A novel of identity told through roles, possibilities, and the refusal of a single life story
What the Work Is
A Wilderness of Mirrors is the English title of Max Frisch’s 1964 novel, originally published in German as Mein Name sei Gantenbein. It is a work of prose fiction by the Swiss author writing in German, and it belongs to the sequence of novels — alongside I’m Not Stiller and Homo Faber — in which Frisch pursued his long-running inquiry into personal identity. The book is set in Germany and written in German.
What the Book Is About
The novel opens from a death. A man leaves a social gathering early one night and is shortly afterward found dead in his car, apparently the victim of a heart attack. Because no one truly knows his story, the only thing left is the possibility of imagining it. From this premise the book becomes an exploration of identity, conducted not by settling on a single life but by trying on roles — testing stories and biographies. Its central concern is the search for identity, and it resolves that search not through a definitive answer but through a play of invented selves, of rehearsed lives that no longer claim to resolve the troubled relationship between the individual and the world, or between reality and one’s feeling of it.
Key Ideas and Themes
The book sits at the center of Frisch’s recurring preoccupation with the tension between the image others impose on a person and the person’s own identity. In Frisch’s thinking, a fixed, clichéd image of another human being is a kind of wrong — a reduction of a person to a preformed picture. Against this stands the true self, which is unique and justified from within and needs to be expressed and realized. A life is fulfilled only when an individual is identical to himself; otherwise, as Frisch put it elsewhere, he has never really existed.
A Wilderness of Mirrors belongs to the group of Frisch’s works in which the protagonist seeks liberation from a preformed image by creating new identities — the same impulse that drives the protagonist of I’m Not Stiller. Here, however, the device is pushed further: rather than one man constructing one false name, the novel multiplies possibilities, presenting a small palette of variations within a single book. The result is a story that deliberately refuses to be one story.
The novel also participates in Frisch’s broader treatment of relations between the sexes. His male protagonists tend to be modern intellectual types — egocentric, indecisive, uncertain of their own self-image, and often poor judges of their real situation. When they form deeper attachments, they lose their emotional balance and become unreliable, possessive, or jealous, and their relationships are shadowed by guilt. The women in his fiction tend to function structurally around the male protagonist, and the action in the man–woman relationship usually comes from the woman while the man remains passive, waiting, and reflective. These patterns are part of the fabric of the novel rather than its explicit subject, but they shape how its imagined lives unfold.
Structure and Approach
The book is notable for its method. Frisch rejected the conventional narrative continuum, and in this novel he instead assembled, within a single work, a set of variations and possibilities rather than a single continuous plot. This technique connects to his wider practice: he adapted principles of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre to his prose as well as his drama, using deliberate distancing effects that inhibit easy empathy and sabotage the conventional illusion that the narrated story really happened. In A Wilderness of Mirrors this approach reaches one of its clearest expressions, as the novel offers invented biographies in place of a settled account of a life.
Significance and Influence
The novel stands as a key example of Frisch’s formal experimentation with narrative and identity, extending the concerns of I’m Not Stiller into a structure built on multiplicity rather than a single self. Its refusal of the conventional narrative line, and its presentation of a small palette of variations within one novel, mark it as a distinctive stage in the development of his prose.
The novel was first published in 1964, the year given for Digamos que me llamo Gantenbein in the account of Frisch’s life and works, where it is described as his third novel. A separate catalog entry lists the work’s first publication as 1965, and a structured record gives 1964; the German-language original is dated 1964 in the discussion of Frisch’s rejection of the conventional narrative continuum, which names “the novel of 1964 ‘Gantenbein’ (‘A Wilderness of Mirrors’).”
Place in the Sequence of Novels
The book appeared between Homo Faber (1957) and La cartilla militar (1974). In the enumeration of Frisch’s novels it is the third, following No soy Stiller (1954) and Homo Faber (1957). It was published in the same period as Andorra (1961), his sixth theatrical work, and preceded the play Biografía: Un juego (1967), which extended similar techniques to theatre audiences.
