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
Frisch himself took the view that the diary offered the prose format that corresponded with his natural approach to prose writing, something that he could "no more change than the shape of his nose". Attempts were nevertheless made by others to justify Frisch's choice of prose format. Frisch's friend and fellow-writer, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, explained that in "I'm Not Stiller" the "diary-narrative" approach enabled the author to participate as a character in his own novel without embarrassment. (The play focuses on the question of identity, which is a recurring theme in the work of Frisch.) More specifically, in the character of James Larkin White, the American who in reality is indistinguishable from Stiller himself, but who nevertheless vigorously denies being the same man, embodies the author, who in his work cannot fail to identify the character as himself, but is nevertheless required by the literary requirements of the narrative to conceal the fact. Rolf Keiser points out that the diary format enables Frisch most forcefully to demonstrate his familiar theme that thoughts are always based on one specific standpoint and its context; and that it can never be possible to present a comprehensive view of the world, nor even to define a single life, using language alone.