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Next to Max Frisch one of the authors I wish to recommend for young readers and Teachers and Learners of the German Language and Culture.

Inspector Bärlach, dying of cancer and with only a year to live, investigates the murder of his colleague Schmied in a rural area near Bern. The case leads to the wealthy industrialist Gastmann, whom Bärlach has suspected of numerous crimes for forty years but never been able to prove guilty. The investigation reveals that Schmied was actually working undercover on Bärlach’s orders to gather evidence against Gastmann. The ambitious young Lieutenant Tschanz becomes Bärlach’s assistant, but the dying inspector gradually realizes that Tschanz himself murdered Schmied out of jealousy over a woman. Rather than arrest Tschanz through conventional means, Bärlach manipulates him into killing Gastmann, then allows Tschanz to believe he’s gotten away with both murders – only to have him arrested at the novel’s end. The title’s meaning crystallizes: Tschanz becomes Bärlach’s “hangman,” the instrument of justice against Gastmann, even as he himself is guilty.

Why It’s So Masterfully Written

Dürrenmatt achieves something quite extraordinary here – he’s written what appears to be a detective novel but is actually a profound meditation on justice, morality, and human nature. The crime plot becomes a vehicle for philosophical inquiry in the best Swiss tradition of skeptical humanism.

The narrative structure is deceptively simple yet brilliantly constructed. Dürrenmatt inverts the genre conventions: we learn the “solution” midway through, yet this doesn’t diminish tension – it intensifies it, because the real question isn’t whodunit but rather what Bärlach will do with his knowledge. This shift from epistemological to moral tension is masterful.

The characterization of Bärlach is exceptional. He’s dying, methodical, morally compromised, and utterly fascinating. He represents a kind of Old Testament justice – using evil to punish evil – which Dürrenmatt presents without endorsement but with deep understanding. Bärlach’s forty-year obsession with Gastmann, rooted in a philosophical wager about whether perfect crimes are possible, elevates the novel beyond mere crime fiction into existential territory.

The prose style is wonderfully spare and precise – very Swiss German in its economy. Dürrenmatt wastes nothing, yet the dialogue crackles with intelligence and the descriptions of the Swiss landscape carry weight. That scene in Lamboing, with its fog and isolation, perfectly mirrors the moral murk of the story.

What makes it particularly powerful is Dürrenmatt’s refusal of easy morality. Bärlach isn’t a hero – he’s a dying man settling scores through manipulation and expedient justice. Tschanz isn’t simply a villain – he’s ambitious, capable, and tragically used. Even Gastmann, the apparent villain, has a certain philosophical integrity. The novel asks uncomfortable questions about whether justice served through unjust means is justice at all.

For classroom use it’s a perfect example of narration: accessible enough for younger readers, sophisticated enough to reward deep analysis, and rooted in distinctly Swiss-German concerns about order, justice, and the relationship between individual morality and social law.

One of my recommendations or must read …

Drama:

Die Physiker.

An Essay on Max Frisch and Friedrich Duerrenmatt and what remains

The Two Moralists of Doubt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch as Arbiters of Post-War Conscience

An Essay on Swiss-German Literary Legacy

When the German-speaking world emerged from the catastrophe of 1945, its literary landscape required not merely reconstruction but fundamental reimagining. The language itself seemed compromised, tainted by twelve years of totalitarian debasement. Into this void stepped two Swiss writers who, by accident of geography and the peculiar moral position of Swiss neutrality, could address German-speaking audiences with both intimacy and critical distance. Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch became the conscience of a civilization forced to reckon with its own capacity for barbarism, and in doing so, they established themselves as the most significant German-language dramatists and prose writers of the second half of the twentieth century after Bert Brecht.

Their legacy extends far beyond literary achievement. Dürrenmatt and Frisch represent a particular mode of intellectual engagement with modernity’s failures—skeptical without being cynical, morally urgent without being didactic, experimental in form while remaining committed to communication with audiences. They wrote in German but from Switzerland, a position that proved both productive and problematic, granting them moral authority while also marking them as perpetual outsiders to the German and Austrian literary establishments they profoundly influenced. Understanding their work requires grasping this paradoxical relationship to German culture: they were simultaneously its most incisive critics and its most committed inheritors.

