switzerland with his 28-year-old wife Marianne, where it was too cramped for him to to dare a new beginning in the German city. After the friendly neighborhood with Alfred Andersch in remote Berzona suffered from being too close, he cultivated friendships in Berlin with Günter Grass and Uwe Johnson , his editor at the time at Suhrkamp Verlag. He meets Hans Magnus Enzensberger and travels several times to East Berlin , where a selection of his second diary is to appear in the Volk und Welt publishing house . Frisch discussed with the publishing director Jürgen Gruner , the editor Roland Links and Hermann Kähler , who was supposed to write an afterword with which the socialist publishing house wanted to distance itself from the bourgeois writer. Above all, however, he met fellow writers in the East such as Jurek Becker , Wolf Biermann , Günter Kunert and Christa and Gerhard Wolf , with whom he made friends. Uwe Johnson, on the other hand, who once fled to the West, met the GDR writers with irreconcilable resentment.
The situation of the people in divided Berlin , the ubiquitous surveillance and censorship in the GDR , from which his colleagues suffer and which affects every conversation, impressed Frisch so much that he put mental games about a divided Zurich on paper. Every now and then he receives news from Switzerland that he comments critically, such as the argument with Karl Schmid about his speech Switzerland as a home? on the occasion of the awarding of the Great Schiller Prize . Frisch is busy with the publication of the service booklet . First drafts for the story Man appears in the Holocene under the working titles Rain and Climate fail and are withdrawn by the author. In addition, he mainly writes notes, he finds support at the typewriter. In the relationship with Marianne, however, the Frisch feels unreasonable, there are tensions. He repeatedly addresses his vain fight against alcohol, increasing age and the expectation of imminent death. Frisch is planning an edition of his work and expects that it will only appear posthumously. The recordings end on March 26, 1974, a few days before he set off on a book tour to the United States , which Frisch believes will be his last trip to New York .
background
Max Frisch, who had previously published two literary diaries for the periods 1946–1949 and 1966–1971 , wrote another diary from February 1973 to April 1980, which he named Berliner Journal . The records cover the period from his move to Berlin through the trip to the United States, which is processed in the short story Montauk , on which he met his future partner Alice Locke-Carey, to the end of his marriage to Marianne, who divorced in 1979. In an interview with Volker Hage in August 1981, Frisch first announced the content of the unpublished journal:
“The diary has a lot to do with marriage, so I can't and I don't want to present it. The whole is a unit, everything merges into one another, I cannot simply remove a part of it, and I also do not want to approach it in an edited manner. It's not a mess book, but a written book, even the private things are written in detail, formulated, not just notes. The compulsion to formulate is important, otherwise it becomes pure self-pity. This is now blocked until twenty years after my death: because of those involved who are then further away from it. "
Max Frisch handed over the typescript of the journal in 1980 to the Max Frisch Foundation, which had recently been founded. Frisch's friend Uwe Johnson was the only one who had read parts of the journal, but had been sworn to secrecy by the author. In a letter to Johnson in October 1980, Frisch wrote:
“I would like the copy that you have deposited with the notary to become your personal property, dear Uwe, on the condition that you do not show this journal to anyone and, if you are the only one who has read it, do not speak to anyone about it . I don't know what's in it anymore, a lot of crud, I suspect, a lot of self-righteousness. Hopefully there is nothing in it that will hurt you. The later issues only deal with Marianne / until the funeral of my hope that a post-marital friendship is possible. "
When the 20-year embargo expired in 2011 after Frisch's death, the Board of Trustees took a look at the Berliner Journal , but decided against publication in full. A selection of the entries from the first two years was first made available to the public in January 2012 on the occasion of an exhibition at the Berlin Academy of the Arts . The Max Frisch Foundation justified its decision in a press release from September 2011:
“For reasons of personal rights, the 'Berliner Journal' cannot be published as a whole. Further clarification is required as to whether at least parts of it will be published in a collection. [...] For legal reasons, the unlocked holdings in Zurich are currently neither accessible to science nor to the public. "
It was not until January 2014 that parts of the first two of a total of five ring booklets, which the Berliner Journal includes in the original, were published in a book by Suhrkamp Verlag under the title Aus dem Berliner Journal . The editor was the President of the Max Frisch Foundation Thomas Strässle with the assistance of the director of the Max Frisch Archive Margit Unser. In an afterword of the edition, Strässle again justified the omissions with "personal rights reasons". He also denied the omitted passages - contrary to the author's judgment - the “work character” because they were “not worked through” and therefore not “of general literary interest”. Frisch biographer Volker Weidermann criticized the decision with which the foundation once again ignored the will of the deceased author after the drafts for a third diary were published in 2010.
expenditure
- From the Berlin Journal . Edited by Thomas Strässle. With the collaboration of Margit Unser. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-518-42352-3 .
- From the Berlin Journal . Unabridged reading by Franziskus Abgottspon for MDR Figaro . The Audio Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86231-419-5 .
Web links
- Review notes for From the Berliner Journal at perlentaucher.de
- Volker Weidermann : Review (FAZ January 2014)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Volker Hage: Max Frisch. His life in pictures and texts. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-42212-0 .
- ^ Max Frisch, Uwe Johnson: The exchange of letters 1964-1983. Edited by Eberhard Fahlke. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-40960-3 , p. 227.
- ^ Section including quotations: Jörg Feßmann: Max Frisch's "Berliner Journal". In: 100 years of Max Frisch. An exhibition January 14 - March 11, 2012 Press kit of the Akademie der Künste , p. 7.
- ↑ Volker Weidermann : I can already see my shame . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 10, 2014.
- ↑ Florian Welle: Self-doubt in Sarrazinstrasse in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 7, 2014, V2 / 22