Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 in Konolfingen, a small town just outside the Swiss capital of Bern. The son of a pastor and the grandson of a well-known satirist, he developed a keen interest in philosophy and a dark sense of humor. Both qualities are manifest in his writings. Dürrenmatt began his career as a playwright in the mid-1940s, choosing to abandon his doctoral dissertation on the philosopher Kierkegaard in order to work on his first play. Later, when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, Dürrenmatt explained that he abandoned his academic work when he “realized that it is not only possible to think with the philosophy, but also with the theater stage.” His first play, It is Written, was immediately controversial and led to fights breaking out in the audience. He had his first significant success with Romulus the Great, in 1950, and followed that with The Visit in 1956. All of his plays include a degree of absurdity and the grotesque, but in doing so lay bare the hypocrisy and greed that, Dürrenmatt believed, characterized political life in post-war Switzerland. Other plays from Dürrenmatt’s oeuvre, including The Physicists (1961) and The Meteor (1966), take a similar track. Following the failure of his play Der Mitmacher in 1970, Dürrenmatt stopped producing new dramatic works in favor of revising literature he had already written; he took the view that his plays could never be finished if they were to accurately reflect the ever-changing nature of life, as Dürrenmatt believed they should. He continued to revise his works until his death in 1990.