The Author’s Situation at the Time of Writing
Frisch had settled in Rome in 1960, where he lived with Ingeborg Bachmann until 1965. In 1962 he began another relationship, with the 23-year-old student Marianne Oellers, whom he eventually married in 1968. He had separated from his wife in 1958 and had begun his relationship with Bachmann that same year. In 1958 he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, one of the most important awards in German literature, given by the German Academy for Language and Literature.
Relation to the Play Biografía: Un juego
The 1967 play Biografía: Un juego is described as a work in which a person discontented with his own biography is allowed to live his life again according to his own free will; his second “story,” however, ends as the first did. The novel’s technique of presenting variations and possibilities within a single work is thus extended, in the play, to theatrical audiences.
The Author’s Literary Standing and Themes
Frisch is considered one of the foremost representatives of German-language literature after the Second World War. His work pays particular attention to matters related to human problems such as identity, individuality, responsibility, and political and moral commitment. To treat such themes he frequently employed irony. His diaries Tagebuch 1946–1949 (1950) and Tagebuch 1966–1971 (1972) are works of great literary value, gathering both the author’s experiences and his opinions on historical events. His figure served as an influence for generations of younger writers. He was a member of the Gruppe Olten.
The Novel Within the “Image versus Identity” Scheme
Hans Jürg Lüthi divides Frisch’s work into two categories according to how the image is treated. The second category centers on the theme of liberation from the image without a predetermined love, and in it Lüthi places No soy Stiller (1954) and Gantenbein (1964), in which the main protagonists create new identities precisely in order to set aside their preformed clichés. In the first category, by contrast, the protagonist’s fate is to live out the simplistic image — as in Andorra (1961), where Andri, wrongly identified by the other characters as a Jew, is forced to experience the fate others assigned him, and in Homo Faber (1957), where the protagonist is effectively imprisoned by the “ultra-rational” prism of the technician through which he is bound to conduct his existence.
The Underlying Skepticism About Language
A defining element in Frisch was an underlying skepticism regarding the adequacy of language. In No soy Stiller his protagonist cries: “I have no language for my reality!” The author went further in his Diary 1946–49: “What is important: the unsayable, the blank space between the words, while these words themselves we always insert as collateral problems, which as such are not the central part of what we want to say. Our central concern remains unwritten, and that means, literally, that you write around it. You adjust the configurations. You provide statements that can never contain real experience: experience itself remains beyond the reach of language. … and that unsayable reality appears, at best, as a tension between the statements.” Werner Stauffacher saw in Frisch’s language “a language that seeks the indescribable reality of humanity, a language of visualization and exploration,” but which never reveals the underlying secret of reality.
Style and Language
Frisch’s style changed in the various phases of his work. His early works are strongly influenced by the poetic imagery of Albin Zollinger, and not without a certain imitative lyricism, something from which he would later distance himself, dismissing it as “poetic” (“falscher Poetisierung”). His later works employed a stricter, consciously unpretentious style that Frisch described as “generally very colloquial” (“im Allgemeinen sehr gesprochen”). Walter Schenker saw Frisch’s first language as Zurich German, the Swiss German dialect with which he grew up. Standard German, to which he was introduced as a written and literary language, is naturally preferred for his written work, but not without regular appearances of dialectal variations, introduced as a stylistic device.
The Brechtian Inheritance
Frisch adapted the principles of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre for his prose as well as his dramas. As early as 1948 he concluded a contemplative piece on the alienation effect with the observation: “One might be tempted to attribute all these thoughts to the narrative author: the linguistic application of the alienation effect, the deliberately malicious aspect of the prose, the uninhibited art that most German readers will reject because they consider it ‘too artistic’ and because it inhibits empathy and connection, sabotaging the conventional illusion that the narrated story really happened.” Frisch had maintained his first contacts with Brecht and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1947.
