SOURCE: "Justice Breeds Murder: Justice in Dürrenmatt as Theme and as Theatrical Material," in Modern Drama, Vol. 24, No. 1, March, 1981, pp. 73-86.

[In the following essay Robinson examines Dürrenmatt's use of justice. She looks at how justice is depicted as paradox and how the characters "choose to play madmen, clowns or victims in order to achieve their goals."]

In Dürrenmatt's plays "justice is at stake," as Palamedes tells his father in The Blind Man. Dürrenmatt tends to examine every situation and every action from the standpoint of justice, discussing such themes as the possibility of changing the world through justice, the perversion and parody of justice in our world, and man's injustice versus the justice of God. As far as his characters are concerned, they are obsessed with it; it is the idea of justice which makes their existence meaningful. "If there is no justice, one parts easily from it [life]," says the man who is about to die in Nighttime Talk With A Despised Man. Dürrenmatt's characters fight to their last breaths for their visions of justice, however distorted. For no matter how elevated or debased their aims, their conflicts arise from their pursuits of justice: whether hunting down a criminal, sentencing a son, robbing a bank, seeking revenge, destroying or saving an empire, they all believe themselves to be fighting for justice and order. Some of them, like the old lady in The Visit, seek personal justice for wrongs they have suffered, but most of Dürrenmatt's major heroes pursue absolute social and historical justice. The Emperor in Romulus the Great sets himself up as Rome's judge and condemns his corrupt civilization to death in the name of justice. In The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, Mississippi fights to reinstitute iron Mosaic justice in his unjust and chaotic society. The Bastard in King John uses all the power of his reason to work for justice and order in his war-tom country, whereas Titus of Titus Andronicus seeks justice for Rome as well as for his tortured family.

Dürrenmatt's seekers after justice are exceptional men. Most of them hold powerful and outstanding positions; yet they choose to play madmen, clowns or victims in order to achieve their goals. Typically, it is Romulus who focuses on the crucial question: "Do we still have the right to be more than a victim?" In the end-time in which they live, heroism can work only through deliberate self-victimization: Romulus's clowning, Möbius's and Titus's madness, the Bastard's and Bockelson's playacting. But even this reduced form of heroism is ultimately doomed, and the heroes end trapped by their own acts, victims now against their wills, able to prove their greatness only by bearing injustice. In his later plays, Dürrenmatt denies them even this most personal achievement. The monstrous disorder wins. "Nonsense is victor!", "And heroes there are none. Only victims."

Therefore, although both Dürrenmatt and his characters want to light up the world with the "pure ray of justice" (as is said of the four old lawyers in The Puncture), thus bringing meaning and dignity to their lives, what they achieve is "justice reflected in the eyeglass of a drunk …" Not content with showing the hero's victimization, Dürrenmatt demonstrates paradoxical reversal and grotesque parody of justice. Judges turn into executioners, just men into criminals, and justice into farce. "… Justice / Breeds murder and does not create an order." Although this quotation stems from the later and more farcically distorted Titus Andronicus, its message is inherent in all of Dürrenmatt's plays. It is foreshadowed in Sainte-Claude's reply to Mississippi, who has called him a fool because "There is no justice without God."

You are the fool. There is justice only without God…. We both have spilled blood; you killed three hundred and fifty criminals and I never counted my victims. What we do is murder; therefore we have to do it meaningfully.

As we shall see, Dürrenmatt's idealistic heroes are forced to accept this monstrous paradox and with it their defeats, whereas the cynical characters use it, or play with it, to serve their ends.

The Puncture (1956) offers an ironic combination of these possibilities when four jovial old lawyers sentence a chance visitor to death in the name of the highest ideal of justice. "… Only in the act of sentencing … does justice become knighted; there can be nothing higher, nobler, greater than when a human being is sentenced to death." Although this is only a game with which the four amuse themselves on their stag night, it causes the death of their victim. Traps, who executes their sentence by hanging himself. Traps believes that they have lit up his world with the pure ray of justice, and he proudly accepts his fate, since it bestows greatness and meaning on his muddled, mediocre existence. So justice breeds murder but also offers meaning to a senseless life.

