Don Juan: Or, the Love of Geometry. Frisch shows how difficult it is to escape from roles. Because society wants to preserve the status quo, it is hostile to any notion of change; it expects people to conform to certain socially acceptable roles that consist for the most part of deadening routine. Frisch portrays those who conform to society without any struggle as smug and self-righteous (a good example of such a character is Biedermann in The Firebugs). Most of Frisch’s protagonists fight for the freedom to be themselves, but the social restrictions they confront are often so overwhelming that they are forced to capitulate.

Don Juan

Don Juan had its premiere on May 5, 1953, at the Zurich Schauspielhaus and at the Berlin Schillertheater. Don Juan appears in Frisch’s works for the first time in the play The Chinese Wall, where he protests against his literary portrayal as a seducer. In the play named for him, Don Juan is the polar opposite of the legendary Don Juan. Far from being the seducer, he is actually the seduced. The first three acts show how Don Juan is forced into the role of seducer; the last two, how, like Stiller in the novel I’m Not Stiller, he tries to escape from the image that people have formed of him.

To those familiar with the legend, the picture of Don Juan as the play opens is startling. Don Juan’s father, Tenorio, is worried about his son because, at the age of twenty, he avoids women. To try to remedy this, Tenorio sends Don Juan to a brothel; while there, however, Don Juan plays chess. Frisch’s Don Juan is an intellectual who loves geometry because it is clear, exact, and “manly.” Like Walter Faber in the novel Homo Faber, he distrusts feelings because they are too unpredictable and chaotic. Don Juan’s love of geometry is, however, responsible for his present involvement with Donna Anna. When he is sent to measure the walls of the enemy stronghold in Córdoba, he returns unharmed with the information, is named hero of Córdoba, and is given Donna Anna as his bride. Don Gonzalo, the commander, does not realize that Don Juan has used simple geometry to arrive at the measurements and has not exposed himself to danger.

The play opens on the night before Don Juan is to marry Donna Anna. The erotic festivities of this night stem from a pagan custom that the Christians have adopted. In the original custom, everyone was supposed to wear a mask. Through the power of love, the bride and groom could find each other despite the masks they were wearing. Because there were so many instances of mistaken identity, the custom was changed. Now the bride and groom do not wear masks because love can obviously err. Don Juan is drawn into the stifling eroticism of this night and sleeps with Donna Anna. He does not know that she is his bride because he has not met her before.

Don Juan’s experiences on this night make him suspicious of love. When he suddenly realizes at the wedding ceremony that he has slept with Donna Anna, he refuses to marry her. He cannot promise to be faithful to her because he thinks that people are interchangeable when the biological urge to mate is aroused. The cries of the peacock seeking a mate, which are a motif in the first part, stress this biological nature of love. Like most of Frisch’s intellectuals, Don Juan is basically self-centered. In fact, he holds a grudge against heaven for separating people into two sexes; he protests that the individual alone lacks wholeness.

It is not surprising that Don Juan repudiates love, because the society that surrounds him treats love cynically. Celestina, the brothel owner, turns the prostitute Miranda away because she has fallen in love with Don Juan: Such “sentimentality,” Celestina believes, is bad for business. Don Gonzalo and Donna Elvira, the parents of Donna Anna, supposedly have a model marriage, yet Donna Elvira thinks nothing of deceiving her husband by sleeping with Don Juan. When the captured Arab prince tells Don Gonzalo to take and enjoy his harem, Don Gonzalo curses the seventeen years of faithful marriage that prevent him from enjoying the proffered sensual delights. The only positive concept of love is held, ironically, by the prostitute Miranda, whose love for Don Juan remains constant.

Don Juan’s refusal to marry Donna Anna and the subsequent events give rise to his reputation as a seducer. To help him escape from the family that is thirsting for revenge, Donna Elvira gives Don Juan refuge in her room, where she seduces him. From her, Don Juan goes to Donna Inez. He is curious to see whether she will sleep with him even though she is engaged to his friend Don Roderigo. When she does, this seems to confirm his belief that love is indiscriminate and merely biological. At the end of act 3, Don Juan is surrounded by people whose deaths he has unwittingly caused: His father dies of a heart attack because of his son’s behavior, Donna Anna drowns herself because of Don Juan’s rejection, Don Roderigo kills himself because Don Juan has slept with his fiancé, and Don Juan unintentionally kills Don Gonzalo with his sword.

