Durrenmatt and the Detectives
1962; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/402308
ISSN1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)German Social Sciences and History
ResumoFriedrich Diirrenmatt has written three detective novels. None of them has that aura of philosophical profundity which surrounds his other works: plays like Der Besuch der alten Dame, for instance, or prose works like his noch mbgliche Geschichte, Die Panne. But the detective novels do have a reason for being. In many of his works Diirrenmatt is concerned directly or indirectly with an almost obsessive idea: justice. We see it in the best known of his works, Der Besuch, in which a wronged woman wants to buy justice on her own twisted terms. The play certainly has many meanings, but one of them deals with the frailty of human justice. In Die Panne a commercial traveller is forced to stay over in a small town where a mock court of elderly townsmen finds him guilty of a crime not punishable in civil courts. They are only amusing themselves, but the realization of his crime causes the traveller to execute justice upon himself by suicide. In the almost farcical novel Grieche sucht Griechin social justice and the little man is the subject. Romulus pronounces justice on an empire in Romulus der GroBe by hastening its destruction. Even in works where the predominant idea is not justice, it is not hard to find frequently the word Gerechtigkeit coupled with random, paradoxical remarks on it. In each of the detective novels it is the main idea and in each one it is treated differently. To be more precise, we might say that these novels are variations on a theme. Diirrenmatt's optimistic philosophical conclusion in Der Richter und sein Henker, Der Verdacht, and Das Versprechen is this: If man wants justice, he must pursue it, but more often than not, the certain attainment of it is something he must leave to Heaven. What literary form is better suited to that message than the detective novel? It is the literary form in which the seeker of justice pursues the perpetrator of injustice. Diirrenmatt's only problem is to exalt the form, to make us realize that justice does not lie solely in the hands of the ingenious Scotland Yard man or the private eye. To see how he does this and to see how he varies the theme, let us look at the novels, chiefly at Der Richter. In this book a lieutenant of the Bern cantonal police is murdered. His superior, Inspector Bairlach, gets the case, but since Blirlach is old and sick, he requests the
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