Max Frisch
"I'm Not Stiller" started with a print-run that provided for sales of 3,000 in its first year, but thanks to strong and growing reader demand it later became the first book published by Suhrkamp to top one million copies. The next novel, "Homo Faber", was another best seller, with four million copies of the German language version produced by 1998. "The Fire Raisers" and "Andorra" are the most successful German language plays of all time, with respectively 250 and 230 productions up till 1996, according to an estimate made by the literary critic Volker Hage. The two plays, along with "Homo Faber" became curriculum favourites with schools in the German-speaking middle European countries. Apart from a few early works, most of Frisch's books and plays have been translated into around ten languages, while the most translated of all, "Homo Faber", has been translated into twenty-five languages.
Max Frisch
Frisch adapted principals of Bertolt Brecht's Epic theatre both for his dramas and for his prose works. As early as 1948 he concluded a contemplative piece on the alienation effect with the observation, "One might be tempted to ascribe all these thoughts to the narrative author: the linguistic application of the alienation effect, the wilfully mischievous aspect of the prose, the uninhibited artistry which most German language readers will reject because they find it "too arty" and because it inhibits empathy and connection, sabotaging the conventional illusion that the story in the narrative really happened." Notably, in the 1964 novel "Gantenbein" "("A Wilderness of Mirrors")", Frisch rejected the conventional narrative continuum, presenting instead, within a single novel, a small palette of variations and possibilities. The play (1967) extended similar techniques to theatre audiences. Already in "Stiller" (1954) Frisch embedded, in a novel, little sub-narratives in the form of fragmentary episodic sections from his "diaries". In his later works Frisch went further with a form of that produced a literary collage of texts, notes and visual imagery in "The Holozän" (1979).