The same is true of The Visit (1956). Here another grotesque version of fate—she might as well be called Clotho instead of Claire—offers to buy justice for a billion, demanding in return the death of Alfred III, the lover who had betrayed her many years before. Her idea of justice is squarely based on capitalistic manipulation, which has determined her life from the start. Claire's lover forsook her when she was pregnant so that he could marry a shopkeeper's daughter, and he bought witnesses to conceal his paternity. Forced into exile and disgrace, she recovered her fortune by selling herself in marriage to a series of millionaires; she then used the money to starve prosperous Güllen economically. At the opening of the play, the town is destitute, and although the worthy citizens begin by protesting Claire's demand tor justice and revenge, they go off to buy new yellow shoes—on credit, of course—and end by accepting her bargain. Ill is murdered communally, and the people get their money. Yet they, too, claim to act in the name of justice: to establish a just community, not to tolerate injustice. "It is not a matter of prosperity and good living, nor of luxury; it is a matter of wanting to realize justice…." Like Traps, Ill in the end becomes a willing victim; he accepts his death sentence, which in truth condemns his executioners, and gives content to his empty life.

In order to understand more fully Dürrenmatt's paradoxical view of justice, one has to examine both the nature of his world and his justice-obsessed heroes. Dürrenmatt throws his characters into critical situations and extreme moments; for him it is always A.D. 476, "a ghastly Götterdämmerung of civilization…." His characters have the sense of living in "the last evening of time", when "the end-time has set in."

Therefore, Dürrenmatt's plays focus on moments of crisis. As historical subjects, he has chosen the fall of Rome, the Thirty Years' War, the Anabaptist revolt in Münster; but his nonhistorical plays concentrate no less on critical situations: Claire's fatal visit in The Visit, the collapse of a band in Frank V, Schwitter's ever repeated dying moment in The Meteor, the murder of a political leader in The Fall. Not content with selecting such critical situations, Dürrenmalt further augments the effect by distorting, exaggerating, parodying the action to a point where extremes confront each other and turn into paradoxical reversals. Only in this way, he feels, can he fix reality precisely, make it transparent. He wants to think a situation through to its end, which to him means both creating a paradox and presenting the worst possible turn a story can take. The result is, as he says of King John, "nasty," but it reveals a truth which is confirmed by our time.

Yet for Dürrenmatt, the worst possible case is not a matter of losing one's head in despair. On the contrary, he relishes the opportunity to tell annoying stories and to challenge his audience with extreme contrasts and paradoxes. Furthermore, as we shall see, the worst possible turn a story can take has its vital and liberating implications, since it constitutes for him the essence of theater and of play; and above all, Dürrenmatt is dedicated to playing with theatrical possibilities and models of the world.

Romulus the Great (1949), set in A.D. 476 with the barbarians at the gates of Rome, shows a world at the point of collapse. Traveling through the country, one finds destroyed cities and smoking villages, men massacred, women ravished and children starving. It is, nevertheless, a parodical world; the Emperor of Rome is a fat, middle-aged clown whose one serious concern is the breeding of hens. While Imperial officials make desperate and often hysterical attempts to save "our civilization," the Emperor concerns himself with his menu—the cook is the only official accorded any importance—and the productivity of his hens, which are named after his Imperial predecessors. The clucking of these fowls disturbs the decrepit but peaceful palace, and hen droppings soil every path of the neglected garden and every crumbling wall. The only source of efficiency—itself grotesque—is the mighty Caesar Rupf, a manufacturer of trousers, who is ready to rescue the moribund empire with his millions if he can marry Romulus's daughter. Romulus, however, scorns such a deal, reminding his servant of a more pressing task: "To our duty, Pyramus. Let's have the chicken feed."

Futile heroism and self-sacrifice abound in this hopeless time. Aemilianus, Romulus's prospective son-in-law, who has just returned, mutilated, from a Gothic prison, is ready for any sacrifice to save the fatherland. "Our shame will feed Italy; through our disgrace it will regain its strength." But Romulus checks him, as he does the messenger who has ridden for a hundred hours without rest to bring the news of another defeat: "Go to sleep, prefect, the times have turned your heroism into a pose." Neither heroism nor wisdom nor planning can alter this "disorderly earth", which will forever be engulfed in wars and upheavals spreading suffering and injustice.

