Among the German-speaking authors in Switzerland who rose to international fame after the Second World War, playwright, novelist and essayist Friedrich Dürrenmatt is the most prominent. Already during his lifetime, his texts ranked high in the modernist canon for students, theater audiences and readers around the globe. His most celebrated plays, translated into virtually all written languages, remain in the repertoire of theaters worldwide to this day. Like his countryman Max Frisch with whom he has been often – and not always perceptively – compared, Dürrenmatt owed his tremendous early success to the stage and to this particular moment in history. During the post-war era, the German-speaking theaters were depleted of talent in the long aftermath of Nazi terror: many authors had…
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Citation: Knapp, Gerhard P.. "Friedrich Dürrenmatt". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 March 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1114, accessed 21 November 2024.]
