On April 19th, 1947, Dürrenmatt’s first play, »It is Written«, premiered at the Schauspielhaus, Zurich. It was a calamity, and the audience whistled so loudly that the police had to intervene. Nevertheless, the author, 26 years of age at the time, went on to achieve world fame and attract an audience of millions as a dramatist. »Romulus The Great«, »The Visit«, »The Physicists« and many more remain among the most performed plays on the German stage to this day, as well as being (beloved!) school reading and »universally renowned, modern myths« (Le Monde, Paris). This edition features all plays with detailed references to performance and publication history, as well as a chronicle of Dürrenmatt’s life and work.

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 Hundreds of unpublished photographs from the writer's private archives are juxtaposed and ›commented‹ by excerpts from Dürrenmatt's autobiographical works and interviews.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

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.

Over 4000 pages of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's conversations and interviews of all kinds for newspapers, magazines, radio, or television made over three decades between 1961 and 1990 have been handed down (it was not until the 60s that he began keeping authentically reproduced conversations and interviews). These conversations are a unique source of insights into Dürrenmatt's views of the world and reality, his aesthetic and material tenets, and the circumstances which accompanied his work.

A suspenseful tale of a police inspector's unremitting search for a psychopathic killer his superiors claim does not exist. But more than a novel of crime and detection, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's deeply moving drama is the eloquent account of a decent man's gradual decay. With grim irony, the master storyteller shows how a dedicated law-enforcer's obsession for truth and justice can lead him to bait a trap as morally offensive as the evil strategy used by the maniacal murderer he relentlessly pursues.

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.

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‹.

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‹.

In 1955 Dr Isaak Kohler, a distinguished Zurich councilman, walks into a restaurant full of well-known politicians, businessmen and artists, and shoots a university professor in open view. For his crime, Kohler is sentenced to 20 years in prison. Dr Kohler, happy as a lark and infectiously content behind bars, sends for Spat, a young, down-on-his-luck lawyer and asks him to reinvestigate his case on the supposition that he is innocent. Spat does the seemingly impossible - he manages to have the murderer acquitted - and in the process is driven to madness. The lawyer becomes obsessed with his intellectual enterprise and, seduced by the notion of justice, decides to murder the murderer. ›The Execution of Justice‹ is a brilliant allegorical thriller that dramatises the distinction between justice and the 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 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.

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‹.

›Nocturnal Conversation with a Scorned Man:‹ A Curriculum of Our Times and for Dürrenmatt readers. In ›Stranitzky and the National Hero‹, the victims of politics rise to power. In ›The Vega Enterprise‹, Venus becomes a penal colony.