Julian Schütt

Julian Schütt is a scholar of literature and biographer of Max Frisch. He earned his doctorate in 1994/95 with the disseration “Germanistik und Politik. Schweizer Literaturwissenschaft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus” He was the chief cultural critic of the Weltwoche Newspaper and the deputy editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine, Du. In 1998, he curated the first comprehensive exhibit on Max Frisch, which appeared in Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Zurich, and edited the accompanying volume Max Frisch: Jetzt ist Sehenszeit (Suhrkamp 1998). In 2011, the first volume of his Frisch biography, Max Frisch. Biographie eines Aufstiegs (Suhrkamp) was published. Schütt currently lives in Zurich, where he works as an author and literary critic.

"A man who finds himself stalked by predjudice" – The friendship between Kurt Hirschfeld and Max Frisch (as well as Friedrich Dürrenmatt)

This paper will attempt a biographical reconstruction of the relationship between Kurt Hirschfeld and the two Swiss literary giants Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. For both, Hirschfeld embodied a theater that arose from the “heightened vigilance of the exiled.”  As Frisch once wrote, it was primarily thanks to Hirschfeld that the Schauspielhaus Zurich became the intellectual home of “those who refuse to let themselves become intoxicated, but rather must know what is really happening in the world and in the texts of the classics.”

Panel – Kurt Hirschfeld after 1945 –