The Swiss Condition: Writing from the Margins

Switzerland’s peculiar position during the Second World War—armed neutrality that preserved democracy and civil society while surrounded by fascist powers—created what the literary scholar Peter von Matt has called “the bad conscience of survival.” Both Dürrenmatt and Frisch came of age during the war years without experiencing the direct trauma of combat, occupation, or concentration camps that marked their German contemporaries. This created a specific moral dilemma: how to address the catastrophe of European civilization from a position of relative safety and material prosperity? How to speak to German suffering and guilt without having shared it directly?

Dürrenmatt, born in 1921 in Konolfingen near Bern, was the son of a Protestant minister. His father’s theological vocation and the Calvinist tradition’s emphasis on human depravity and divine inscrutableness profoundly shaped his dramatic vision. Frisch, born a decade earlier in 1911 in Zurich, came from a more secular, bourgeois background and trained as an architect before turning to writing. These biographical differences matter: Dürrenmatt’s work is shot through with theological concerns about guilt, justice, and the hiddenness of God, while Frisch’s preoccupations center on identity, authenticity, and the social construction of self.

Yet both shared what might be called the Swiss dilemma of belatedness. They had not fought in the war, had not resisted fascism directly, had not endured bombing or occupation. This positioned them as observers rather than participants in the central trauma of their generation. Rather than disclaiming authority, they transformed this marginal position into a source of critical perspective. Swiss neutrality became not merely political fact but epistemological stance—a commitment to questioning all certainties, to viewing human affairs with skeptical detachment, to refusing the comforts of ideology or nationalism.

Dürrenmatt’s Grotesque Universe: Comedy as Moral Vision

Dürrenmatt’s mature aesthetic rests on a paradox: he insisted that tragedy was no longer possible in the modern world, yet his plays and prose works are saturated with tragic material. His famous essay “Theaterprobleme” (1955) argues that genuine tragedy requires a coherent moral universe where individual action carries metaphysical weight. In the bureaucratized, technologically mediated world of the twentieth century, Dürrenmatt contended, responsibility becomes diffused, agency uncertain, and the tragic hero’s meaningful confrontation with fate impossible. What remains available is comedy, or more precisely, the grotesque—a mode that exposes the absurdity of modern existence without offering the consolations of either tragic nobility or comic resolution.

This theoretical position animated his greatest dramatic works. “Der Besuch der alten Dame” (The Visit, 1956) presents a Swiss town systematically corrupted by wealth, its citizens progressively abandoning moral principle for material comfort. The play’s protagonist, Claire Zachanassian, returns to her impoverished hometown offering a billion marks in exchange for the murder of the man who wronged her decades earlier. What unfolds is not melodrama but systematic moral disintegration rendered in grotesque-comic form. The townspeople’s elaborate rationalizations, their progressive degradation disguised as moral improvement, their ultimate collective murder presented as justice—all this Dürrenmatt stages with surgical precision and dark wit. The play refuses catharsis precisely because it implicates the audience in the very corruption it depicts. We watch ordinary people become murderers through incremental compromise, and recognize the process as utterly plausible, even familiar.

“Die Physiker” (The Physicists, 1962) takes this method to its logical extreme. Three physicists—one claiming to be Newton, one Einstein, one the historical Möbius—are confined to a mental institution. Each is pretending madness for different reasons: two are spies from rival superpowers, the third genuinely trying to protect his revolutionary scientific discoveries from military exploitation by feigning insanity. The play’s central paradox crystallizes in Möbius’s desperate claim: “What has once been thought cannot be unthought.” Scientific knowledge, once created, cannot be unmade; the physicist bears responsibility for consequences he cannot control. The play’s devastating conclusion reveals that the asylum’s director, the only genuinely insane character, has stolen Möbius’s manuscripts and plans to use them for world domination. The physicists’ careful ethical calculations prove futile. Madness wins not because reason fails but because instrumental rationality—the logic that created nuclear weapons—is itself a form of insanity.

Dürrenmatt’s prose fiction extends these concerns into narrative form. “Der Richter und sein Henker” (The Judge and His Hangman, 1950) and its sequel “Der Verdacht” (Suspicion, 1951) feature Inspector Bärlach, a dying detective who manipulates younger colleagues to execute justice his official position cannot deliver. The novels are superficially crime fiction but function as parables about justice, revenge, and the impossibility of moral purity. Bärlach uses a murderer to kill another murderer, compromising himself to achieve an outcome the law cannot provide. The question Dürrenmatt poses is whether justice served through unjust means remains justice, or whether the very attempt to impose moral order inevitably corrupts the one attempting to impose it.