The Diaries as a Formal Model
Frisch broadened the possibilities of the diary, using it as a form of expression for facts from the public and private spheres, for the fictional and the autobiographical. It gathers commentary on the social, political, and cultural situation of the moment, travel notes, existential questions, essays on literature, and sketches of later works — for example, the story told in the play Andorra appears in his first diary. In that first diary, Tagebuch 1946–1949, appear the fragment Der Andorranische Jude (1946) and the outline of his dramatic work Andorra. This fragment has sometimes been interpreted as a parable of Switzerland, but it concerns, first of all, the lateralization of the theme of the collective’s prejudices and their destructive effect on the individual. Prejudice has its own dynamic, to which a reaction rarely occurs. It is precisely that posture that propels it and reinforces its harmful consequences. This phenomenon goes beyond the sphere of Swiss society. Already in Stiller (1954) Frisch embedded, within a novel, small sub-narratives in the form of fragmentary episodic sections from his “diaries.” In his later works Frisch went further with a montage technique that produced a literary collage of texts, notes, and visual images in The Holozän (1979).
The Second Diary
In his second diary, Tagebuch 1966–1971 (1972), he bears witness to political events of singular scope: the Prague Spring, the United States’ intervention in the Vietnam War, the military dictatorships in Greece and Chile, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. A key sentence of the Diary 1966–1971, repeated several times, is a quotation from Montaigne: “Thus I dissolve, and lose myself.” The section focuses on the private and social problems of aging. Although political demands are incorporated, the social aspects remain secondary to the central concentration on the self. The fragmentary and hurriedly structured informality of the Diary sustains an underlying melancholic mood.
Death as a Late Theme
Death is a recurring theme in Frisch’s work, but during his early periods it remains in the background, eclipsed by the problems of identity and relationship problems. Only with his later works does death become a central question. Frisch’s second published diary launches the theme.
The Author’s Biography
Max Rudolf Frisch was born in Zurich on 15 May 1911 and died in Zurich on 4 April 1991. He was an architect and a Swiss writer in the German language, dedicated especially to theatre and the novel. He was the son of the architect Franz Bruno Frisch and Karolina Bettina Wildermuth; Max had a brother named Franz and a half-sister, Emma Elisabeth, a daughter his father had from a previous marriage. The Frisches were a modest family. Their financial situation worsened when the father lost his job during the First World War.
During his time at secondary school between 1924 and 1930, Frisch created his first literary fragment, which he destroyed after taking his baccalaureate. At the Gymnasium he met the Swiss painter Werner Coninx. Coninx’s father owned a publishing house, which led them to maintain a great friendship. At 19 he began studying Germanistics in Zurich. At university he became friends with several professors and maintained contacts with various Swiss media outlets. This led him, in 1931, to begin working for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), one of the most important in the country. In 1932 he had to abandon his Germanistics studies because of his father’s death and his family’s financial problems. This made him focus entirely on his journalistic work in order to have a fixed job that would allow him to support his family. Between 1933 and 1936 he worked as a reporter in Europe and the Middle East for the NZZ. In 1935 he travelled for the first time to Germany, where he manifested his opposition to National Socialism and to the antisemitism prevailing in the country. In 1934 he published his first work, Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt.
Between 1936 and 1940 he studied Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Zurich and also Architecture. On the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he did military service as an artilleryman in the Swiss Army. After winning First Prize in the City of Zurich Architecture Prize for the construction of the building covering some swimming pools (today called Max Frisch Bad) in 1942, he opened his own architecture studio. Max Frisch married Gertrud Constanze von Meyenburg in 1942, with whom he had two daughters, Ursula (1943) and Charlotte (1949), as well as a son, Hans Peter (1944).
In 1951, thanks to a Rockefeller scholarship, he spent a year in the United States. In 1954 he separated from his family, closed his architecture office, and began working as a writer. That same year he published his first novel, Stiller. This novel combines elements of the detective novel with autobiographical ones and philosophical ideas. This work earned Frisch great recognition as a writer. In 1955 he went to New York, where he began writing his second novel, Homo Faber, which appeared in 1957. A year later he published Biedermann und die Brandstifter, one of his principal theatrical works.
In 1972 he returned from the United States and settled again in Switzerland. Two years later he published the novel La cartilla militar, and in 1975 the novel Montauk. In 1976 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade during the Frankfurt Book Fair. In 1978 he published his last drama: Tríptico: Tres escenas. A year later he separated from Marianne Oellers and published his penultimate novel: El hombre aparece en el holoceno. At the beginning of the 1980s he received an honorary doctorate from New York University. In 1984 he published his last work, the novel Barba azul.
