Max Frisch - Constellations and Perspectives. International conference from June 9 to 11, 2011 in Dresden.
TUD Dresden University of Technology, Institute for German Studies
Max Frisch is a well-known author of contemporary German literature. The 'commemorative year' 2011 on the occasion of his 100th birthday in particular has brought new book publications and a wide range of activities. However, the purposeful contextualization of Max Frisch's work, as a transition from contemporary fame to historical understanding in time, is still a desideratum 20 years after his death.
Max Frisch © Deutsche Fotothek
The international conference Max Frisch - Perspectives and Constellations aims to collect approaches that fill this desideratum by focusing on new developments and drafts in research on Max Frisch's work. The aim is to free Frisch's work from the isolation of meanwhile quite stabilized interpretative routines and to gain new insights from new constellations.
Based on materials that have been made available in recent years by the Max Frisch Archive at the ETH Zurich, the lectures will on the one hand make clear the genesis of Frisch's work, and on the other hand also allow the specifics of a Swiss context to be determined more precisely, which has led to Frisch being claimed as an icon of critical contemporary Swiss literature in recent years. In addition, the integration of Frisch into the so-called 'Suhrkamp culture' in the 1960s and its significance for Frisch's work will be examined. Further lectures will use theme-centered approaches - such as the religious symbolism that pervades Frisch's entire oeuvre, the leitmotif of judgment and the images of Rome and Italy - to present new perspectives on Frisch's writing.
Further lectures will be devoted to complexes that have so far received little attention: On the one hand, that which addresses the question of the connection between Frisch's work politics and the filming of his works, and on the other, his impact in the so-called literature of migration, which is evident not only through Frisch's essays Überfremdung 1 / 2, with which he had quite significantly promoted the self-understanding as well as the recognition of the literature of migrants, but also through the references to Frisch by so-called 'migration writers'. In addition, lectures on Frisch's reception in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the 'Wende' will shed light on another aspect of the impact of Frisch's work that has received little attention.
By looking at different media and perspectives on knowledge, at new constellations that once again make the dialogical nature of Max Frisch's oeuvre tangible, and finally also through dense descriptions of his texts in their contexts as a whole, the aim is to provide impulses for a new engagement with Max Frisch - the author and his work - in the year of commemoration. The contributions to the conference can - and should - serve as examples for further analogous questions, which will come together to form a new overall picture of the author Max Frisch in his literary epoch from 1945 to 1989, which is already our past present.
The conference is open to the public. Interested students and doctoral candidates are expressly invited. The conference fee is 20 euros. Please register by 15.05.2011 at: .
We look forward to seeing you there!
Program[print version]
[Site plan]
THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 2011, 7:00 p.m., Turmcafé, Technische Sammlungen Dresden
Walter Schmitz: Welcome and opening
Klaus Schuhmacher: Max - the monster
Walter Schmitz: Frisch - the classic
Friday, June 10, 2011 (Dülfersaal, TU Dresden)
9:00 - Ursula Amrein: Max Frisch and the formation of post-war modernism in Zurich
9:30 - Walter Obschlager: Max Frisch's Holocene narrative in the field of tension between nature and culture
10:00 - Claude D. Conter: From Öderland to the Swiss Soviet Republic:
(In)freedom (in) Switzerland - Max Frisch and Christian Kracht
10:30 - Discussion
11:00 - Alexandra Pontzen: Max Frisch and the Suhrkamp culture
11:30 - Klaus Schuhmacher: The architect as author
12:00 - Daniel de Vin: With Frisch in court
12:30 - Discussion
14:00 - Bettina Gruber: Religion without faith. On the motifs of paradox in the work of Max Frisch
14:30 - Yahya Elsaghe: Adultery out of tuberculosis. Fear of infection and its end in Max Frisch's novels
15:00 - Melanie Rohner: Criticism of imperialism in the 'white man'? Max Frisch's 'Homo faber' from a postcolonial perspective
15:30 - Olaf Berwald: Intertextual constellations in the work of Max Frisch and Peter Weiss
16:00 - Discussion
19:00, Museum Café, Landhaus (Stadtmuseum Dresden, Landhaus)
Michael Wüstefeld: Max Frisch readings in the GDR. Writerly reflections from the Dresden Elbe Valley
Francesco Micieli: Max Frisch and the migrants
Saturday, June 11, 2011 (Gerberbau, Room 37/H, TU Dresden)
9:00 - Walter Schmitz: Biography - not a game.
Life Variations in Stage Plays by Max Frisch and Jagoda Marinič and in the Film "The Butterfly Effect" by Eric Bress and J. Mackye
9:30 - Klaus Schenk: Writing oneself. On fiction and autofiction in Max Frisch
10:00 - Ruth Vogel-Klein: 'Drafts for a third diary': 'Fortschreibung' and text genesis
10:30 - Discussion
11:00 - Hilde Bechert: Max Frisch: Zurich Transit - a film experience
11:30 - Annette Teufel/Jutta Müller: The Evidence of Images and The Alterity of the Self. Cinematic approaches to Max Frisch
12:00 - Agnieszka Narloch: Max Frisch - translated. 'Western modernism' in the Polish discourse
12:30 - Discussion
14:30 - Vesna Kondrič Horvat: Max Frisch in the field of tension of the transcultural paradigm
15:00 - Jürgen Schröder: "Without resistance - no hope". Literary models of resistance after 1945
15:30 - Final discussion
16:30 - Workshop for interested parties: Literature of migration and Max Frisch