An Angel Comes to Babylon (1953) expresses a similar view of an ever-changing yet also never-changing chaos and confusion. Nebuchadnezzar alternates between ruling and being ruled; using his rival Nimrod as footstool, having his ministers spit at him, and then serving as Nimrod's footstool, being spat at in turn by the ministers. His only creation—or is it Nimrod's?—is the idiot son who hops through the palace. The other permanent element is the suffering and persecution of the people, symbolized in the red garb of the hangman. Heroic deeds and sacrifices are senseless. As the wise Akki tells his friends in his last and most bitter Macame, "Bear disgrace, walk any paths, bury, if the times demand it, wild hope, hot love, suffering, grace, and humanity, under a red hangman's grab."

Frank V (1959) is perhaps too blatantly a schematic parody of justice, recounting the fortunes of a dynasty of criminals and their "gangster-bank." (Incidentally, Dürrenmatt draws a parallel between this gangster-bank and the "gangster-monarchy," as he calls it, of Richard III.) At one point, two men invoke the aid of "divine justice" in robbing the bank; after they are discovered, the wife of the bank owner pronounces the verdict: "You are definitely accepted into our bank. The attempted break-in was laudable, even if amateurishly planned; the key was excellent work". When this same lady, after a lifetime of forgery, fornication and murder, confesses all and asks for justice, the president of the country in his turn gives a verdict:

    My old sweetheart, come on, don't take it to heart
    What you confessed may be nasty but
    If I look more closely it's no big thing….

There can be no justice, for that would jeopardize world order and economics. Instead, the lady is complimented for having saved the bank, which continues on its course.

In his other plays, Dürrenmatt builds similar extreme worlds, alienated from order and meaning, and constructed so that justice is reduced to the absurd. However, his Titus Andronicus, a play which presents a purely parodical accumulation of monstrosities, paints an even starker picture of this "idiotic course of time". During the course of his career, Dürrenmatt intensifies the parody, the grotesque, the simplification, using these devices to reduce everything to theatrical essence. Personal meaning or individual conscience, even if manifested only in the acceptance of victimization, become less and less possible.

This development begins with The Physicists (1962), set in an insane asylum inhabited by three brilliant scientists and run by an insane hunchbacked spinster, a good example of Dürrenmatt's totalized scheme: a mad hero in a mad world. In King John (1968), "the comedy of politics" portrays secular and religious rulers caught in a web of pointless wars and equally pointless reconciliations which lead to further injustice and violence. The city of Münster in The Anabaptists is yet another place of unreason and injustice, where Catholics and Protestants indiscriminately exchange positions, invariably getting hurt in the process. One knight, for example, on being struck by the falling statue of his patron saint, is converted to Protestantism, while at the same moment his colleague becomes a Catholic, so that once again they find themselves in opposite camps. Those in power are cynical, and the Anabaptists are either deluded fanatics or opportunists. The only rational man, a mathematical monk who believes that "my reason can conquer this unreasonable world", is constantly threatened by the gallows, whether Catholic, Protestant or Anabaptist.

In Titus Andronicus (1970), Dürrenmatt goes even further in exemplifying "the farce of politics". The opening lines at once reveal this world of pure parody, when Saturninus appeals to the patricians to elect him, not his brother, emperor of Rome:

    Elect me, and if my brother Bassianus
    Gets elected, stick this lewd pig immediately.

The play ends with the deaths and mutilations of all the characters, and the senselessness of all endeavors:

    What use is justice, what use revenge?
    They are only names for an evil affair
    The globe rolls along in the void
    And dies as senselessly as we all die….

With this background of chaos, accidents and inhumanity, the "monstrous disorder of things", Dürrenmatt concentrates on the actions of characters who make an effort to change "this world of breakdowns" (Panne, p. II). His heroes, like Romulus, are remarkable men; emperors, generals, millionaires, artists or scientists of genius, men of extraordinary powers who try to control, improve or order the world according to their visions of justice. They will not accept the injustice of the world as immutable, and reason is the chief weapon in their fights. Often their senses of logic and order are offended as much as their senses of tightness. Thus, Newton of The Physicists, finding disorder unbearable, has become a physicist out of love of order: "to reduce the seeming disorder of nature to a higher order"; and Schwitter of The Meteor (1966) flees from the "monstrous disorder of things" into a fantasy of reason and logic which he finds in art, which, as Dürrenmatt describes it, is a world closed in itself, with its own geometry. Most of Dürrenmatt's characters, dreaming of a higher order and a higher justice, aspiring to prove that the spirit is stronger than the matter, man, like to think in terms of computations which leave no remainder; but reality corrects their ideas, as Romulus admits at the end. Romulus's true greatness lies in this insight, rather than in his schemes, for as Dürrenmatt says, the only greatness which man can show in these times is to bear injustice.