In March 1989 he was diagnosed with cancer, which ended his life on 3 April 1991 at the age of 79. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered by his friends at a party held in his honour. Frisch left documents and letters at a banking institution with the instruction that they could only be opened 20 years after his death. Despite this, no publication is foreseen.
Other Works of the Period and After
Andorra, his sixth theatrical work, was published in 1961. The main theme of this drama is the presentation of a closed society that can come to transform a person, marginalizing him. It is a means of reflection about National Socialism. In 1964 and 1967 he published, respectively, Digamos que me llamo Gantenbein, his third novel, and the theatrical work Biografía: Un juego.
The Theatrical Works and Their Brechtian Reference
Frisch’s dramatic works were written in the 1950s and 1960s. All of them take Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre as a reference. Among them stand out Graf Öderland (1951/1961) and Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958), where the bourgeoisie is accused of its complicit passivity. Santa Cruz (1946): in the port of Santa Cruz, Pelegrín, a dreamer and adventurer, steals a ship together with a group of pirates to abduct the fiancée of a hussar captain, Elvira, with whom he is madly in love. During the captivity, Elvira and Pelegrín live a passionate love story. The social conditions of the time and the persecution the couple suffers cause their destinies to separate again, back in Santa Cruz. After seventeen years Pelegrín, ill and at the point of death, seeks out Elvira. La muralla china (1946) is a farce consisting of a prologue and 24 scenes; it premiered in 1946 in Zurich. The Chinese emperor Hwang Ti builds a wall to “defend himself from the future.” Disguised with masks, characters from the historical past appear, symbolizing the tyranny of the powerful. The inactivity and lack of participation to which the rulers summon the people, personified in the figure of the mute, are criticized. “The contemporary,” an intellectual and creator, is the character who embodies humanist values and who receives only humiliations when he criticizes the action of power. In 1955 another version was written with some modifications. Cuando terminó la guerra (1949). Don Juan o el amor a la geometría (1953) is a comedy whose main theme is the individual’s resistance to a socially imposed role. In it the protagonist’s rejection of the social role is a play with the tradition of a literary figure. Don Juan refuses to be an amorous hero; he loves the clarity and sobriety of geometry. But this does not change society’s opinion of him. And he himself fails in the almost naive desire to define the world and the meaning of life in a mathematically irrefutable way. Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958), as its subtitle describes it, is a “didactic piece without a lesson” that refers us back to political reality. Herr Biedermann, a citizen of order, takes two vagabonds into his house who soon inform him that they are incendiaries and want to burn the city. Because he lacks the necessary courage to oppose them, and because he likewise believes it will not be very serious if he gives in a little, he himself provides them with everything they need to set fire to the city. Finally, Herr Biedermann too succumbs to the flames. Andorra (1961) is a dramatic work composed of twelve scenes. The sequence of scenes is constructed in the style of a court session. Before the curtain the characters defend themselves for having acted in a certain way and not another; they try to justify themselves each in his own way, and falsify the real events in the attempt. What really happened is shown afterwards in individual scenes on the stage: the young Andri is considered a Jew in the town, in Andorra. The teacher, apparently his adoptive father, in reality his true father, has passed him off as a Jew because he believed he could thus save him from political problems. Everyone sees in the child typically Jewish modes of behaviour, and treats him as a Jew. When the situation changes, and being taken for a Jew becomes dangerous because the country is threatened by antisemites, the teacher confesses the truth. But it is already too late. Andri has internalized the image society had of him. And society is likewise not prepared to change the idea it has of him. As a product of this society, Andri succumbs to the persecution to which Jews are subjected. This work does not deal only with the persecution of the Jews, but with the madness of racial discrimination in general. As Frisch said: “The Andorra of this work has nothing to do with the small State of the same name; Andorra is a name for a model.” Biografía (1967) is a work in which a person discontented with his own biography is allowed to live his life again according to his own free will. However, his second “story” will end like the first. Tríptico: Tres escenas (1978).
The Diaries as Published Works
Blätter aus dem Brotsack (1939). Tagebuch 1946–1949 (1950). Tagebuch 1966–1971 (1972).
