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Publishers are used to suffering.

They make an effort to please their authors - until they accuse them, like Tucholsky once, of “drinking on velvet” while swallowing “thin beer on hard benches” yourself.

Publisher Siegfried Unseld moved on this ice with great certainty for decades.

In 1959, when he was in his mid-thirties, he took over the Suhrkamp Verlag and immediately set about showing the world that he was up to the task.

He works obsessively.

His workload is immense, must be immense in order to do justice to the star and great authors in his house.

Anyone who reads Unseld's correspondence with Thomas Bernhard or Peter Handke, for example, quickly takes the publisher's side.

Because these two did not miss an opportunity to harass their publisher and constantly accuse him of disregard or fraud.

Handke and Unseld: You take the publisher's side

Source: publisher

If you consider that Unseld also has to take care of the no less care-intensive Uwe Johnson, Hans Magnus Enzensberger or Martin Walser during the same period of time, it is clear that his working days are walks on the razor blade.

Max Frisch is also one of these divas.

His 60th birthday is due on May 15, 1971 - an occasion that his publisher wants and must celebrate with dignity.

Together with his colleague Helene Ritzerfeld, he goes to New York, where Frisch lives with his second wife Marianne, to pay tribute to the jubilee and at the same time maintain contacts with agencies and publishers

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He arrives in Manhattan on May 14th.

He doesn't have time to get used to jetlag.

Frisch's birthday has priority, so he invites him to Sardi's restaurant between Broadway and Eighth Avenue for lunch.

In the evening, a Swiss architect couple will host a dinner.

There is a lot of business to discuss with Frisch, and so you have frequent contact in the following days.

Frisch is dissatisfied with its presence in the American market.

His plays hardly get a response, and no publisher wants to warm to his diaries.

A right not to be humiliated

At a lunch on May 19, the tense atmosphere discharges, as Unseld records in his legendary “travel reports”.

Outraged, Frisch explains that his publisher virtually ignored his birthday.

He came to New York with “empty hands”, chose a measly restaurant, gave a poor speech and did not consider it necessary to bring him an adequate present.

Peter von Matt, Max Frisch, Siegfried Unseld and Günther Pflug, the former general director of the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt

Source: Picture-Alliance / KEYSTONE

All contradiction is useless, even the reference to the stately travel expenses is not fruitful.

Frisch needs barely twenty minutes to let his anger run free.

The attempts of the perplexed and personally hit publisher to repair the relationship in the next few days were unsuccessful.

With a bang, you get behind a reception that the publisher gives for its author the next day (and which, as Unseld emphasizes, costs 4,000 DM alone) behind you.

May 19th remains a key experience for Unseld.

He gives up his conviction that “there can be friendship in the relationship between author and publisher”.

Frisch's audacity makes him, the hypervital, even generally doubt what he is doing - touching considerations that allow you to look deep inside: “The New York lunch overshadowed everything.

It hit me in such a way that for the first time in my life I felt resignation.

Thought of throwing in the towel.

I also have a right not to want to be humiliated. "