Don Quixote, whose name is frequently mentioned in the texts, could be the model for all of Dürrenmatt's heroes. "We should all be Don Quixotes, if only our hearts were a little in the right place and we had a grain of sense under our scalps." Dürrenmatt's characters are indeed engaged in Quixotic struggles, against overwhelming odds, to which they dedicate themselves with single-minded enthusiasm, ready for any sacrifice.

But they are Quixotes also in the sense of being madmen and fools, often dangerous and destructive fools who bring disaster on themselves and those around them. They will not see that in the time of crisis in which they live, it is not enough to be sharp-witted, to reason, to plan and be dedicated. A minor character like Charles V in It Is Written understands this: "Our deeds," he remarks, "only heighten the confusion". He dreams of retiring from the Imperial throne to a cloister where he can circle all day around a statue of justice in quiet contemplation. In fact, the heroes' fanatical adherence to reason does add to the confusion and lead to such absurdities as an emperor playing a clown and a physicist, a madman. Moreover, their idealism causes them to compound the very chaos and injustice which they set out to destroy. Romulus, Mississippi, Claire, the Bastard and Titus (one could add others, such as Möbius, Knipperdollinck, even Baerlach from The Suspicion), are all ready to kill for the sake of their ideals. They are all therefore subjected to paradoxical reversals, when their desires for justice lead to murder and their heroism to victimization. Clearly, for Dürrenmatt it is always a matter of paradox and the worst possible case. Those who sit in judgment over their worlds are themselves judged in the end. As the admittedly opportunistic secretary of justice declares in The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi: "The world is bad, but not hopeless; it becomes hopeless only when it is measured by an absolute standard. Justice is not a chopping machine, but an arrangement". For Dürrenmatt, the tragedy of human justice is embodied in Kleist's character Kohlhaas, whom he interprets as a typical Dürrenmatt hero who "refutes the world, but in so doing is himself refuted by the world…. But Kohlhaas must be absolute, if he wants to be in the right, and thereby his justice becomes a crime" (Theater).

Romulus is the best example of this typical Dürrenmatt character; most later heroes resemble him in their aims, methods and in their final failures. At the beginning, we see Romulus as a clown, occupying his time with his hens while Rome is collapsing. But soon we recognize in him the relentless hero who has dedicated himself to justice. Romulus turns out to be the severe moral judge of his society. He condemns Rome for having transgressed his ideal: "it knew truth, but it chose force; it knew humaneness, but it chose tyranny…. Justice is at stake." In his fervor, he believes that he can execute justice only through execution, sacrificing his family and delivering his entire civilization to the barbarians, and finally dying himself. Like Mississippi and many other Dürrenmatt heroes, he makes himself into the executioner of his world: "Like a God is such an executioner." Romulus believes that in an end-time such as his, the only just solution is deliberately to become the victim. But his plan fails; there is no justice as he had envisaged it, only a "disorderly earth." In historical terms, this means that the world will be caught in an endless succession of wars, and in personal terms, that Romulus is forced to end his days in an ignominious retirement. Far from dying a just and heroic death, Romulus is pensioned off, his dream of justice having turned into the farce of his retirement. Having played the clown deliberately and for a purpose, he is finally compelled to play that part against his will. Whereas in the beginning Romulus sits in judgment over the world, in the end the world sits in judgment over him. Through him, Dürrenmatt shows how man's every effort at justice is overthrown by accident and by an ironic fate which annihilates his plans and forces him into a ridiculous defeat. But at the same time, Romulus is one of those terrible simplifiers who bring calamity because they insist on measuring the world with an absolute standard. Holding this ironic double vision, Dürrenmatt can grant his hero greatness only when Romulus willingly accepts his defeat in the face of reality and plays the bitter comedy to the end.

