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
Jürgen H. Petersen reckons that Frisch's stage work had little influence on other dramatists. And his own preferred form of the "literary diary" failed to create a new trend in literary genres. By contrast, the novels "I'm Not Stiller" and "Gantenbein" have been widely taken up as literary models, both because of the way they home in on questions of individual identity and on account of their literary structures. Issues of personal identity are presented not simply through description or interior insights, but through narrative contrivances. This stylistic influence can be found frequently in the works of others, such as Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T. and in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina. Other similarly influenced authors are Peter Härtling and . Frisch also found himself featuring as a "character" in the literature of others. That was the case in 1983 with Wolfgang Hildesheimer's "Message to Max [Frisch] about the state of things and other matters" ("Mitteilungen an Max über den Stand der Dinge und anderes"). By then Uwe Johnson had already, in 1975, produced a compilation of quotations which he called "The collected sayings of Max Frisch" ("Max Frisch Stich-Worte zusammen"). More recently, in 2007, the Zürich–born artist Gottfried Honegger published eleven portrait-sketches and fourteen texts in memory of his friend.