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
Adolf Muschg, purporting to address Frisch directly on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, contemplates the older man's contribution: "Your position in the history of literature, how can it be described? You have not been, in conventional terms, an innovator… I believe you have defined an era through something both unobtrusive and fundamental: a new experimental ethos (and pathos). Your books form deep literary investigation from an act of the imagination." Marcel Reich-Ranicki saw similarities with at least some of the other leading German-language writers of his time: "Unlike Dürrenmatt or Böll, but in common with Grass and Uwe Johnson, Frisch wrote about the complexes and conflicts of intellectuals, returning again and again "to us", creative intellectuals from the ranks of the educated middle-classes: no one else so clearly identified and saw into our mentality. Friedrich Dürrenmatt marvelled at his colleague: "the boldness with which he immediately launches out with utter subjectivity. He is himself always at the heart of the matter. His matter is the matter. In Dürrenmatt's last letter to Frisch he coined the formulation that Frisch in his work had made "his case to the world".