The fourth act takes place thirteen years later and depicts Don Juan’s descent into Hell, famous from the legend—but with a new twist. It is no longer an example of divine retribution but is actually staged by Don Juan himself to escape from his role as a seducer and from his financial problems. Don Juan seeks to persuade the bishop that his “descent into Hell” will provide the Church with proof of divine justice; the husbands of the seduced wives will have their revenge; and finally, youth will not be corrupted by following Don Juan’s example as a seducer. In return, Don Juan wants the Church to give him a cell in a monastery in which he can devote his time to his beloved geometry. Don Juan invites thirteen of the women he has seduced to witness the event, and arranges for Celestina to play the part of Don Gonzalo’s statue, which comes to life to punish him. Before the company arrives, Miranda, now the widow of the Duke of Ronda, offers Don Juan refuge in her castle, which he abruptly refuses. Don Juan’s plan goes awry because the bishop turns out to be a disguised husband in search of revenge. Even though he reveals Don Juan’s deception, the legend proves stronger than the truth—nobody believes that Don Juan has not been taken off to Hell. In the intermezzo that follows this act, Celestina tries to tell Donna Elvira (who is now a nun) about the role she played in the “descent into Hell,” but Donna Elvira prefers to believe in “miracles.”

In the last act, Don Juan has been forced to accept Miranda’s offer of refuge and has married her. He is sitting at the table, waiting for her to come. Outside the castle, his literary legend is being created on the stage. He is a virtual prisoner in the castle because, after his spectacular “descent into Hell,” he cannot return to the world. To return as a husband would also make him the laughingstock of everyone. Yet the intellectual Don Juan who despised love is beginning to love Miranda (he confesses that he misses her when she is away). Before, Don Juan could not reconcile love and intellectual pursuits. When he was drawn into erotic adventures, he felt as if he were a piece of nature while he wanted to be an intellectual; he thought that heaven scorned him as a man of the spirit. He had not treated women as individuals but as members of the female sex; his affairs with them were unimportant episodes. At the end of the play, he is beginning to grasp that a relationship with a woman can be meaningful and through it he can gain the wholeness that, as an individual, he lacks. When Miranda breaks the news to him that she is expecting his child, she tells him that she does not expect him to be pleased at first, but she is convinced that he will be pleased about it in the future. The play ends with a question mark: It is not clear whether the relationship will continue to grow or whether it will deteriorate into the dullness of everyday routine that Don Juan fears.

Throughout the play, Frisch shows how damaging preconceived images are to the individual. In contrast to the legend in which Don Juan appears as a fixed entity, Frisch shows him evolving from a naïve twenty-year-old, to a bored seducer, to a husband, and finally to a father-to-be (in the legend, Don Juan is never a father). Don Juan fights against his reputation, which does not fit him in the least. In the notes that follow the play, Frisch claims that Don Juan is more related to Icarus and Faust than to Casanova; despite his reputation, Don Juan, like Icarus and Faust, is a man of the spirit who thirsts for knowledge.

The Firebugs

The Firebugs had its premiere on March 29, 1958, at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. A prose sketch titled “Burlesque” that appears in Sketchbook, 1946-1949, right after Frisch has mentioned the fall of the Bene government in Czechoslovakia in 1948, forms the basic plot for the later play. The sketch tells how a stranger comes to a man’s house. The man wants to win the stranger’s friendship to demonstrate how humane he is. He gives the stranger shelter, storage for his gasoline, and even the matches with which the stranger and his friend incinerate him. Frisch developed this into a radio play in 1953 and finally into The Firebugs, in which the satire is sharper. The play was intended to share a theatrical evening with a companion play that Friedrich Dürrenmatt was to write. Later, Frisch added an epilogue to fill out the theatrical evening, but the epilogue does not add anything important to the play.

Frisch is sharply critical of the middle class and capitalism in this play. The protagonist, Biedermann, is an Everyman of the middle class (the name implies a philistine; a respectable, unimaginative bourgeois). Biedermann has become rich by manufacturing a worthless hair tonic—as he tells his wife Babette, his customers might just as well put their own urine on their scalps for all the good his hair tonic does. Unlike most of Frisch’s protagonists, Biedermann does not question his identity but is smugly satisfied with himself. Above all, he wants to enjoy his rest and well-being. His appearance of bonhomie, however, serves to mask an inner ruthlessness.

