Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Biography

In 1941, about to enter university, Dürrenmatt wrote to his father that he did not know what to do: draw or write. “I feel called to both” conveys the sense of that letter. He took several more years to decide, and then gave up neither.

He was born on 5 January 1921 in Stalden in the Emmental, which became part of the municipality of Konolfingen in 1933. His father, Reinhold, was the village pastor, and his grandfather, Ulrich Dürrenmatt, was a politician and poet. Later Dürrenmatt explained the frequent presence of death in his work by saying that in a pastor’s house someone was always being given last rites or buried. At twelve he won his first prize, a watch, in a children’s drawing competition. In 1935 the family moved to Bern, where his father became pastor at the deaconesses’ house. Dürrenmatt called his school years the worst time of his life: he left with a school-leaving certificate in 1941 graded “barely sufficient”. He wanted to become a painter, but from 1941 he studied philosophy, natural sciences and German philology in Bern, and for a time in 1942–43 in Zürich. In Bern he lived with his parents in an attic room and covered its walls with large paintings. They were later painted over, and in the early 1990s they were found, uncovered and restored. In 1946 he left the university without even starting the planned dissertation on Kierkegaard, and decided to become a writer.

On 12 October 1946 he married the actress Lotti Geissler. His first play, It Is Written, a comedy about the Anabaptists of Münster, was staged in April 1947 by the Schauspielhaus in Zürich. The evening ended in a scandal, and the following year the author withdrew the play. The second play, The Blind Man (1948), passed almost unnoticed. Max Frisch, who had received the manuscript of the first play from the theatre publisher Kurt Reiss, wrote to the young author himself. In 1949 Romulus the Great reached the stage, in place of an unfinished drama, The Tower of Babel, which the author destroyed.

The first years as a freelance writer were hard: the family was growing, with a son born in 1947 and daughters in 1949 and 1951. Dürrenmatt wrote satirical sketches for cabaret, theatre criticism for the weekly Weltwoche and, as he recalled himself, lived on commissions from West German radio stations: “They were our patrons.” For these stations he wrote radio plays, among them Hercules and the Augean Stables and A Dangerous Game. The crime novels The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion were serialised in the newspaper Schweizerischer Beobachter.

The breakthrough came in 1952: the comedy The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, rejected by Swiss theatres, was staged in Germany. In the same year Dürrenmatt bought a house in a valley above Neuchâtel and stayed there for the rest of his life.

The Visit, in Zürich in 1956, with Therese Giehse in the title role, brought him world fame and financial independence. In 1958 the film It Happened in Broad Daylight was made from his screenplay, and from that screenplay he wrote the novel The Pledge. The Physicists followed in 1962 and Der Meteor in 1966, which the author himself considered his most personal play. There were also failures: Frank V (1960) and the stage version of Hercules (1963). He mocked the critics who rejected Hercules in a series of caricatures.

In 1968, together with the director Werner Düggelin, Dürrenmatt took over the Basel theatre Komödie Basel, but after conflicts and a heart attack he left after one season. He spoke publicly on international events: on the Middle East, on the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia. In 1967 he attended the Soviet writers’ congress in Moscow, and in 1987 he went to a Moscow forum of cultural figures. The Swiss federal police had kept him under surveillance for fifty years, and he spoke about this in his 1990 speech dedicated to Václav Havel, “Switzerland: A Prison”.

He drew and painted all his life, but hardly ever sold his pictures and exhibited rarely: in Neuchâtel in 1976 and 1985, in Zürich in 1978. He called his drawings battlefields on which his writer’s “adventures, experiments and defeats” are played out. Among those he looked to, scholars name Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Piranesi and his friend Varlin. His favourite motifs were the labyrinth, the Minotaur and the building of the Tower of Babel. Many of the cycles were illustrations to his own books.

Lotti died on 16 January 1983, and in 1984 he married the actress and director Charlotte Kerr. In his last years he finished the novel The Execution of Justice (1985), on which he had worked, with interruptions, since 1959, wrote The Assignment (1986) and Durcheinandertal (1989), and continued his autobiographical Stoffe (“Materials”).

Dürrenmatt died in Neuchâtel on 14 December 1990. He bequeathed his manuscripts to the state on condition that a literary archive be created, and in 1991 the Swiss Literary Archives were founded. In 2000 the Centre Dürrenmatt opened in Neuchâtel, a museum designed by Mario Botta, where his paintings and drawings are on permanent display.