hw

profilekayeeL
FriedrichDurrenmattPresentation.pptx
Home>English homework help>hw

Friedrich Durrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Swiss author

born

January 5, 1921

Konolfingen, Switzerland

died

December 14, 1990

Neuchatel, Switzerland

Friedrich Dürrenmatt,  (born Jan. 5, 1921, Konolfingen, near Bern, Switz.—died Dec. 14, 1990, Neuchâtel), Swiss playwright, novelist, and essayist whose satiric, almost farcical tragicomic plays were central to the post-World War II revival of German theatre.

Dürrenmatt’s vision of the world as essentially absurd gave a comic flavor to his plays.

He described the primary conflict in his tragicomedies as humanity’s comic attempts to escape from the tragic fate inherent in the human condition.

His plays often have bizarre settings.

In 1970 Dürrenmatt wrote that he was “abandoning literature in favour of theatre,” no longer writing plays but working to produce adaptations of well-known works. In addition to plays, Dürrenmatt wrote detective novels, radio plays, and critical essays.

3

Friedrich Dürrenmatt already had writing in his blood. His grandfather--a well-known satirist and political poet--encouraged in the young boy a questioning spirit which would characterize his later works.

At the age of 22, he set about composing his first play, a lyrical and apocalyptic comedy which was never produced. Over the course of the next few years, he struggled to earn a living as a writer and had to turn to the writing of short stories, mystery novels, and radio plays to make ends meet, but he never gave up writing for the stage.

Early Writings

His breakthrough came in 1952 with the comedy The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi in which he first began to formulate his own unique style of theatre, a dark, dreamlike world populated by characters who, though frighteningly real, are often distorted into caricature. The playwright found that dark comedy was a most effective medium through which to expose the grotesque nature of the human condition.

The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi evoked strong reactions from Dürrenmatt's audiences and established him as one of the finest European dramatists of his day.

His first major success was the play Romulus The Great. Set in the year 476 A.D., the play explores the last days of the Roman Empire, presided over, and brought about by its last Emperor.

In The Visit, 1956, Durrenmatt writes a classical tragedy for the 20th century, a modern answer to ancient questions of honor, loyalty and community. When The Visit was written, the world was on the brink of disaster, and every town was a Gullen. He wrote that in the 20th century because "we no longer find tragic heroes, but only tragedies staged by world butchers and carried out by meat-grinding machines...power today is only minimally visible, since like an iceberg the largest part is sunk in faceless abstraction...Today's state has become impossible to survey, anonymous and bureaucratic...genuinely representative people are lacking and the tragic heroes have no name."