In The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi (1957), each character, dialectically developed out of the others, pursues his own vision of justice; they are all united only in their disregard of human life. Under the banner of Mosaic justice, Mississippi passes a record number of death sentences; this practice is frowned upon by the secretary of justice, for whom justice has to be politically feasible: "At times one has to decapitate in God's name, at times be clement for the devil's sake." To bring about a "triumph of justice", Mississippi is prepared to murder his adulterous wife and marry the woman who murdered her husband, and the communist Sainte-Claude is prepared to start revolutions in the name of human rather than divine justice. They generate murder and unrest, but neither man realizes his ideal and both are accidentally killed. They repeat Romulus's fate in that everything they do becomes senseless, but they do not share his insight. Their justice breeds murder and revolutions which "condense to a single monstrous trumpet blast of death."

Nebuchadnezzar in An Angel Comes to Babylon has the same aims and the same frustrations as Romulus. He wants to create an empire based on reason and justice, "a new order of things." But all he achieves is a string of executions and wars. It is indifferent whether he or Nimrod reigns. The empire "is carted through our times / On the old rails …", to paraphrase a line from King John: the same attempts at reform to combat never-changing grievances, a succession of wars and revolutions, and, above all, executions—in short, the eternal disorder and injustice which no man can change. As the Angel tries to teach Nebuchadnezzar: "ruling worlds befits heaven and begging befits man" (I, 190). Yet, although his impotence is proven by events, he remains defiant in spirit, seeking to oppose "creation out of nothingness with the creation out of the spirit of man and see which is better: My justice or the injustice of God."

At the beginning of King John, the Bastard is confidently "Playing the game I chose …" Like Romulus, he plays the clown with a serious purpose: everything he does serves his plan to regulate politics by reason, to make it just. Under his influence, King John himself becomes an advocate of justice, seeking restriction of the royal power, protection from arbitrary laws, freedom for the people. But invariably the crises and accidents of a chaotic world turn the Bastard's plans upside down:

     I interfered
     In the world of the powerful
     Tried to steer them to a better course.
     Yet stupidity pulled the carriage of fate.
     And accident.

The result of his intervention is further chaos and bloodshed. So Dürrenmatt again reaches paradox: the man who plans is most vulnerable to accident and achieves the very opposite of his plans; he who seeks justice is the most destructive. As John tells the Bastard at the end:

     You brought nothing but calamity.
     Improving the world you only made it the
     More damned.

This accusation also fits Dürrenmatt's other seekers of justice and order who turn out to be the perpetrators of the very evils they are trying to root out. The Bastard ends, not unlike Romulus, by withdrawing from the world and playing the part he once had freely chosen as a guise; he is a bastard and his brother's groom.

Although Titus's fate resembles that of the others, Dürrenmatt has so reduced him to the purely farcical that we cannot respond in the same way to his predicament. Titus lacks the wit and fascination of the other heroes, yet he shares their obsessions. A mixture of Romulus and Mississippi, Titus believes that Rome's greatness lies in its law, which he enforces in a single- but also narrow-minded manner. Dürrenmatt denies him the distinction of playing a part; Titus is simply a bigoted advocate of law and order. In an extended interlude—which, although not strictly linked to the plot, expresses Dürrenmatt's concern—Titus asks heaven and hell for justice, chanting together with his invalided soldiers:

     Justice, justice,
     Who sustains you, justice?
     Who greased you, justice?
     With whom do you whore, justice?

This litany continues for another page when, among other things, they plan to stage the tragedy of the missing justice.

Like Möbius before him, Titus plays the madman when all else fails him.

      The nonsense
      Of the world only insanity can still subdue.

He serves a mother her sons for dinner, then stabs her and is finally stabbed himself by the Emperor. So the cycle continues until all the characters are maimed, raped or killed. Justice becomes revenge which demands justice, which again cries out for revenge, and "Thus it goes on in the idiotic course of time." Once m[o]re justice turns to madness and then murder; it does not, finally, subdue the nonsense of the world.

In The Conformist (1973), Dürrenmatt continues the farcical reduction of his characters and plot, while still exploring the same themes; indeed, here he gives them a pure schematic form. The gifted scientist Doc, a latter-day Möbius, has been fired from his job during an economic crisis; now he works for Boss, whose business is murder. Doc lives literally underground, where he dissolves the bodies which Boss provides so plentifully. Doc's son Bill seeks justice by trying to destroy the world which has destroyed his father. Having become the richest man in the country, he squanders his fortune in an attempt to wreck the economy and hastens political collapse by arranging the murder of each incoming president. This mixture of Romulus and Claire is finally killed by Cop.

