Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit can be viewed as an allegory about the selfishness and corruptibility of people in general, or as a parable of the cruelty and carnage that took place in Europe and the world as a whole in the twentieth century. Like Max Frisch's Andorra, The Visit is given a setting in a fictional and only semi-realistic town in Europe. But it contains allusions to actual twentieth-century events and people, so the connection to the real world is made clear. The action of the play, however, is bizarre. An elderly woman named Claire Zachanassian, after she has become fabulously wealthy, returns to her hometown and offers the townspeople as a whole a huge sum of money if they will kill her former lover Alfred Ill (or Anton Schill in one version of the play), who in their youth many years earlier had jilted her. The townspeople initially appear horrified by the offer, but eventually they accept it, Ill is murdered, and Claire pays them the money ("a billion") and leaves.

It is not difficult to see the analogy between this situation and the violence, amorality, and carnage of general events that took place in the actual Europe of the twentieth century. Just as no one could have imagined the scale of destruction people were capable of in two world wars and the Holocaust, at first, in The Visit, Claire's offer is not taken seriously. But the whole town is eventually corruptible, and all are complicit in the killing.The town serves as a microcosm of Europe and the real world with its violence and destruction--though in the drama it is only one man who is killed, and it is a man who is himself guilty of crimes.