Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.

In a talk given at an National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute (2011) on advanced topics in the digital humanities, philosopher of science Paul Humphreys suggested that as soon as machines could create knowledge, a point in time he traces back to the launch of ENIAC in 1946, the distinction between the humanities and other fields of academic endeavor was rendered tenuous at best and probably even eliminated. One can, of course, quibble with Humphrey's use of the word knowledge when it comes to the data produced by computers. One can even take issue with using ENIAC as a marker for the beginning of the computer age. But even if one argues successfully that Humphreys overstates his case, one must admit that somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, whether it was in 1941 when Konrad Zuse developed the Z3, 1943 when Alan Turing developed Colossus, or 1946 when ENIAC entered the picture, the way we pursue knowledge and the nature of research drastically changed.

It is not an overstatement to claim that information technology (IT) is the first technology in human history that touches everything. Philosopher of science Steven Shaviro polemically points out that IT is to humans what nature was in a bygone era—that is, “the inescapable background against which we live our lives and from which we derive our references and meanings.” If we take Shaviro's suggestion seriously and accept his conflation of nature and machines and the derivation of reference and meaning with regard to machines, we can no longer content ourselves with a strictly outlined traditional understanding of the humanities.

In Frisch's narrative Montauk (1975), various memories and episodes from the narrator's life are alternately presented from a first-person and a third-person point of view. throughout the text, the writing process of this specific book, and of literature in general, are negotiated in a self-referential discourse. The time frames change frequently. Fragmentary and constantly shifting memories that reach back into childhood are interwoven with a present-day plot set in the United States. This plot shows the sixty-two-year-old narrator “Max” in 1974 with Lynn, a young American woman whom he met at his New York publisher's office and with whom he spends a few days in New York City and a weekend at the shore, in Montauk, on the far eastern end of Long island.

The work's narrative structure is highly complex. The pages written in the past tense are partially grouped according to thematic clusters and partially follow a loose associative pattern. The thematic segments present aspects of the life of “Max,” a Swiss writer, in brief episodes or diachronically under thematic titles such as “architecture” or “fame,” and shed light on his experiences and character traits. Another technique of weaving the diverse segments together uses subtle associations that are triggered by persons, places, objects, time references, questions, single words, and quotations, associations that establish parallels between the present and a remembered past. Particularly memories of other people are interwoven in an associative manner. They provide connections to the narrated time in Montauk.

Frisch's novel stiller (1954) begins with an exclamation: “Ich bin nicht Stiller!” (I'm not Stiller!) The novel's protagonist, Anatol Stiller, a Swiss sculptor who has taken on a new identity and moved to the United States and then to Mexico, returns to his home country and is arrested upon his arrival after an altercation with a Swiss border guard who questions the validity of his identification papers. The novel consists of two parts, a journal that Stiller writes in a series of notebooks while in pre-trial confinement, and an account in which the district attorney, who had become a friend of Stiller's, outlines Stiller's life after his release. Throughout Stiller's notebooks, the prisoner claims that his name is not Stiller, but James White, a position that he continues to insist on even when his wife confronts him. Like many of Frisch's works, the novel negotiates conflicts between subjective and external reality and questions the stability of selfhood. The notebooks display a clear structure. Segments on Stiller's wife Julika and on the district attorney Rolf and his wife Sibylle alternate with reflections, dialogues, and stories that Stiller/White invents for his prison guard in order to entertain him while at the same time revealing a lot of himself.

Max Frisch's tagebücher mainly consist of Tagebuch 1946–1949 (1950) and Tagebuch 1966–1971 (1972). The first volume received close attention only after the second was published and rapidly became a bestseller in 1972, with extremely positive reviews by Rudolf Hartung and Marcel Reich-Ranicki in Die Zeit and by Hans Mayer in Der Spiegel. Thus, it is not surprising that the first volume to be translated into English, in 1974, was the Tagebuch 1966–1971 (under the English title Sketchbook 1966–1971), followed a few years later, in 1977, by the Tagebuch 1946–1949 (Sketchbook 1946–1949), more than twenty-five years after its first publication in German.

Yet Tagebuch 1946–1949 was not the first Tagebuch written by Max Frisch. Indeed, besides the Tagebuch with Marion—the first part of the Tagebuch 1946–1949, covering the years 1946 and 1947, which had already been published in 1947—Frisch had written Blätter aus dem Brotsack (Pages from the Knapsack) in 1939, which was his first longer prose work after the novels Jürg Reinhart (1934) and Antwort aus der Stille (An Answer from the Silence, 1937). Blätter aus dem Brotsack was also the first work that Max Frisch wrote after he had burned his unpublished manuscripts in 1937 and had decided never to write again (Tb 1, 588). As Frisch explained later in an interview with Rolf Kieser, in this very particular situation he naturally chose the diary form because he did not have enough time for longer literary forms.

Max Frisch was sixteen when he sent his first play, Stahl (Steel), to Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, but when the rejection slip came back from Berlin, the play was consigned to flames. So it was not in 1937, but as early as 1927 that he first voluntarily destroyed some of his own writings. The play had been typed on a rented typewriter, for which Frisch had to use his pocket money. That is perhaps why he was writing in a hurry. However, the rejection from Berlin did not give rise to any sense of resignation or self-doubt; on the contrary, Frisch immediately began writing a new play.

We do not know what exactly he destroyed in 1937 when he went into a forest to consign all his unpublished early manuscripts to the flames. Frisch said that his diaries were among the irretrievably lost texts. They probably also included the play Der Schüler im Himmel (Schoolboy in Heaven), which he wrote in March 1927 for a school performance, and also presumably the three-act play entitled 13. Trupp (Troop 13), which was announced for a family evening of the Free Military Preparatory Training organization (F.M.V.) in 1928. Was the manuscript of Flucht (Escape), which he had sent to his friend Werner Coninx to look at in 1935, among the works destroyed?

The American author Kurt Vonnegut proclaimed, “novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” If Vonnegut was correct, then Max Frisch's 1957 novel Homo Faber is a remarkably accurate representation of life. Although there is a tendency in some of the secondary literature, as noted by Ferdinand van Ingen in his article on technology and mythology in Homo Faber, to view the protagonist Walter Faber's occupation and his obsession with all things technological as more or less coincidental, and although Frisch himself gave conflicting answers regarding Faber as a “Techniker,” I suggest that technology is indeed a key to understanding this novel. Faber's former lover Hanna Landsberg puts it best when she describes technology as a trick that allows humans to order the world in such a way “daßwir sie nicht erleben müssen” (so that we don't have to experience it). This is Faber's goal. Throughout the text he denigrates “Erlebnisse” and the idea of “erleben.” His connection to the natural world is filtered or mediated by technology, and Faber claims to prefer it that way.