Regardless of which people you mentioned the name Friedrich Dürrenmatt to in the past few days, the reaction was the same for everyone: “I read that at school”. Then one called “The Physicists”, the other “The Tunnel” or “The Breakdown”; The detective novels “The Judge and His Executioner” and “The Suspicion” were also spontaneous, and of course “The Old Lady’s Visit” got the most mentions.
The plays and prose works by the Swiss writer and playwright, who was born 100 years ago in the Emmenthal community of Stalden as the son of a pastor, were part of the literary canon from the sixties to the late eighties; in German-speaking countries they were required reading in high school classes.
But what was also said by all those who had read Dürrenmatt at school: It is outdated and forgotten! Does anyone else read it, does it still have a meaning? In fact, it seems like an eternity ago that the aforementioned titles made Dürrenmatt world famous, his name became as well known on Broadway as it was in the international film business.
Painting and drawing was his second passion
They all date from the 1950s (“Die Physiker” is from 1962), and even in the last decade of his life he had problems getting performances on big stages, he was considered antiquated, and apart from criticism, hardly anyone was interested in his prose .
In retrospect, however, it is not at all easy to get Friedrich Dürrenmatt to fix him as an author or even the founder of a certain literary school, despite his canonization. Walter Jens liked to speak of the fact that like all great writers he had “only one topic”: “How does a pure person assert himself in an eon of chaos, hypocrisy and power”.
But Dürrenmatt’s work is enormously diverse in terms of content and form. It is playful, breaks the genre boundaries, sometimes contains afterwords that follow afterwords, presents many reworked fragments or reflections, is funny or entertaining here, cryptic or philosophical there.
And it is just as committed to the enlightenment as to the constant doubt about the meaning of all existence, which the early Dürrenmatt often accused of being a nihilist.
For Dürrenmatt, writing always meant “a form of fighting”. “I mess around with theater, radio, novels and television”, he wrote in a note in 1957: “How painting was viewed as a craft in the village artist’s studio, as fiddling with brushes, charcoal and pen, etc. Today, writing has become a preoccupation with and experimentation with different materials. ”
He called his fabrics “transformed impressions”
After growing up in the village and later in Bern, the young Dürrenmatt, who also flirted with the Nazis for a short time, realized early on that he would either be a painter or a writer. He paints biblical motifs and doom scenarios as if obsessed.
He then began to write pieces, while studying philosophy in Bern he worked on stories like “Die Stadt” or “Der Hund” and finally caused a veritable scandal in 1947 with his Anabaptist play “It is written” at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Afterwards there was talk of a “dramaturgical rampage”, of the “intoxication of a puberty dramatist gone wild”.
As a result, Dürrenmatt continues to write plays, for example the comedy “Romulus the Great”, but also earns his living with commissioned works such as radio plays or those famous crime novels that appear in sequels in “Schweizerischer Beobachter”.
His breakthrough in Germany, an unavoidable must for every Swiss author, finally came in 1952 at the Münchner Kammerspiele with the “Marriage of Mr. Mississippi”, also a comedy exaggerated into the grotesque full of passion, madness and crime.
He had found his fabrics, which he called “transformed impressions”. As a “whole man”, he wrote in 1967, referring to his village youth and childhood experiences, “everything is connected because everything is related, everything can become so important, decisive, mostly afterwards, unexpectedly.”
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Dürrenmatt initially believed that he could explain and shake the world structure primarily with profound comedies, nonetheless “uncomfortable pieces”, as he called them. Or when he wrote prose, including the detective novel. His commissioner Bärlach is reminiscent of Simenon’s Maigret (and even more so, by the way, of the late, heavyweight, thoroughly calm Dürrenmatt).
But his thrillers, especially “The Judge and His Executioner” and “The Suspicion” are also parodies of the genre. Many of the dialogues in it have a philosophical character, and the characters argue about law and justice, guilt and morality.
