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Fever, runny nose, physical changes. “A virus epidemic broke out” is the current story of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss author and playwright who was born 100 years ago in Stalden in Emmental in the Swiss canton of Bern as the son of a shepherd.
Nobel Prize Candidate and School Reading Provider
“The virus epidemic in South Africa” takes place during apartheid. The virus turns white people black. The white ruling clique insists that everyone should wear an enamel shield: whites who have turned black have one white with the black inscription “white,” the others the other way around. Until the once white people get excited that “white” is written in black and they ask for gold letters.
The story was only published after the death of Dürrenmatt, whom many know from school lessons (“The Old Woman’s Visit”, “The Physicists”). In the spring, Diogenes-Verlag is planning a new volume with unpublished fragments from Dürrenmatt’s pen.
Speaking of the pen: What many do not know is that the author also painted and drew. He never sold them, at most he gave them away. More than 1700 works are known. “My drawings are not ancillary to my literary works, but the drawn and painted battlefields on which my literary struggles, adventures, experiments and defeats take place,” Dürrenmatt once explained.
Dürrenmatt spent 38 years in French-speaking Switzerland until his death. Vallon d’Ermitage is the name of the area above Neuchâtel / Neuenburg. His three children grew up there, and his first wife Lotti died there in 1983. His second wife, German director Charlotte Kerr, went ahead with the expansion of the house into the Museum Center Dürrenmatt, which opened in 2000.
As a painter, the artist has also immortalized himself on his own walls: the Sistine Chapel is a guest bathroom in which Dürrenmatt has painted every inch with figures from his works. There you can see Romulus and the Minotaur, among others, and also a little Pope, all of whom look out over the quiet place.
He wrote his young fame
The author scored his fame at an early age: in the early 60s, at 40, he was at the zenith of his career. The prose “The judge and his executioner” (1952), “The suspicion” (1953) or “La Panne” (1956) and the plays “The visit of the old woman” (1956) and “The physicists” were published. (1962). ). The subsequent balance was mixed, Dürrenmatt failed with various works by the public or critics. However, he continued to write stupid verses that were also in love with Charlotte in the 80s: “The rhinoceros writes the tigress / I have nothing but you in my head / because I think in front of / above my nasal horn / under my forehead / There is the brain that loves you. “
“The Old Woman’s Visit” is played around the world to this day. “Because of Dürrenmatt, many Chinese consider the Swiss to be very smart and funny,” said a professor of Chinese literature in 2015 in “Du” magazine. Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty nearly won the 1992 Cannes Palme d’Or for his footage (“Hyenas”).
Dürrenmatt was negotiated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he never received, like the other great Swiss author of the 20th century, Max Frisch, ten years his senior (“Biedermann und die Brandstifter”, “Andorra”). They combined a difficult friendship with competitive behavior, as Ueli Weber writes in a new biography.
On a joint trip to Venice in 1967, Weber mentions memories of Frisch’s wife, Marianne Frisch-Oellers, the two of them sneaking out of the hotel one by one the morning after it was announced that the Nobel Prize winner would search the newspaper for see who had received the award, that is. yes, long before the days of the internet. They were both more relieved that the other had not won than that they were depressed that they had been overlooked.
After an extensive bachelor’s degree in the humanities, Dürrenmatt made a name for himself in 1947 with the premiere of the Anabaptist drama “It Is Written” in Zurich. Until his worldwide success, he, who decided to become a painter or writer at school, had financial concerns. In a kind of crowdfunding, the “Observer” magazine encouraged readers in 1952 to pay Dürrenmatt at least five francs a month in exchange for three-year sequel stories.
Shirt-sleeved humor and a dash of arrogance
The writer was diabetic and suffered his first heart attack at age 48. He was sure it would not age, which did not stop him from dining with friends and enjoying wine-filled nights with the treasures of his well-stocked cellar. His companions in Diogenes’ biography of Weber describe him as someone with realistic humor. Even arrogantly: About (later Nobel Prize winner) Günter Grass said he was “too unintelligent to write such great books.” Fresh is a fast guy, “but what he writes sometimes is really terrible.” He did not know the statements would be released, Dürrenmatt said later.
He was also a provocateur who used to surprise by acting. Shortly before his death, Dürrenmatt delivered one of his notorious speeches in Rüschlikon in 1990. The occasion was an award ceremony for Václav Havel, the writer and former dissident who was once in prison and had become president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Iron Curtain at the end of 1989. Switzerland is also a prison in which the prisoners are also the guards, Dürrenmatt said in front of a group of confused political celebrities.
Charlotte Kerr wanted to escape her 70th birthday celebrations in January 1991 with Fritz and go on a world tour. According to his biography, friends reported that Dürrenmatt really did not feel like it. “Tüet mi nid gang jump,” he said, in High German, for example: “Don’t rush me all the time.” Before leaving, he died on December 14, 1990 at his home.
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