Ignoranz als Staatsschutz?

In his last typescript, Max Frisch processed in a very personal way and in a literary form typical of him the scandal that shook Switzerland in 1989/1990: Almost a million residents had been monitored by the Swiss state security during the Cold War. The Federal Prosecutor's Office had produced its own chronicle of suspicions on individually designed index cards or "files," the grotesquely banal nature of which only intensified the scandal. Frisch's work on his own file took place in 1990, in the lead-up to the controversial 700th anniversary celebration of the Swiss Confederation. Almost half a century after "Stiller," Frisch felt compelled to revisit the question of the relationship between life stories and identity. He tackled the flotsam of the analog surveillance apparatus with scissors, a stapler, and a typewriter. The resulting collage.