Justice breeds murder also in the case of Cop. He has dedicated his life to convicting Boss; but when at last he lays his evidence before the authorities, every one of the officials is interested only in sharing Boss's profits. Finally Cop "demands justice" from the highest judge; but laughing at Cop, this man demands the largest share of the profit: "Only drunk writers and divorced females babble of justice." Cop realizes the senselessness of his life's work, what a "gigantic nonsense the whole." In a world in which crime is "the form of our civilization," he is the only guilty one, "since I alone sought justice in a world in which justice can be stolen." He then voices one of Dürrenmatt's paradoxical ideas about justice from the aptly named Monster Lecture about Justice and Law, where Dürrenmatt had written: "No single man changes reality; reality is changed by all. Reality is all of us and we are always only single men." Indeed Cop, like Romulus, believes that a single man can realize justice which is everyone's business. And this misconception leads him to murder. At the end, however, aware of his mistake and of his powerlessness, he is ready to die himself. His death, at least, will be just, "even if it is a pitiful justice, but that already is much today; there is no other." Clearly, Dürrenmatt is doing what Charles V desires, always circling around justice.

In The Anabaptists (1967), the hero, Bockelson, is spared both the confrontation with paradox and the defeat, since the games he plays have no ulterior purpose. He "lets himself be driven / Wherever his game drives him….", not even trying to steer. He creates parodies of "lofty stories, heroic stories," without ever losing the sense that they are just different versions of his game; he plays king or beggar with equal detachment, out of "loose inspiration." He believes in nothing and uses everything. Somewhat like his creator, Bockelson recites "comedian-like a farce / Interspersed with Biblical passages and dreams of a better world…." So for once a hero remains undefeated; he is even promoted to the first rank of the Cardinal's theatrical company. Only he who plays a game as radically as Bockelson can survive. Those who believe in justice or reason come to grief, and those who are resigned to making compromises are condemned "to patch up a foul order …" (III, 126), as the Bishop knows from his own experience. Like the disorderly earth of Romulus the Great, this foul order is characterized by a terrible perversion of justice:

      The blessed strung to the wheel; the seducer pardoned
      The seduced butchered, the victors derided by their victory
      The judgment defiled by the judges….

The answers to this injustice are as extreme as the situations themselves. One can accept it in faith, trusting to divine grace. Man is nothing without grace, but grace is incompatible with human justice. Thus, the blind faith of the blind duke, who never defends himself and who gives in to his blindness, wins out over all the horror of this life. He would agree with Knipperdollinck's daughter in It Is Written that, "It does not befit man to be just" (III, 141). This is a lesson which the "just" Knipperdollinck learns only after he has sacrificed his wealth and his family in his dedication to justice: "Injustice is your lot, you men, and error. Look at my bloody sword of justice, you Anabaptists. Look at human justice. She cut everything to pieces without knowledge, she beheaded blindly. Be it cursed, human justice" (III, 141). He ends strung to the wheel, praising God: "Lord! Lord! / Look at my broken limbs, crushed by Your justice…."

Another answer, as the ends of both The Physicists and Titus Andronicus illustrate, is to see only meaningless indifference, monstrous accident, dead matter, "an obscene aberration of carbon … and incurable scab." But instead of submission, which is stressed more in the earlier works, and denial, which predominates in the later ones, integrity is an option: man can simply cultivate his own garden, as Augias does in the "garden of his renunciation," surrounded by dung, and the Bishop, amidst wars and slaughter, trying "to remain reasonable amidst unreason." Unable to change the world, these characters are resigned to doing the small things which are within reach. The Jew Gulliver from The Suspicion (1961) also teaches Commissioner Bärlach this lesson. Bärlach is another Quixotic seeker after justice, setting out "to combat evil with the mind." Although ingenious and courageous, he is nevertheless "a fool of a detective," who causes the death of an accomplice, and who might have lost his own life, had not Gulliver rescued him at the last minute, with the advice: "As single men we cannot save the world. Therefore we should seek not to save the world but to endure it, the only true adventure which is still left us at this late date." Yet, this awareness of an all-pervasive injustice, which cannot be altered, which can only be borne, does tend to keep these characters from taking any action at all.