The Other Novels
No soy Stiller (1954) narrates the life of a man who identified himself to the customs officers on arriving in Switzerland as the American Jim Larkin White. He is placed in preventive detention by the authorities because he is taken for the disappeared Swiss citizen Anatol Ludwig Stiller, against whom a summons has been issued for espionage. But these external details are anecdotal with respect to the story itself. It narrates Stiller’s internal controversy with himself, with the individual he is and with the one he wanted to be. Stiller had fled from his past and his failures, he had wanted to construct a new identity for himself, which is why he could say of himself before the authorities that he was (no longer) Stiller. In prison he begins to write notes about his life, following the advice of his defence lawyer, to clarify his identity. This first part of the novel, “Stiller’s Notes in Prison,” is the most voluminous. The second, an “Epilogue of the Narrator,” narrates Stiller’s evolution after the verdict. Stiller had finally accepted the verdict of being Stiller, and for the rest of the accusations his innocence had been proven. The phase after the verdict is a narrated repetition of Stiller’s previous life. It ends with Stiller still being the same character, with all his defects and frustrations. He has accepted his historical identity, the story of his life from which he wanted to flee. But he accepts it, compelled by the result of the investigation. And at the moment when he abandons the personality of White, when he accepts that of Stiller, he falls silent as a human being, resigns himself to being continued by a narrator, the third person replaces the first. The work begins with an affirmation “I am not Stiller”; and concludes narratively with “Stiller remained in Glion and lived alone.”
Homo Faber (1957) is a novel whose main theme is the overcoming of a false identity. Its protagonist, the engineer Walter Faber, is a faithful follower of a mathematical and rational vision of reality, sustained by the calculation of probabilities, and sees how chance bursts into his life when he falls in love and begins a relationship on a journey through Europe with the young Sabeth. Thanks to her, Faber learns the importance of the irrational. Before dying of cancer, Faber overcomes his previous vision of the world and finds his authentic self.
La cartilla militar (1974) bears the name of the identity card of the members of the Swiss army. In it he submits his experiences during active service to a critical evaluation, and it is a reinterpretation of the time Frisch had once described in the pages of his Diary: La bolsa de pan, published in 1940. Frisch took a patriotic stance, advocating armed defence, which had as its special theme cooperation between Switzerland and Nazi Germany, the pro-Nazi attitude of certain circles, the mechanisms of army hierarchy, and the economic and social ills of Switzerland. With the book Frisch positioned himself as a critic of the army. In his later work he took up the same theme of a Switzerland without an army.
Montauk (1975) is a story that has an exceptional position in Frisch’s work. While the fictional stories served Frisch to explore the possible behaviour of his protagonists, in Montauk he tells an authentic experience: the weekend he spent with a young woman in Montauk, on the east coast of the United States. The short-term love story is used by Frisch as a retrospective of his own biography. According to Philip Roth, his “life as a man” relates to the women with whom he was associated, and the failure of his relationships. Further reflections apply to the author’s age and his approaching death and the mutual influence of life and work. In addition, the story deals with the appearance of Montauk: in contrast to his previous work, Frisch describes his decision to document the direct experience of this weekend without adding anything. Montauk met with a strongly polarized reception. Frisch’s admirers, faced with the open descriptions of his past, were deceived. Some readers were embarrassed by Frisch’s self-exposure. Other critics acclaimed the story as his most important work and praised the achievement of making a literary masterpiece of his own life. Marcel Reich-Ranicki adopted Montauk into his Canon of German Literature.
El hombre aparece en el holoceno (1979) is a short novel originally published in German in 1979 and in English in The New Yorker on 19 May 1980. A distinctive characteristic of the style of this book is the use of reprinted clippings that the protagonist, Mr. Geiser, removes from various encyclopedias, the Bible, and other books. It contains some autobiographical elements: Frisch at the time of writing was approximately the same age as the protagonist, Mr. Geiser, and Frisch also had a house in the canton of Ticino where the story takes place.
