freedom and fulfillment, along with communication of the living and the dead. Volker Hage pointed out the vague guilt with which the hero is left at the end, concerning which no legal process can pronounce a verdict, which is a theme that would return in Bluebeard (1982), Frisch's last novel. Urs Bircher saw "Jürg Reinhart" as the beginning of a long line of more or less fictitious "me-stories" which Frisch would write. Reception Frisch's first-born novel was positively received by contemporary critics, almost without exception providing him with adulatory publicity and setting him above other young Swiss writers of the time. In Germany, too, Frisch's work was well received, with such criticism as there was in the newspapers reserved for the Swiss resonances in the use of the German language. Leonhard Beriger missed the "lively intellectual interplay" (den „lebendigen geistigen Austausch“) such as was provided by Jakob Schaffner (a Swiss novelist sympathetic to the political ideology of Germany in the Nazi period). According to Alexander Stephan, the German critics praised "Jürg Reinhart", above all, because of its brilliantly clear commitment to the "Great deed". Hellmut Schlien, writing in Die Literatur in 1934, thought that the novel showed very great promise, and gave its youthful author what he called "an honest word of encouragement along the way" („ein ehrliches Wort der Aufmunterung mit auf den Weg“). For Schlien the novel exemplified the way that modern literature, by the device of exaggerated psychological dissection within a novel, was returning to a form of archaic epic rendering. He commended "the style and manner of the presentation ...[as]... exceptionally fresh". "The prose, if still somewhat untempered and impetuous, captures with striking immediacy the personalities, their relationships and experiences. Here there are already signs of real style, with a certain pleasing care-free quality, and a strong accompanying nervous tension in the narrative". In the author's Swiss homeland, too, critical reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Writing in Der Bund, Hugo Marti found "the young Parzival from Zürich" excessively garrulous, but the encounter was nevertheless essentially characterized by sympathy and empathy. Robert Faesi, who had himself taught Frisch at Zurich University, published a supportive review of "Jürg Reinhart" in the Basler Zeitung, and the newspaper nominated Max Frisch as a "Travel talker" ("Reiseplauderer"). Characteristically harder to impress was , the long-standing literary editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) (for which Frisch himself wrote regularly) who refused to