Dürrenmatt's plays are built of dialectical reversals, antithetic contrasts, and the grotesque parallels and distortions which constitute his vision. As we have seen, he uses paradox and parody extensively. Seeing everything as its own parody presupposes an attitude of play, but it also implies the collapse of order and meaning, and man's lack of control. Thus, in The Physicists, Möbius, playing mad, acts out a parody of Solomon. Once "a prince of peace and justice," Solomon becomes the inspiration for madness and murder, for Möbius invokes this ruler when he turns to insanity and when he kills the nurse whom he loves. Ultimately, however, this parodied "poor king Solomon" is a symbol of our world and man's state. Like parody, paradox confronts man with the limits of his power and understanding, and exposes his impotence in the most striking manner. Both parody and paradox work through ironic reversals, antithetic constellations and developments. This process is crucial for Dürrenmatt, who believes that "the playwright needs a gradient, a contrast."

So it seems that parody, paradox, as well as the worst possible turn, the dialectics, the reversals, often so perfectly symmetrical, and the grotesque contrasts, all are ultimately in the service of Dürrenmatt's theatrical conception. "The more paradoxically it can be presented, the better reality is suited as theatrical material." "Justice breeds murder," therefore, can be read as a theatrical rather than a conceptual statement. And, indeed, Dürrenmatt's ideas of justice, however thought-provoking, are perhaps a little simple and absolutist, and do not add up to a philosophy. But they are always highly theatrical: heroes fighting to the last for justice and humanity, and turning justice into crime; both human inadequacy and monstrous disorder turning idealism destructive. "The disgrace of the times which makes statesmen out of murderers and judges out of executioners, forces the just to die like criminals." Moreover, these ideas are expressed, of course, by Dürrenmatt's grotesque parodical view.

So perhaps what is crucial for Dürrenmatt in the end is not even justice itself, but playing with the theatrical possibilities of this theme, exploiting the material, creating models, possible worlds. In a sense, that is the basic process of writing, but for Dürrenmatt, playing—with ideas and forms, with situations, with a role, with words—is especially important. He is always sharpening his ideas and situations into paradoxical and parodistical formulations, and challenging us with his constructions. This generalization applies to his expository prose as well as to his art; it describes his way of thinking. In the Monster Lecture about Justice and Law, for example, Dürrenmatt concludes that: "The world, through our injustice, is with justice unjust." In the same lecture, he says: "I think the world through by playing it through"; he compares the procedure to a game of chess in which it does not matter who wins: "the game alone counts, the theme of the opening, the drama of the endgame." "Every play," Dürrenmatt once said, "almost forces a counterplay. It is an inner dialectical process"; and, "The theater as a world of its own contains as its themes fictional men; it develops contra-puntally. A theme has a countertheme…."

As a result of these views, Dürrenmatt often devises contrasting endings for his stories, as in Greek Man Seeks Greek Maiden, or even reworks them completely. In The Pledge, subtitled "Requiem of a Mystery Novel," we get a direct glimpse of Dürrenmatt's way of playing with his material. The story concerns Matthäi, a brilliant criminologist, who is convinced of the innocence of a convicted murderer. "Inexorable, obstinate, passionate," like all of Dürrenmatt's heroes, he tracks down the real criminal. Yet he is foiled at the last minute by an accident, literally, a car accident, which prevents the murderer from being caught in Matthäi's trap. Now, says the old police inspector who tells the story, the writer has certain alternatives. He can let Matthäi win after all, thereby establishing the higher idea of justice, the victory of faith, hope and reason. (That is essentially what Dürrenmatt does in the television version of the story, called "It Happened in Broad Daylight.") Or, he can make the story even more cruel—"The worst also happens occasionally"—by letting Matthäi believe in the innocence of a guilty man and seek a murderer who does not exist; then all the protagonist's actions and plans, however clever, are absurd. Yet even here man has a choice: he can accept his inadequacy in all humility, aware that accounts do not square in reality, or he can deny reality and end in madness. After suggesting these possible models for his story, Dürrenmatt settles for a compromise: Matthäi, unable to accept the workings of accident and absurdity which have destroyed his life's work, goes mad; but at least the inspector discovers years later that Matthäi was right after all.

Despite the evidence, however, one must guard against making this distinction between concept and theater too neat. Perhaps Dürrenmatt, like so many contemporary writers, sees it the other way round: it is justice that is essentially theatrical and therefore parodical. Hence, he does not simplify and totalize—reality does; he is not theatrical—reality is.

