When Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a child, his parents told him the Greek myths and the stories of the Old Testament. These became the essentials of his future artistic material. A student of literature and philosophy in Switzerland spared by the cruelties of World War II, Dürrenmatt imagined the apocalypse in expressionistic paintings and in a first play, which scandalized the Swiss and made Dürrenmatt into a household name. In 1952 he moved with his wife and children to Neuchâtel. It was here, in peace and solitude, that he wrote his internationally acclaimed plays (›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹) and his bestselling crime novels (›The Judge and his Hangman‹, ›The Pledge‹). His late works, considered by many as his crowning achievement, are yet to be discovered by a large audience. Hundreds of unpublished photographs from the writer's private archives are juxtaposed and ›commented‹ by excerpts from Dürrenmatt's autobiographical works and interviews. A fantastic and vivid life in pictures.

Dürrenmatt's essays are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theatre. His best known essays are Theatre Problems, The Bridge, The Brain, Vinter, Monster Essay on Justice and Law and The Winter War in Tibet, a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth - a Plato's Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.