If you read Dürrenmatt’s novels again today, you will notice how clear, sober and well written they are, how powerful this prose is. Yes, and how much Dürrenmatt was a writer and explicitly not a poet, what he once made a precise distinction for himself. There is also a lot of pop and contemporary music in it.
If, for example, the gas station, the most important location of this novel, and the billboards hung there are described in detail in “Das Versupt”: “Drinks Canada Dry”, “Lindt milk chocolate” or “Pneu Pirelli” is written on it.
Or when Dürrenmatt in the story “Die Panne” enumerates with relish food and especially wines from Château Margaux from 1914 to Château Pavie from 1921 to Pichon-Longueville from 1933.
Dürrenmatt’s characters are utterly theatrical
Which in the latter case was due to the fact that Dürrenmatt not only loved big cars (but could not drive well), but was especially a great wine connoisseur and wine drinker. In the late seventies, when his health was only just so tolerable, he loved to wander down from his house high up in Neuchâtel to the restaurant of his friend Hans Liechti, with six bottles of wine from his own wine cellar in his trouser and coat pockets and in both hands to drink with Liechti.
Of course, plays, stories and novels that have become so successful by Dürrenmatt also have something mechanical, obvious, and textbook-like.
His characters are utterly theatrical, be it the eccentric billionaire Claire Zachanassian, who returns to her gloomy and sad home village in “The Old Lady’s Visit” and takes revenge on her fellow citizens who once drove her away.
Be it the staid, simple-minded textile traveler Alfredo Traps, who is tried in the “glitch” by the aged four-person amateur court and demonstrated that he could well be a murderer (and who then, having become insightful and clever, hangs himself – although he does everything was just a game).
The American writer Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that Dürrenmatt’s stories were “pretty and strange Swiss watches”, and that they had no secrets or weaknesses: “The refined, glittering structures can be admired in glass cases, and they let small dolls depict twitching, human scenes Love and greed and stupidity and murder and politics and hope. The puppets are clearly puppets and do what the machine intended them to do. There is only one human soul to marvel at – that of the inventor. “
In 1974 he wrote an essay on Israel
Seen through this way, Dürrenmatt became quieter and more crisis-ridden from the 1970s onwards. At this point in time he was already a legend, but his new works were no longer received as extensively as before or even caused a stir again. From the beginning of his “writing” he stood idiosyncratically across the German-speaking literature business (unlike his great Swiss rival Max Frisch, who was a Suhrkamp author and also a textbook playwright).
And across society and politics in his home country anyway, that’s just right for a Swiss author.
The work of the late Dürrenmatt then became increasingly political, essayistic, and philosophical. In 1974 he accepted an invitation to Israel to give lectures. After his experiences in the country, he began to rewrite them on site, which ultimately resulted in his great Israel essay, which was hardly sold as a book.
Still to be discovered: the so-called fabrics
This text still reads fairly fresh, almost up-to-date, it is free from ideological submissions, from a schematic right-left thinking. With his pro-Israel stance, Dürrenmatt did not make any new friends with his colleagues who were consistently critical of Israel.
At the same time he began to work on his large-scale “fabrics” project at that time. His focus should be his early biographical experiences, which had previously found little acceptance in his work.
As a result, he was barely able to control the “material”, it got out of hand because Dürrenmatt kept adding new fragments, abandoned writings or essayistic passages to them. In 1981 the first three parts appeared under the title “Labyrinth”, shortly before Dürrenmatt’s death on December 14, 1990, six more followed with “Turmbau”.
Ulrich Weber, the curator of the Dürrenmatt estate, refers in his recently published biography worth reading (Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 2020, 715 pp., € 28.) on how present Dürrenmatt is still on the German and international stages with his pieces, how he has “permanently established himself in the extended reading canon”. But the late Dürrenmatt should be much more interesting, much more worth discovering; the author of the really wild novel “Durcheinandertal”, the Israel essay and precisely those “substances” that ultimately formally anticipated what is now commonplace in literature.
