Alfred Andersch and Max Frisch met one another for the first time in 1957, in the legendary Café Odeon in Zurich. In his role as a radio editor, Andersch asks Frisch, three years his senior, for the most daring and shocking extract possible from his recently completed novel ›Homo Faber‹. Shortly after that, Frisch writes to him for the first time. At the beginning of the sixties, when Frisch is living in Rome with Ingeborg Bachmann after having left his family, their correspondence intensifies. In 1965, Frisch relocates with his new, younger lover Marianne Oellers, his future wife, to Berzona in Ticino, where the Anderschs' owned a house from 1958 onwards. Frisch finds himself in illustrious company: as well as Alfred Andersch, Golo Mann and the designer and typographer Jan Tschichold live in the small mountain village too. They would go hiking together and meet in food stores for a good chat. But the idyll did not last long, for the tensions between the two pugnacious spirits Frisch and Andersch increased until the latter temporarily broke off all contact.

The letters published here for the first time document the unusual and not always easy friendship between Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers: Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The literary world linked Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers inseparably together like a pair of comedians, something by which both authors were sometimes amused but more often irritated. Their common ground was their experience of Switzerland, isolated and spared from conflict between 1939 and 1945, and the guilt which the country incurred during World War II; their preoccupation with and different approaches to Kierkegaard and Brecht; their dissimilar but equally definite criticism of the army and anticommunism; their work at the Zurich Schauspielhaus theatre with the dramaturgist Kurt Hirschfeld whom they both admired. An epilogue by Peter Rüedi, for many years a critic of both authors, points out some connections between the letters, the authors' lives and work, and contemporary history.