Swiss · b. 1921
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss dramatist and novelist, one of Europe's foremost postwar playwrights, known for darkly comic, morally serious tragicomedies such as The Visit and The Physicists, and for inventive crime novels.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a leading figure of postwar German-language theatre, a master of the grotesque tragicomedy who used dark humor, theatrical ingenuity, and moral seriousness to confront the dilemmas of the modern world. His plays The Visit (about greed and collective guilt) and The Physicists (about scientific responsibility in the nuclear age) became international classics.
Alongside his drama, Dürrenmatt wrote inventive, philosophically charged crime novels — including The Pledge and The Judge and His Hangman — that subverted the conventions of the genre. His work is marked by a bleak but bracing vision, a fascination with chance and justice, and a gift for combining entertainment with serious ideas.
Dürrenmatt died in 1990. He is recognized as one of the most important European dramatists of the twentieth century, whose tragicomic parables remain strikingly relevant.
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt's darkly comic Cold War classic. In a Swiss sanatorium, three patients claim to be physicists — one believes he is Newton, another Einstein, a third hears Solomon — but nothing is as it seems in this tragicomic parable about science, responsibility, and the terror of knowledge in the nuclear age.
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