Frisch's "Stiller": Clip #2


Here we must go back a little. Stiller, as we know, took part in the Spanish Civil War, while still a very young man, as a volunteer in the International Brigade. It is not clear what impelled him to this militant gesture. Probably many factors were combined—a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time, also an understandable desire to see the world, a desire to subordinate his personal interests to some higher historical force, a desire for action; perhaps too, at least in part, it was flight from himself.

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