seen from the subtitles used in the books as published. In 1944 Gustav Kilpper, DVA's general director confessed the "beneath all the monstrosities and horrors of daily life, the people and events about which you write, bring us back to the private and fundamentally unimportant". Interpretations Genre Most reviewers categorize "Jürg Reinhart" as a Bildungsroman, a training novel or a . The core theme is the development of Jürg Reinhart, even though the novel often switches away from that perspective, especially in the central section where the writer concentrates on Inge's death rather than on the development of Jürg, and although the plot, unusually for this genre, takes place over only a few months. Volker Weidermann, however, spoke of the book as being at one and the same time both a work of literature and a colportage novel (i.e. a work of pulp fiction). Urs Bircher highlights the "sentimental journey" elements of this "travel novel", but he too detected some aspects and structures more reminiscent of "trivial writing" ("Trivialliteratur"). Jürg Reinhart, the lead protagonist Urs Bircher describes the protagonist as a sort of "Swiss Parsifal" dressed in the white-red combination of his national flag. His name "Reinhart" symbolises the fact that at the beginning he is still clearly "clean" of sexual experience and this is reinforced by the determination he displays in defending his sexual "purity" at least in the first part of the novel. For Volker Weidermann, too, the novel's focus is on the "pure hero who tries to guard his purity in a dark world". Frisch supports this interpretation with various cliché visions of a woman seeking to seduce the pure young man away from the path of virtue. For Walter Schmitz the "innocent fool" Reinhart carries a "Neo-romantic vagabond soul" and is the "embodiment of the healthy youth". The contrast created in the novel is between Jürg Reinhart and Robert von Reisner who embodies casual loveless sexuality and carnal irresponsibility. That contrast is played out in the differing experiences of Hilde with each of the two young men. For Walburg Schwenke the novel, in common with all Max Frisch's early work, is in the first instance a presentation of the fundamental existential conflict between the bourgeois life and the artistic existence. Frisch's alter ego, the protagonist Jürg Reinhart, is the social outsider. He remains incapable of handling his relations the baroness or Hilde. Whereas he is inept