On 21 April 2022, the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung and the Max Frisch Foundation opened their joint exhibition, “Why Utopia? Max Frisch and Helmut Schmidt”.
Frisch accompanied the Chancellor on the first state visit by a German head of government to China in 1975, accepted an invitation to the SPD Federal Party Conference in Hamburg in 1977, and he was part of a group of intellectuals with whom Schmidt debated the causes of terrorism during the “German Autumn”. Both figures epitomise the complex relationship between intellectuals and politicians. The exhibition documents the relationship between Helmut Schmidt and Max Frisch through photographs, historical audio recordings and films, as well as personal documents.
In the atrium of the “Carl von Ossietzky” State and University Library in Hamburg, Dr Meik Woyke (Chairman of the Board and Managing Director of the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung) and Prof. Dr Thomas Strässle (Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Max Frisch Foundation). Following this, the writer Nora Bossong and Hamburg’s Senator for Culture and author Dr Carsten Brosda discussed the relationship between art and literature on the one hand, and politics on the other. The discussion was moderated by NDR presenter Jan Ehlert. Drawing on the encounters between Helmut Schmidt and Max Frisch, our panellists explored how much utopia politics needs and how politics and literature not only enrich but also complement one another.
We streamed the panel discussion live, and you can watch the recording here:
Watch the recording (in German)
The Max Frisch Archive is an independent academic institution of the Max Frisch Foundation, based at the ETH Library in Zurich. It manages and supplements the estate of the Swiss writer and ETH graduate Max Frisch. The collection is available for academic, journalistic and artistic research.