Dear Uwe - Dear Mr. Frisch
Rhys Williams considers the correspondence between Max Frisch (1911-1991) and Uwe Johnson (1934-1984), two of the major German-language novelists of the post-war period.

They first met in 1962 in Rome, where Frisch was then living with the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, and Johnson, who had moved to West Germany from the GDR in July 1959, was writer-in-residence at the Villa Massimo. Their correspondence runs from 1964 until Johnson's untimely death in 1984. In addition to the 124 letters - the complete set - this illuminating volume contains Uwe Johnson's detailed comments on Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1966-71 . Frisch, partly to support his impecunious colleague and partly because he trusted Johnson's literary judgement, submitted the manuscript of his diary to Johnson's brutally frank editorial comment. Often Frisch accepts Johnson's sometimes acerbic pedantry; on occasions he disregards the advice. Seldom can a single document have illuminated so vividly the aesthetic and cultural preferences of two such significant writers.

The relationship between Frisch and Johnson was an unequal one. When they first met, Frisch was already an established figure. He had begun his literary career in the 1930s, making his debut as a novelist with Jürg Reinhart (1934) and Die Schwierigen (1943). He was also a highly successful dramatist: his Nun singen sie wieder (1946), Als der Krieg zu Ende war (1949), Don Juan oder die Liebe zur Geometrie (1953) and, above all, Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958) established him as the only Swiss rival to Friedrich Dürrenmatt. But it was the novels, Stiller (1954), Homo faber (1957) and Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964) which had placed him in the first rank of European novelists. Uwe Johnson was by over twenty years his junior, and, despite the relative success of Mutmassungen über Jakob (1959) and Das dritte Buch über Achim (1961), which brought Johnson a cult following, he was finding it difficult to adjust to life in West Germany. Taciturn, complex, almost self-destructively analytical, and constantly embroiled in the vicious in-fighting on the question of German-German relations, he was confronted in Frisch with a successful, wealthy, almost patrician author who seemed comfortably at home in Western Europe and the USA. Throughout the correspondence, Frisch manages to maintain a tone of friendly openness ('Lieber Uwe'). Johnson is more defensive ('Lieber Herr Frisch'), more susceptible to shifts of mood. Yet, as the relationship develops, striking (and wholly unexpected) similarities between the two figures begin to emerge.

The 1970s were a momentous decade for both writers. After the publication of the Tagebuch 1966-1971, Frisch caused something of a literary sensation with his autobiographical fiction Montauk (1975), in which a scarcely veiled account of a weekend spent by the elderly author and a younger female companion on Long Island is interspersed with reflections on previous relationships, with a first wife, with Ingeborg Bachmann and with Marianne (Frisch's then wife). To many readers, Marianne foremost among them, it seemed that Frisch had exploited the privacy of personal relationships for literary gain. Invited by Marianne to offer a fellow-writer's judgement, Uwe Johnson produced in January 1975 a masterly defence, insisting that the text is a valid exploration of the shifting boundary between reticence and revelation. Acknowledging that it might well be interpreted by readers and critics as an indiscretion, Johnson argued that its compositional subtlety raises it to the level of fiction. Marianne, though grateful, remained unconvinced.

The 1970s saw the publication of the first three volumes of Johnson's monumental Jahrestage (1970-1973), for which he was awarded the Büchner prize. The fourth volume did not appear until 1983, but Johnson sought, through his move to England in 1975, to overcome the writer's block from which he was suffering. The move to Sheerness on the Thames estuary had been partly financed by Frisch, and it was as an expression of thanks that Johnson agreed to edit a volume of selected passages from Frisch's œuvre (published as Max Frisch: Stich-Worte), in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Suhrkamp, their publishing house. Johnson embarked on the task with his usual punctiliousness, and was disappointed when his selection proved too long for the projected volume and when Frisch agreed to cuts in his carefully orchestrated composition. Such disagreements were symptomatic.

The greatest irony of a correspondence in which Johnson defends Frisch against the charge of indiscretion emerges only in 1980, with the publication of Johnson's Begleitumstände. In the last pages of the published volume Johnson gives a bitter account of his wife's alleged affair with a Czech agent, which had come to light in 1975 and which, when the news leaked out in 1978, caused Uwe and Elisabeth Johnson to separate. Johnson announced the matter in a desperately laconic letter in August 1978. When he was invited to give the Frankfurt lectures on poetics, Johnson consulted Frisch about the question of making public his private grief; Frisch, with the Montauk experience behind him, advised in favour and Johnson did so. Perhaps it was this cathartic moment that permitted Johnson to complete the fourth and final volume of Jahrestage. If this is the case, then there could be no better legacy of a fascinating relationship.

Rhys W. Williams is Professor of German at the University of Wales, Swansea. (Hogarth, 1992). He has also published translations of contemporary Russian poetry and fiction.

Eberhard Fahlke (Editor): Der Briefwechsel Max Frisch/Uwe Johnson 1964-1983 is published by Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999. 430 pp. ISBN 3 51840 960 3