The theological dimension of Dürrenmatt’s work distinguishes him from other absurdist writers of his generation. Unlike Beckett or Ionesco, who present a godless universe of pure contingency, Dürrenmatt’s cosmos is one where God exists but remains radically hidden. His intellectual heritage includes not just Brecht and expressionist theater but also the Protestant theologian Karl Barth, whose emphasis on divine transcendence and human incapacity to comprehend God’s purposes shadows Dürrenmatt’s dramatic universe. The grotesque, for Dürrenmatt, becomes almost a theological category—a way of acknowledging the radical disproportion between human understanding and divine reality, between our moral aspirations and the actual state of the world.

Frisch’s Architecture of Identity: The Self as Construction

Where Dürrenmatt’s preoccupations are theological and moral, Frisch’s are existential and psychological. His central obsession across five decades of writing was the problem of identity: how selves are constructed, how they become trapped in social roles and others’ expectations, how authentic selfhood might be achieved or whether such a thing even exists. This concern animates his major novels—“Stiller” (I’m Not Stiller, 1954), “Homo Faber” (1957), “Mein Name sei Gantenbein” (A Wilderness of Mirrors, 1964)—and his dramatic works, particularly “Andorra” (1961) and “Biedermann und die Brandstifter” (The Fire Raisers, 1958).

“Stiller” remains Frisch’s most sustained exploration of identity’s malleability. The protagonist, Anatol Stiller, returns to Switzerland after years abroad and claims not to be Stiller, insisting he is an American named White. The novel’s first line—“I’m not Stiller!”—establishes the fundamental problem: can one escape the identity others have assigned? The narrative unfolds as prison diary entries in which “White” recounts his non-Stiller life while authorities compile evidence proving he is indeed Stiller. What begins as existential comedy darkens as the novel reveals Stiller’s profound alienation from himself, his inability to inhabit the life others expect him to live, his desperate attempt to achieve authentic existence by rejecting his previous self. The novel’s conclusion is ambiguous: Stiller accepts his legal identity but achieves no genuine reconciliation with himself. The self, Frisch suggests, is less something we discover than something imposed by social recognition and legal documentation.

“Homo Faber” approaches these concerns through the figure of Walter Faber, a UNESCO engineer whose rationalist worldview systematically blinds him to emotional and existential realities. Faber embodies a particular type of modern consciousness—technically competent, emotionally stunted, convinced that probability theory can substitute for genuine engagement with contingency and mortality. The novel traces his gradual, catastrophic confrontation with everything his rationalism has excluded: love, death, the incestuous encounter with his own daughter that results from his refusal to acknowledge the past. Frisch presents Faber neither as villain nor victim but as representative modern man, trapped in a form of consciousness that the Enlightenment promised would liberate but which actually imprisons.

“Andorra” stages the problem of identity as political parable. Andri, raised as a Jew in the fictional country of Andorra (clearly meant to evoke Switzerland), eventually discovers he is not actually Jewish but the illegitimate son of a teacher who claimed he was an adopted Jewish refugee to hide his own shame. By this point, however, Andri has internalized the anti-Semitic stereotypes his community projected onto him. When a neighboring fascist power invades and begins liquidating Jews, Andri accepts his assigned identity and goes to his death, even after learning the truth. The play anatomizes how identity becomes reified through repeated social performance, how individuals internalize the images others project onto them, how prejudice creates the very characteristics it claims to discover. Frisch’s target is not merely anti-Semitism but the more general human tendency to fix others in predetermined categories, to refuse the fluidity and complexity of actual persons.

Frisch’s dramatic technique owes much to Brecht, but where Brecht sought to provoke political consciousness and revolutionary action, Frisch aims for a more modest if no less difficult goal: making audiences aware of their own participation in creating oppressive social realities. His use of direct address, non-realistic staging, and temporal manipulation are borrowed from epic theater, but deployed toward existential rather than Marxist ends. The goal is not to inspire class consciousness but to disturb comfortable assumptions about identity, authenticity, and social conformity.

