First stolen, now printed: Max Frisch’s highschool diploma essay | EUROtoday

Last week, the Berlin Academy of the Arts introduced notes by sixteen-year-old Heiner Müller that have been created within the final months of the battle in 1945, had survived within the poet and playwright’s property and are actually printed within the new concern of the journal “Sinn und Form” – direct strains into his later work turn out to be seen. At the identical time, the looks of one other early textual content from a really distinguished writer turned identified: Max Frisch’s highschool commencement essay from 1930, which he wrote for the German topic underneath the title “Light and Shadow Sides of Modern Technology” – on the age of 19.

This essay doesn’t come from the property, however was stolen seventy years in the past by the then pupil Hans Eggenberger from the secondary college on Rämistraße in Zurich, which Frisch had additionally attended. Eggenberger’s consideration had been drawn to Frisch’s lately printed novel “Stiller” at school, and since he knew that he and the author went to the identical college, he used the surprising entry he had gained to an archive cupboard to see whether or not Frisch’s highschool diploma essay may very well be discovered there; When he discovered it, he took it with him as a result of he was apparently afraid that the eight-page textual content would finally be thrown away anyway. Before Eggenberger died final 12 months, he needed to transfer right into a nursing dwelling and handed the manuscript over to the Max Frisch Archive on the University of Zurich.

Now it’s being printed – in essentially the most uncommon place potential, particularly not in a literary journal, however within the anniversary publication for the a hundred and seventy fifth birthday of the Zurich instructing help writer, which is entitled “Please don’t scribble in the book!” has appeared. In addition to a facsimile of the eight pages, the transcription of the very brief essay is obtainable, launched by a way more in depth classification that Thomas Strässle wrote as president of the Max Frisch Foundation and a quick remembrance of the theft (which has lengthy been legally barred) that Eggenberger wrote earlier than his loss of life.

Strässle takes the essay critically, however what the nineteen-year-old Frisch wrote in it can’t bear comparability with the existential notes of the sixteen-year-old Müller. After all, it begins sarcastically: “If I were an authority, my name would have the sound that would make people sit up and take notice, my words would have the suggestive power of a personality taken seriously, I would allow myself to condense human history into a handful of sentences . . .”

And then they arrive, sadly banal, even when the spelling is sort of error-free (as 4 present highschool college students marvel at in a video to which a QR code leads). The grade for this was a two to a few (in line with the German system), however aside from the announcement of the agency will to mental prominence, there isn’t a stylistic trace of the later Frisch. Let’s await the amount of letters the younger writer is at present engaged on along with his writer Peter Suhrkamp.

“Please don’t scribble in the book!” Of instructing supplies and studying paths. Edited by Dirk Vaihinger. Lehrmittelverlag Zurich, Zurich 2026. 110 pages, illustrations, 22.90 Swiss francs.