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.
Franz Xaver Kroetz
He became famous when in 1971 the premiere of his plays "Heimarbeit" ("House-work") and "Hartnäckig" ("Persistent") were disrupted by neo-fascists. His plays in the 1970s portrayed people who had been rendered speechless by their own social misery. In the play "Das Nest" ("The Nest"), the protagonist is a truck driver. His boss orders him to dump toxic waste into a lake, thus soiling his "nest." He wrote a libretto based on his play "Stallerhof" (1971) for an opera of the same name which Gerd Kühr composed in 1987/88. It was premiered at the first Munich Biennale in 1988. The play was staged at the Burgtheater in 2010 by David Bösch.