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
By 1947 Frisch had accumulated roughly 130 filled notebooks, and these were published in a compilation titled "Tagebuch mit Marion" ("Diary with Marion"). In reality what appeared was not so much a diary as cross between a series of essays and literary autobiography. He was encouraged by the publisher Peter Suhrkamp to develop the format, and Suhrkamp provided his own feedback and specific suggestions for improvements. In 1950 Suhrkamp's own newly established publishing house produced a second volume of Frisch's "Tagebuch" covering the period 1946–1949, comprising a mosaic of travelogues, autobiographical musings, essays on political and literary theory and literary sketches, adumbrating many of the themes and sub-currents of his later fictional works. Critical reaction to the new impetus that Frisch's "Tagebücher" was giving to the genre of the "literary diary" was positive: there was a mention of Frisch having found a new way to connect with wider trends in European literature ("Anschluss ans europäische Niveau"). Sales of these works would nevertheless remain modest until the appearance of a new volume in 1958, by which time Frisch had become better known among the general book-buying public on account of his novels.