The critical tendency to pair Dürrenmatt and Frisch can obscure how fundamentally different their literary methods and philosophical temperaments were. Dürrenmatt worked in the grotesque-comic mode, using exaggeration, paradox, and theatrical provocation to expose moral contradictions. His plays are populated by outsized characters—millionaire vengeful ex-prostitutes, mad psychiatrists, physicists pretending insanity—who function less as realistic individuals than as embodiments of moral positions or philosophical problems. His style tends toward the baroque, the excessive, the deliberately artificial.

Divergent Methods, Convergent Concerns

Both writers also offer something increasingly rare: models of serious intellectual engagement with moral and political questions that avoids both dogmatism and relativism. They rejected simple answers without succumbing to nihilism, maintained ethical commitment without prescribing specific political programs, and insisted on art’s capacity to illuminate moral truth without reducing literature to propaganda. In an era of performative outrage and algorithmic polarization, their commitment to nuanced examination of complex problems offers a valuable alternative.

Frisch, by contrast, worked in a more restrained, psychologically realistic register, even when employing modernist narrative techniques. His characters are recognizable bourgeois types—engineers, architects, teachers—trapped in quotidian crises of meaning and relationship. Where Dürrenmatt’s universe is theatrical and expressionistic, Frisch’s is novelistic and introspective. Dürrenmatt’s plays demand staging, performance, the physical presence of actors creating grotesque tableaux; Frisch’s work, even his drama, has a literary quality that makes it equally effective on the page.

Temperamentally, too, they differed markedly. Dürrenmatt cultivated the persona of the skeptical outsider, the overweight bohemian who drank too much and painted garish canvases in his spare time, the preacher’s son who rejected all dogma including political progressivism. Frisch presented as the serious intellectual, architecturally precise in thought and expression, politically engaged with the anti-nuclear movement and later with questions of immigration and Swiss identity. Their personal relationship was cordial but distant—they recognized each other’s talent but represented different possibilities for the Swiss writer’s vocation.

Yet for all their differences, they shared crucial concerns. Both were obsessed with guilt—not merely individual guilt but the collective guilt of bystanders, of those who benefit from injustice without directly causing it, of societies that maintain moral respectability while compromising fundamental principles. Both rejected simple moralizing in favor of complex ethical examination that implicated audiences in the problems dramatized. Both understood theater and literature not as entertainment but as instruments of moral inquiry, as spaces where civilizational questions could be posed even if definitive answers remained elusive.

Most fundamentally, both insisted on the artist’s responsibility to address the present moment without succumbing to topicality. Their work remains relevant not because it avoids historical specificity but because it finds in particular circumstances universal human patterns. “Die Physiker” is very much about nuclear weapons and Cold War politics, but it asks timeless questions about scientific responsibility and the relationship between knowledge and power. “Andorra” addresses mid-century European anti-Semitism, but it illuminates how any society constructs scapegoats and how individuals internalize oppression. The particular becomes universal not through abstraction but through rigorous attention to how general human tendencies manifest in specific historical situations.

The Swiss-German Paradox: Insider-Outsiders

Both writers negotiated a complex relationship to German literary culture. They wrote in German, were published primarily by German houses (Suhrkamp for both), and addressed German-speaking audiences most directly. Yet they remained fundamentally Swiss, suspicious of German cultural pretensions, protective of Swiss democratic traditions, and aware that their moral authority derived partly from not being German. This created productive tensions in reception.

German critics sometimes dismissed them as provincial moralists, lacking the experimental daring of true avant-garde figures like Heiner Müller or Peter Handke. Austrian critics viewed them as representatives of comfortable bourgeois critique, insufficiently radical in either form or politics. Swiss critics alternately celebrated them as national treasures and condemned them for washing Swiss dirty laundry in public—Frisch’s critiques of Swiss xenophobia and military fetishism made him controversial at home throughout his career.

Yet this very marginality granted perspective impossible from within German or Austrian traditions. Neither burdened by direct Nazi collaboration nor able to claim resistance credentials, neither fully committed to Western capitalism nor sympathetic to Eastern bloc socialism, they occupied a third space from which to interrogate post-war European civilization. Switzerland’s neutrality, often criticized as moral cowardice, became in their hands an epistemological position—a refusal of the easy certainties that ideology provides, an insistence on examining all positions with skeptical scrutiny.

