Dürrenmatt: oder Die Ahnung vom Ganzen

by Peter Rüedi

Die erste große Biographie über Friedrich Dürrenmatt – vom Pfarrerssohn aus dem Emmental zum Autor von Weltruhm und mit Millionenauflagen, glänzend und packend geschrieben von Peter Rüedi, einem der ausgewiesensten Dürrenmatt-Kenner.

Genres: Biography

960 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Friedrich Dürrenmatt is one of the few writers for whom I have an endless fascination. He is often categorized with writers like Kafka and Borges but apparently read only one work of former, Der Prozeß (The Trial) , in passing and there is no evidence that he read anything by the latter. He was not influenced by contemporary writers. Among his primary influences were Aristophanes, Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Jean Paul, Lessing, the 19th century Swiss writer Gotthelf, Kierkegaard, Strindberg and Kant. Although his father was a Protestant minister, he was a social rather than a religious Protestant who later became an atheist. Yet his reading of the Bible was evident in his writing.

Rüedi’s subtitle, A Feeling for (or Premonition of) the Whole (Die Ahnung vom Ganzen), sums up Dürrenmatt’s life and thinking as well as anything I’ve ever read. His modern, far-sighted themes were buttressed by a gift for seeing behind the structures of his contemporary life and the future in ways few could.

Dürrenmatt was obsessed by three themes. One, labyrinths, also a constant theme of Borges, could be traced back to his love of Greek theater and mythology. His characters often seemed to be lost and never aware of what might be waiting around the corners of their experiences. Another, “tower-building” (Turmbau)—as in the Tower of Babel—embodied his yearning to understanding the yearning of man to better himself and the ironies, misconceptions, and hypocrisies that come with it. His idea of justice embodied both: the ideal of a pure justice always conflicted with the reality of justice of mankind as expressed through fallible, earthly institutions. Later in life he was fascinated with mathematics, physics and astronomy as was demonstrated in one of his two masterpieces, Die Physiker (The Physicists) . His most important theme was justice—both in its personal and bureaucratic incarnations. Virtually all of his writing seemed to be linked to a Don Quixote-like quest to understand justice, or perhaps more accurately, injustice. As he wrote near the end of his life, “Truth and justice are the greatest mass murderers in history.” (Die Wahrheit und die Gerechtigkeit sind die größten Massenmörder der Geschichte.)

Dürrenmatt’s world view was very much grounded in his native Switzerland. He was in his early 20s during World War II, so his military service was more one of drilling than fighting. He didn’t experience war like so many of his European contemporaries. It also led to a complicated claustrophobia. Most Swiss were not able to travel during the war, but they were exposed to many nationalities who passed through. He struggled his life long with the inner demon of speaking German but being Swiss.

Dürrenmatt called his plays comedies, not tragedies; his comedies, while having moments of humor, are not funny as such, they highlight the paradoxes of humanity. Tragedies, according to Dürrenmatt, “sets out blame, danger, proportion, perspective, and responsibility.” They come to conclusions. The intent of his comedies, however, was to underscore that tragic protagonists with unambiguous attributes do not exist. Human experience, on the other hand, is messy and inconsistent; it is a comedy. Part of the comedy of his life was his obsession to constantly revisit and revise his works. Over the years he would often change endings, convert radio plays to stage plays, stage plays to novels, and novels to theatrical fragments. He often left his most successful pieces alone, almost shunning them, but he clung his “lesser” writings with a passion of a father who couldn’t let his children go into adulthood.

Unfortunately, Peter Rüedi lets his adoration of Dürrenmatt get wildly out of control and seemingly had no editor to harness some of the nuggets of insight in this book. It is 733 pages of ponderous, often irrelevant information—or I should say, relevant only to the most pathologically obsessed—and 250-plus pages of addenda. Interspersed with the author’s linear biography are “excursions,” or chapters on specific themes including Dürrenmatt’s “Swissness,” his dilettantish interest in natural sciences, or his struggles with the established order of the German and Swiss theater scene. But to get there, we have to plod through irrelevant issues like a late life correspondence with a school classmate who also was a writer, even though he never read any of his writings. We get a long passage on his reminiscence of the landlady of his youth, details about his mortgage, his pets, and his driving habits. I was fearing a schedule of his bowel movements would emerge. (The one trivial thing that might have interested me was a remark about Dürrenmatt’s passion for football [soccer] only to not find a single word about it in the rest of the book.)

This is a book only for the most obsessed Dürrenmatt students. For others, the time needed to read this would be better spent giving his works second, third and fourth readings.