The Paradox of the Parable Play: When the War Was Over and Count Oederland

Abstract

The particular tension characteristic of Max Frisch’s work, whether in the theatre or in narrative fiction, is rooted in a persistent sense of paradox: on the one hand, he is a moralist in the tradition of the Enlightenment with a profound concern for the uniqueness and worth of the individual; on the other, he is heir to that specific twentieth-century experience of crisis which is most clearly marked by the collapse of confidence in the central tenet of the Enlightenment, namely that reason and language, its concrete form, can both grasp and adequately express individual experience in a given social reality. In the immediate post-war period the problem was intensified by an even more serious loss of confidence in culture itself, which Frisch was one of the first to delineate, as we have seen. Culture, Frisch was aware, offered no guarantee against, and certainly no alibi for, social or individual disintegration.¹ Indeed, in so far as it had lost contact with any political dimension it had declined into an empty aestheticism. If after the Nazi Holocaust culture had perforce become an extremely questionable concept, so too the traditional claim of the ‘Dichter’ to a special educative role was seen as equally unconvincing. Frisch thus found himself in the paradoxical position of fighting against a perverted humanism in the name of humanism, whilst at the same time he felt deeply uncertain of his function as a critical writer and intellectual.