As the play opens, Biedermann is sitting comfortably at home reading about arsonists in the newspapers. He proclaims that they should all be hanged. Although he has been forewarned, he still lets Schmitz stay in his attic because he wants to appear humane. His humaneness is, however, a facade, as his treatment of his former employee Knechtling demonstrates. Because Knechtling (who has invented the hair tonic) wants to share in its profits, Biedermann fires him. When Knechtling comes to ask for help for his sick wife and three children, Biedermann refuses to see him and callously says that he should put his head in the gas oven—which he subsequently does. Biedermann is morally responsible for Knechtling’s death because he has driven him to suicide.

The reign of terror in Biedermann’s house grows. Because Biedermann is afraid of Schmitz, he asks his wife to turn him out the next morning. Schmitz’s accomplice, the former waiter Eisenring, arrives, and together they bring barrels of gasoline into the attic at night. Biedermann again is too cowardly to throw them out. In fact, when the policeman arrives with the news of Knechtling’s suicide, Biedermann tells him that the barrels contain hair tonic—he is afraid to tell the truth because Schmitz has heard him say that Knechtling should gas himself. To win the friendship of the arsonists—and thus (he hopes) be spared—Biedermann prepares a festive meal for them. He even gives them the matches with which they start the fire. Although he knows that they are arsonists, he deliberately closes his eyes because he is afraid of them.

The arsonists are adept at manipulating Biedermann. When Schmitz, a former heavyweight wrestler, arrives, he first alludes to his strength, in that way intimidating Biedermann. Then he flatters him by telling him how humane he is. Schmitz later manipulates Babette by telling her stories of his disadvantaged childhood. In this way, he arouses her compassion so that she will not have the heart to throw him out. Later, Eisenring describes how the arsonists use language to disguise their intentions. One disguise is joking about their intentions; another is using sentimentality (for example, when Schmitz describes his childhood); but the best disguise of all is telling the truth because nobody believes it. The arsonists do not hide the fact that they are arsonists. They tell Biedermann that the barrels contain gasoline and that they have chosen his house because of its strategic location—when his house burns, the whole town will go up in flames. Yet Biedermann insists on thinking that they are joking. It is not exactly clear why the arsonists want to burn down the town. Their accomplice, Dr. Phil, who has joined them because he wants a revolution, claims that they set fires merely for the love of setting fires, and he leaves them because they do not have a political reason for their actions. They could represent anarchy or the principle of evil (in the epilogue, the arsonists are the devils in Hell). Yet they also administer justice by punishing Biedermann for Knechtling’s death.

On one level, the play seems to allude to certain political events in the twentieth century. The original prose sketch could allude to the takeover of the Bene government by the Communists because it appears in Sketchbook, 1946-1949 right after Frisch has mentioned this. There are also allusions to the rise of Nazism—like the arsonists, Adolf Hitler never concealed his intentions, as is shown in his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925-1926). Yet, it is a mistake to think that the play applies to a specific event. Frisch was concerned about the vulnerability of middle-class democracy to terrorism because of its inner weakness and moral corruption.

Frisch himself noted that this play in particular was influenced by Bertolt Brecht, an influence that is most evident in the form. The six scenes are broken up by a chorus of firemen that comments on the situation, interprets the action, and warns of danger. The chorus is, however, helpless to avert the catastrophe—firemen can only put out fires, not prevent them. Another Brechtian device is the lack of suspense. From the outset, it is clear to everyone (except Biedermann) that the strangers are arsonists. The attention of the audience is thus focused not on how the play will end but on how Biedermann causes his own destruction. In the play, Frisch parodies the dramas of fate; what happens to Biedermann is not fate (as he would like to believe) but could have been avoided.

Frisch called his parable a “morality play without a moral,” an indication of Frisch’s belief that people cannot be taught. Like Brecht’s Mother Courage, Biedermann does not learn from his experiences. This is especially evident in the epilogue, which takes place in Hell. Hell here is on strike because Heaven has pardoned too many criminals, in particular those who have obeyed orders to kill while they were in uniform (an allusion to the Nazi war trials). Biedermann refuses to believe that he is in Hell. He protests that he has always obeyed the Ten Commandments. To the end, Biedermann is convinced that his only failing was that he was too good-natured; he refuses to see that he acted wrongly. He even demands restitution for his damaged property. Because of the strike in Hell, Biedermann and Babette are saved. As the play closes, there is a vision of a new town arising out of the ashes of the old, but the chorus suggests that people have already forgotten the lesson of how the old town burned. Like Biedermann, people do not learn from their experiences, a pessimistic conclusion about the middle class.