Barba Azul (1982) tells the story of a doctor accused of murdering his ex-wife. It was Frisch’s last novel. Hans Mayer of Die Zeit called Barba Azul: “A beautiful new story, which with Montauk and Holoceno clearly rounds off an epic triptych.” Reinhard Baumgart of Der Spiegel described it as “very taciturn, yes, a quiet book,” and wrote that “In part, the story really speaks the shameful, suggestive, and almost naked language of dreams, of the repression of a very bright and sometimes too weakly illuminated dream.”
The “Image versus Identity” Theme in Full
At the centre of Frisch’s literary work are certain central themes and motifs, many of which repeat, in various forms, throughout the whole range of the author’s production. In the Diary 1946–1949, Frisch spells out a central idea that runs through his later work: “You shall not make a graven image, God instructs us. That should also apply in this sense: God lives in each person, although one may not notice it oneself. That carelessness is a sin we commit and is a sin committed almost incessantly against us, except if we love.” The biblical instruction is taken here to apply to the relationship between people. Only through love can people manifest the mutability and versatility necessary to accept the intrinsic inner potential of others. Without love, people reduce one another, and the whole world, to a series of simple preformed images. Such a cliché-based image constitutes a sin against the self and against the other.
True personal identity contrasts with this simplistic image. For Frisch, each person possesses a unique individualism, justified from within, and which needs to be expressed and realized. To be effective, it can operate only through the life of the individual, or else the individual self will be incomplete. The process of self-acceptance and the subsequent self-realization constitute a liberating act of choice: “The differentiating human value of a person, it seems to me, is the Choice.” The “selection of oneself” does not imply a one-time action, but a continuous truth that the “real self” must recognize and activate repeatedly, behind the simplistic images. The fear that the individual “self” may be overlooked and life thus lost was already a central theme in Frisch’s early works. A failure in the “selection of oneself” would probably result in the alienation of the self from itself and from the world in general. Only within the limited span of an individual human life can personal existence find a fulfilment that can exclude the individual from the infinite immutability of death. In No soy Stiller Frisch establishes a criterion for a full life as “that an individual be identical to himself. Otherwise, he has never really existed.”
Relations Between the Sexes in Full
Claus Reschke says that the male protagonists in Frisch’s works are all similar modern intellectual types: egocentric, indecisive, uncertain regarding their own self-image, often misjudging their real situation. Their interpersonal relationships are superficial to the point of agnosticism, which condemns them to live as isolated loners. If they develop a deeper relationship involving women, they lose their emotional balance, becoming unreliable, possessive, and jealous partners. They repeatedly assume obsolete gender roles, masking sexual insecurity behind chauvinism. Likewise, their relationships with women are shadowed by feelings of guilt. In a relationship with a woman, they seek “real life,” from which they can obtain integrity and self-realization, free of conflicts and paralyzing repetitions, and which will never lose elements of novelty and spontaneity.
The female protagonists in Frisch’s works also lead to a recurring gender-based stereotype, according to Mona Knapp. Frisch’s compositions tend to centre on male protagonists, around whom his principal female characters, virtually interchangeable, fulfil a structural and focused function. They are often idolized as “great” and “wonderful,” superficially emancipated and stronger than the men. In reality, however, they tend to be driven by small motivations: disloyalty, greed, and insensitivity. In the author’s later works, female characters become increasingly one-dimensional, evidencing no internal ambivalence. Often women are reduced to the role of a simple threat to the man’s identity, or the object of some infidelity, thus catalysing the successes or failures of the man’s existence, providing the male protagonist with an object for his own introspection. For the most part, the action in the man/woman relationship in a work by Frisch comes from the woman, while the man remains passive, expectant, and reflective. Superficially, the man loves the woman, but in reality she is feared and despised.
From her feminist perspective, Karin Struck saw that Frisch’s male protagonists manifest a high level of dependence on female characters, but women remain unknown to them. The men are, from the outset, focused on the end of the relationship: they cannot love because they are preoccupied with escaping their own failures and anxieties. They often combine images of femininity with images of death, as in Frisch’s version of the Don Juan legend: “Woman reminds me of death, the more she seems to flourish and thrive.” Each new relationship with a woman, and the subsequent separation, was, for a Frisch male protagonist, analogous to a bodily death: his fear of women corresponded with the fear of death, which meant that his reaction to the relationship was one of flight and shame.
