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Friedrich Durrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 3, Essays

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Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) is unanimously considered, together with Brecht, as the greatest writer of theatrical plays in Germany of the second post-war period. There is, however, an important difference that sets him apart from Brecht and this is despite the fact that Dürrenmatt did study and, in fact, ended up sharing many of Brecht's theories on epic theatre. This difference stems from the unforeseeability and unconventionality of Dürrenmatt's work that contributed, on a par with one of his countrymen, Max Frisch, to a radical renewal of dramaturgy written in Germany and which offered, in a somewhat grotesque way, a disturbing picture of the shabbiness hiding behind the appearance of respectability of the society in which he lived. Frisch, however, was obsessed with questions pertaining to identity, to rationalism, and to relationships between men and women. He was, so to speak, 'a sceptic humanist', an expression he particularly liked to use to define himself. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, while characterised by his sarcastic exuberance that tends to overwhelm his interlocutor through fierce and pitiless taunting, has always a 'Christian foundation', as Frisch himself used to say, or, to be even more precise, a 'Calvinist foundation' because of its eagerness to look for answers to questions about grace and justice and to deliver from the top its judgement about human foolishness through the 'grotesque' that always seems to touch on the excessive but that is, at the same time, very distant from the measure of the other.