Andorra

Andorra had its premiere in November, 1961, at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Like The Firebugs, the plot is derived from a prose sketch, written in 1946, in Sketchbook, 1946-1949. The sketch, titled “The Andorran Jew,” tells of a young man who everyone thinks is Jewish. Some criticize him for his supposedly Jewish traits, while others admire him for these same qualities. When he is killed, it turns out that he was an Andorran like the others. After this sketch, Frisch quotes the commandment “Thou shalt make no graven image.” In Andorra, Frisch shows how the protagonist Andri becomes a Jew simply by being told that he is Jewish.

The action takes place in the fictional country of Andorra (Frisch stated emphatically that he was not alluding to the tiny country in the Pyrenees). Frisch intended the play to be a model: Such events, he believed, could happen anywhere. The characters are two-dimensional because Frisch was not interested in them as people but only in their attitudes to Andri. The Andorrans are convinced that their country is a model of all human virtues—it is a haven of peace, freedom, and human rights. To be an Andorran, they think, means to be moral and humane. As the image of whitewashing shows, their moral superiority is only a facade. When there is a storm, the whitewash is washed off the church, showing the red earth beneath. As the soldier comments, this makes the church look as if a pig has been slaughtered close by, an image that indicates that the virtuous appearance of the Andorrans masks brutality.

Although nobody knows it, Andri is in fact an Andorran, the illegitimate son of the teacher Can and a woman from the neighboring country of the Blacks. Instead of telling the truth, Can told everyone that he had rescued a Jewish child from the savage anti-Semitism of the Blacks, and wins praise for this “courageous” act. The Andorrans’ treatment of Andri shows, however, that they cannot tolerate anyone who they think is different. The cabinetmaker is unwilling to take Andri as an apprentice; he thinks Andri should become a salesperson instead because he cares only for money. Later, the cabinetmaker assumes that the faulty chair is Andri’s, and the other apprentice (whose chair it is) lets Andri take the blame. The soldier accuses Andri of cowardice, a supposedly Jewish trait. The doctor criticizes the Jews because they are ambitious. Yet these are traits of the Andorrans themselves. The cabinetmaker demands an exorbitant price for Andri’s apprenticeship; the doctor is overly ambitious; and when the Blacks invade, the soldier gives up without a fight.

At first, Andri desperately tries to be an Andorran, but when this fails, the priest persuades him to accept the fact that he is different. When Can finally tells Andri the truth about his origins, Andri refuses to believe him; he thinks that it is only a pretext to prevent him from marrying Barblin, Can’s daughter (his half-sister), whom he loves. When Andri’s mother, who inexplicably comes to see him for the first time, is killed, the innkeeper, himself the culprit, accuses Andri of the crime. Because he is different, he is made the scapegoat. Andri’s acceptance of his “Jewishness” causes his death. When the Blacks invade, everyone has to walk barefoot over the square, their heads covered by black cloths—a grotesque scene. Although Andri is in no way different from the others, the Jew Inspector selects him as a Jew, and Andri is taken away and murdered. Can, who belatedly has tried to tell the truth about Andri, hangs himself in remorse. As the play ends, Barblin is whitewashing—a futile gesture because the guilt of the community can only be covered up, not erased.

Like Biedermann, most of the characters do not learn from their experiences. After some of the scenes, the characters who are responsible for Andri’s fate step forward to the witness box and try to justify their behavior. With the exception of the priest, no one accepts any responsibility for Andri’s death; each proclaims his innocence and no one feels remorse. Despite Andri’s death, the Andorrans’ prejudice against people who are different is as strong as ever.

These plays (which are among his most successful) are typical of Frisch’s concerns. Frisch protested against the roles that people assume, either by choice or because they are forced into assuming them because such roles limit people’s potential to lead fulfilling lives. In most of his works, Frisch examined the consequences to the individual of such role-playing. In Andorra, however, he shows that people form preconceived images not only of individuals but also of different groups of people and of nationalities, which leads to prejudice and racism. Frisch pessimistically concludes that most people do not learn from their experiences. In a society consisting of conformists, Frisch’s protagonists vainly try to free themselves from their imprisoning roles. Such failure causes their progressive alienation from society, family, and friends—and ultimately from themselves.