In any case, like their creator, the characters are players in the widest sense; references to playing a game occur in almost every work. Palamedes plays "a lonely game, as it flourishes among ruins on the last evening of time," helping his father maintain his illusion. Da Ponte plays the opposite game, using the whores and derelicts of his army as actors to destroy the blind man's peace. Of course, Romulus, Möbius, Bockelson, the Bastard are all master players. But, as we have seen, their games—and Dürrenmatt likes to use a chess metaphor—end in a checkmate. Yet, though forms of play are always present in Dürrenmatt's art, there is the same change of emphasis and orientation which we have noted before. This tendency becomes apparent, for example, in a comparison of the two Bockelsons. In It Is Written (1947), Bockelson says that he plays "with men as with light balls" (II, 23); in The Anabaptists, he plays "comedian-like a farce / Interspersed with Biblical passages and dreams of a better world…." In the earlier plays, the characters are more immediately playful, experiencing the wonder and joy of their games: hence, Romulus's fun with his hens, and Bockelson's relish of food: "Blessed and full of grace be what I have just savored! / Russian salad with tuna!" Dürrenmatt stresses the wit and wisdom as well as the courage of these game-playing characters who, like Romulus, have the greatness to accept their defeat. In his later plays, he accentuates the limitations of their games and the futility. The idealist and rebel can survive only as the consummate actor who turns his dreams of a better world into a farce; believing in nothing, he reduces everything to a mere game. Playing now makes reality absurd and alienates man.

A crucial scene alteration in the two Anabaptist plays illustrates Dürrenmatt's development. At the end of It Is Written, Bockelson and Knipperdollinck dance on the rooftops under a giant moon and an infinite sky; theirs is a poetically exalted meeting which shows Dürrenmatt to be heavily influenced by the expressionists. In The Anabaptists, this scene is moved to a stage on which Bockelson appears, stripped to the waist, carrying paintbrushes and a pail, and wearing an enormous red train and a crown. Dürrenmatt, having forsaken deeper meaning and poetry, shows the world as a stage of grotesque theatricality. A similar reduction is apparent in the endings of Romulus the Great and The Physicists. At his abdication, Romulus bids farewell to the world, seeing it as a colored ball with rich provinces, a blue sea with dancing dolphins, yet also a ball dissolving into nothingness. This is a world monstrous at once in its abundance and in its emptiness. The defeated Möbius, on the other hand, sees the universe as a blue shimmering desert, "and somewhere around a small, yellow, nameless star circles senselessly, evermore, the radioactive earth." If formerly the monstrosity of the world stimulated wonder, fear and joy, now its effect is desolate, forsaken, alienated.

In his later plays, Dürrenmatt is working more and more towards reduction and a theatrical essence: "Dramaturgically I try to show things always more simply, to become more and more economical, to leave out more and more, only to hint." In Play Strindberg and, even more, in The Conformist, characters, dialogue and action begin to resemble the comic strip, and the entire conception, thus reduced, does not yield much stimulation or insight. And yet, however reduced and absurd it may be, playing is itself a liberating force; it creates distance, energy and freedom. The player observes "the doings of men a little detached from earthly encumbrances, in a light … in which lines appear more distinctly … and shapes stand out clearly against their background." Again, playing is defined as a way of making reality transparent, being precise about it. It not only expresses but also subdues and controls the "nonsense of the world." And it always precludes the sentimentality inherent in a perception of reality which reduces men to victims. In the same ways, seeing and shaping reality through parody and paradox create not only a grotesque perception, but also distance and freedom: clarity of vision—"The grotesque is one of the great possibilities of being precise"—as well as a form which enables one to cope with whatever desperate message it contains. For Dürrenmatt insists that his portrayal does not of necessity lead to despair: "He who despairs loses his head; he who writes comedies, uses it" (Theater). In the end, the effect is tragicomedy, although Dürrenmatt prefers to call it comedy. It is comedy for our time, comedy about tragedy, which is the only comedy we can put up with. This concept gives meaning to Romulus's statement, "Someone on his last legs like us can understand only comedies." The writer of comedy, says Dürrenmatt, transforms "a world which is no laughing matter into a stage world about which he laughs …" (Theater).