Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990), Swiss author of avant-garde plays and existentialist detective novels. He was born in Konolfingen, the son of a clergyman, and educated at the universities of Zurich and Bern. His early plays, such as Es steht geschrieben (1947, It Is Written), dealing with the Anabaptists in 16th-century Münster, and Romulus der Grosse (1949, Romulus the Great), about the fall of Rome, combine a sense of comic irony and sense of the absurd with the violent and grotesque. His best-known plays, Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956; The Visit, 1958) and Die Physiker (1961; The Physicists, 1963), deal with justice, guilt, and revenge and the helplessness of the individual in mass society. The Visit was made into an opera (1971) by Gottfried von Einem. Among his later dramas are Portrait of a Planet (1971; trans. 1973) and Achterloo (1983), a comedy. Dürrenmatt's popular detective fiction includes Der Richter und sein Henker (1952; The Judge and His Hangman, 1955), The Quarry (1953; trans. 1962), and The Pledge (1958; trans. 1959).