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 Hundreds of unpublished photographs from the writer's private archives are juxtaposed and ›commented‹ by excerpts from Dürrenmatt's autobiographical works and interviews.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.

»I like being Swiss« Dürrenmatt often said. The Switzerland he was talking about was not the nation celebrated in myths, but the juxtaposition and problematic co-existence of its four different cultures. A small nation which emerged from its conquest by Napoleon, Switzerland was for the pragmatic Swiss writer a political opportunity: a confederation of states in miniature, and as such a kind of model for Europe. As a fatherland, Switzerland often annoyed him. He made fun of the discrepancy between the small-state reality and its heroic history. But even as a very young man, Dürrenmatt was disturbed by the very fact which now irritates the whole world and a great many Swiss: the way in which Switzerland has covered up its past – its isolated role and its sparing in World War II – under a cloak of legends.

Stranded when his car breaks down in a village a traveller gladly accepts the invitation of a retired judge to spend the night in his house and to join him and a few friends for dinner and their Game. This could happen to anybody. But only Friedrich Dürrenmatt could have used such a commonplace occurrence as the starting point for the nightmarish story that follows.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt became one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century. But from our perspective today, we can see that Dürrenmatt's career from start to finish embraced fictional works whose quality and significance are undeniable. His novellas and short stories are searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions. The best known and most successful of them are The Judge and His Hangman, Suspicion, The Pledge, Greek Man Seeks Greek Wife, Justice, The Tunnel, Traps, The Minotaur and The Assignment.

In The Judge and his Hangman (1950) Dürrenmatt's investigator takes to the stage for the first time: Inspector Bärlach, an old fossil of the judicial system. For health reasons, he has only very little time left to solve a murder case. Bärlach's approach to the issues of justice, morality, guilt and punishment is a common thread running through all of Dürrenmatt's crime novels. In Suspicion (1951), for example, the inspector fights once more against death and injustice, driven by his boundless defiance at »existing in this world and fighting for another one, a better one«. In The Pledge (1958) another investigator, Matthäi, doggedly tries to hunt down a child-murderer, showing no fear of danger or its consequences. Justice (1985) focuses on a young lawyer's entanglement in the delicate web of justice, the judicial system and morality. Dürrenmatt began his fifth (and uncompleted) crime novel The Pensioner (1995) as early as 1969, but kept re-writing it. The novel's protagonist, the ill, gluttonous Inspector Höchstettler, is the spitting image of Bärlach.

The texts presented in ›Thought Fugue‹ are records of works in progress: the typescripts, from Dürrenmatt's literary estate, of materials (each one a complete unit), as well as of all essays and stories, which he had planned for additional volumes of ›Materials‹ and which he expanded and revised numerous times between 1987 and the end of 1990. Each text presented here is the final version of the piece concerned. From the Contents: ›Prometheus‹, ›Thought Fugue‹, ›On Imagined Constructs and Emotional Universes with a Parable‹, ›The Dinosaurs and the Law‹, ›Dramaturgy of Imaginative Power‹, ›The Attempt‹, ›Cabala of Physics‹, ›Farewell from the Theatre‹, ›Postscript to Achterloo IV‹.

›Romulus the Great‹ is an ›historical comedy without historic basis‹ and one of Dürrenmatt's strongest pieces of sarcasm, a veritable campaign against the meaninglessness of power for power's sake - as Romulus willfully aids the fall of his corrupt empire.

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 theater. His best known essays are ›Theatre Problems‹, ›The Winter War in Tibet‹, ›The Bridge‹, ›The Brain‹, ›Vinter‹ and ›Monster Essay on Justice and Law‹.

The letters published here for the first time document the unusual and not always easy friendship between Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers: Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The literary world linked Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers inseparably together like a pair of comedians, something by which both authors were sometimes amused but more often irritated. Their common ground was their experience of Switzerland, isolated and spared from conflict between 1939 and 1945, and the guilt which the country incurred during World War II; their preoccupation with and different approaches to Kierkegaard and Brecht; their dissimilar but equally definite criticism of the army and anticommunism; their work at the Zurich Schauspielhaus theatre with the dramaturgist Kurt Hirschfeld whom they both admired. An epilogue by Peter Rüedi, for many years a critic of both authors, points out some connections between the letters, the authors' lives and work, and contemporary history.

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.

The hero of the novel, the gluttonous and ailing Superintendent Gottlieb Höchstettler, is the spitting image of Superintendent Bärlach in Dürrenmatt's successful earlier novels The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion. Other characters are Bärlach's former superior, Dr. Lucius Lutz, and a Swiss dramatist engaged in writing a detective novel for the first time in many years. Dürrenmatt began The Pensioner in Puerto Rico in 1969, and he reworked, revised and lengthened it several times between then and 1979. Although the novel was never finished, the essential of its ending is clearly discernible. Facsimile reproduction of manuscript and typoscript.

Arnolph Archilochos is a middle-aged puritan; pale, shy and rather plump. When he is not working as an assistant book-keeper in the Obstetrical Forceps Division of the Petit-Paysan Engineering Works, he is absorbed with the Old New Presbyterians of the Penultimate Christians. Then one day, encouraged by his landlady, he decides to get married. He advertises in the local newspaper, making only one stipulation: that his wife should be of the same nationality as himself - Greek. The answer to his advertisement is Chloe, who is voluptuous, affectionate, rich and - Greek. Suddenly the nondescript little clerk finds his wheel of fortune has begun to spin at giddy speed. Overnight he becomes popular, successful and wealthy. Then, at the height of his vertigo, on his wedding day, comes the moment of revelation and disillusion.

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 theater. His best known essays are ›Theatre Problems‹, ›The Winter War in Tibet‹, ›The Bridge‹, ›The Brain‹, ›Vinter‹ and ›Monster Essay on Justice and Law‹.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.