This comes through most clearly in their treatment of guilt and responsibility. German writers of their generation—Böll, Grass, Enzensberger—wrote from within the experience of national catastrophe and collective guilt. Their work necessarily engaged with the question of how one remained human, or became human again, after the Holocaust and total war. Dürrenmatt and Frisch addressed these same questions but from an angle that allowed different insights. Not having been perpetrators or direct victims, they could examine the psychology of complicity, of standing aside, of benefiting from others’ suffering while maintaining moral cleanliness. This speaks directly to contemporary moral predicaments: most of us in developed nations are not direct perpetrators of global injustice but we benefit from it systematically. Dürrenmatt and Frisch anatomize precisely this condition of comfortable complicity.

Legacy and Contemporary Relevance

The question of literary legacy is always vexed, but certain measures suggest Dürrenmatt and Frisch’s enduring significance. Their major works remain in print in multiple languages and continue to be taught in German literature curricula worldwide. “Die Physiker” and “Andorra” are staples of German theater repertory, regularly performed not as historical artifacts but as living drama with contemporary resonance. Film adaptations of their work continue to appear. Academic conferences and critical studies proliferate, examining their relevance to current concerns about technology, identity, and moral responsibility.

More important than institutional recognition is how their central concerns have only intensified. Dürrenmatt’s preoccupation with scientific knowledge that escapes ethical control speaks directly to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and autonomous weapons systems. “Die Physiker” posed the question of whether scientists can remain morally responsible for discoveries they cannot control; this question has only become more urgent as we develop technologies whose consequences we cannot predict or contain. The play’s suggestion that madness might be the only sane response to certain forms of knowledge resonates chillingly in an era of climate crisis and existential technological risk.

Frisch’s examination of identity construction and social role-playing has acquired new relevance in the age of social media, where selfhood increasingly occurs through curated performance for distant audiences. His exploration of how prejudice creates the characteristics it claims to discover remains urgently pertinent to contemporary discussions of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. “Andorra” could be staged today with minimal alteration as commentary on how European societies construct Muslim identity through repeated projections of cultural incompatibility.

Conclusion: The Persistence of Doubt

What ultimately distinguishes Dürrenmatt and Frisch in the German literary canon is their insistence on doubt as an ethical position. Not the facile doubt of postmodern skepticism that denies the possibility of truth or justice, but the rigorous doubt of moral seriousness that refuses to be satisfied with comfortable certainties. They inherited from Swiss Protestant tradition a suspicion of human pretension, from Enlightenment rationalism a commitment to critical examination, and from modernist aesthetics an understanding that form must constantly be reimagined if literature is to capture contemporary reality.

Their legacy extends beyond specific techniques or thematic preoccupations to model a particular stance toward literature’s social function. They refused the romantic notion of the artist as prophet or the modernist vision of art as autonomous realm separate from social concerns. Instead, they practiced what might be called engaged skepticism—using literature to pose urgent moral questions while resisting the temptation to provide definitive answers, creating work that demanded active intellectual participation from audiences rather than passive consumption.

In doing so, they established themselves not merely as significant Swiss writers or important German-language authors but as essential voices of twentieth-century European literature. Their work documents how Western civilization attempted to reckon with its own barbarism, how individuals navigate between moral aspiration and actual behavior, how societies construct meaning in the aftermath of meaning’s collapse. These remain live questions, which ensures that Dürrenmatt and Frisch will continue to be read, performed, and argued about as long as we struggle with the problem of how to live ethically in a world where ethics seem increasingly beside the point.

The moralists of doubt, it turns out, are precisely what each generation needs—voices that refuse consolation without surrendering hope, that expose hypocrisy without claiming moral superiority, that insist on asking difficult questions even when satisfying answers prove impossible. This is the legacy Dürrenmatt and Frisch bequeathed to German letters and to all of us who continue to read them with gratitude and discomfort, recognition and resistance, agreement and argument. Which is, of course, exactly the response they intended.

Published by Peter H Bloecker, retired Director of Studies living at the Gold Coast.

Updated 13 Dec 2025.

When teaching at the DHPS in Windhoek, Namibia, my Year 13 students performed the Drama Die Physiker having read and studied the text. (1992)