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
The film director believes that Frisch had for the most part an "unfortunate relationship" with film, even though his literary style is often reminiscent of cinematic technique. Seiler explains that Frisch's work was often, in the author's own words, looking for ways to highlight the "white space" between the words, which is something that can usually only be achieved using a film-set. Already, in the "Diary 1946–1949" there is an early sketch for a film-script, titled "Harlequin". His first practical experience of the genre came in 1959, but with a project that was nevertheless abandoned, when Frisch resigned from the production of a film titled "SOS Gletscherpilot" ("SOS Glacier Pilot"), and in 1960 his draft script for "William Tell" ("Castle in Flames") was turned down, after which the film was created anyway, totally contrary to Frisch's intentions. In 1965 there were plans, under the Title "", to film an episode from the novel "Gantenbein", but the project was halted, initially by differences between Frisch and the film director Erwin Leiser and then, it was reported, by the illness of Bernhard Wicki who was brought in to replace Leiser. The "Zürich – Transit" project went ahead in the end, directed by Hilde Bechart, but only in 1992 a quarter century later, and a year after Frisch had died.