Set in and around Bern, Neuchâtel and Biel, the Barlach mysteries bring these watery regions alive. Swiss writers identify strongly with their region as much as with their country and this can sometimes hamper wider recognition, especially so as regions come in three different languages. Dürrenmatt’s characters slip from German into French and back again, with unease, the way driving around the lakes involves gear shifts from one language to the other. Dürrenmatt describes the locality south of the Jura bordering Lake Biel: an old settled landscape of vineyards, a thoroughfare for Celtic settlers between forbidding mountain ranges, and where Rousseau sought his last refuge in Switzerland on the island of St Pierre:
They drove downhill in the direction of Ligerz, into a land that opened out far below, at a tremendous depth. All around them, the elements lay spread out far and wide: stone, earth, and water. They were driving in the shade, but the sun, which had sunk behind the Tessenberg, was still shining on the lake, the island, the hills, the foothills of the mountains, the glaciers on the horizon, and the immense towering heaps of cloud floating along in the blue oceans of the sky.3
This deep landscape rubs up against a shiny post-war business world. Dürrenmatt’s tightly knit plot veers into metaphysical fantasy, peppered with acerbic asides on his countrymen. A policeman’s murder links to a nearby clandestine meeting of industrialists, arms dealers and the mysterious ‘foreign power’. Dürrenmatt writes a state-of-the-federation novel as well as a detective thriller.
Let’s face it: the Swiss have no education, no cosmopolitan character, not a trace of European consciousness. There’s only one remedy: three years of military service.4
Dürrenmatt pokes fun at the cosiness of the economic miracle, as Rousseau had characterised the remittance economy of Swiss mercenaries and their new-fangled sophistication. Under the post-war prosperity, artists are co-opted by entrepreneurs hand in glove with the state, their hands in each other’s pockets. Wealth operates as a gagging order. Secrecy obscures the bottom line. We are familiar with twenty-first-century corporate capitalism – if you can’t beat ’em, privatise ’em – but its first flush was in post-war Switzerland:
Decoration. We live in a cultured society, Lutz, and we need to advertise that. The negotiations have to be kept secret, and artists are good for that. Everyone dining together, a nice roast, wine, cigars, women, conversation, the artists get bored, huddle in little groups, drink, and never notice that the capitalists and the representatives of that foreign power are sitting together.5
Dürrenmatt’s detective mysteries were written at the height of the Cold War when Switzerland was concerned with bolstering its arsenal of fighter jets and tanks. Its principal arms supplier was Great Britain, later to be replaced by the United States. Switzerland’s military-industrial complex recalibrated its neutrality to a new set of circumstances and to ‘members of a foreign embassy’, as Dürrenmatt’s state councillor puts it. Crime in The Judge and His Hangman extends its tentacles into the arms industry under this new world order. Cosy with the Germans during the war, Swiss expediency – if not allegiance – has shifted. ‘For us, it’s a question of money: for them, it’s political principle,’ says the police chief with unintended irony. Like the later spy writing of John le Carré, recruited in Bern at about this time, Dürrenmatt’s detective mysteries suggest Cold War manoeuvring behind the local crime scene, but also greed. Profit from a ‘foreign embassy’ trumps dead bodies; a hand played surreptitiously and successfully during the war is still a winning suit.
Suspicion, the second of the Barlach mysteries, makes overt links between wartime medical experiments at Stutthof concentration camp and a clinic called the Sonnenstein, ‘one of the most expensive private hospitals in Switzerland’. The Sonnenstein caters to the terminally rich. Dürrenmatt has learned from Glauser and Brecht the allegorical trick of having a clinic represent the sickness of a whole country – a device later Swiss writers also found useful, as did the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Glauser’s insane asylum in Bern, with its hushed-up murders and spider web of intrigue, confines the poor, the victims of the 1920s and 1930s. It mirrors Switzerland’s situation between two world wars. Dürrenmatt’s Inspector Barlach is ailing. In the first sentence of Suspicion he ‘checks into the Salem’ with an incurable disease. He says to his visiting boss, ‘They let the big scoundrels go and lock up the little ones’ – a comment with a particular resonance in the late 1940s as it has in our own day after the 2008 economic crash. ‘But the real prey, the big beasts, the ones most worth hunting because they most deserve it – they’re officially off limits, like animals in a zoo.’6 The zoo, of course, is Switzerland.
Bern is equally claustrophobic, comfortable for some, a labyrinth:
But that’s what Berne has always been, a nice little hole in the wall for policemen to nest in. This place has been one infestation of tyranny from the beginning … Fifty years I’ve been living in this fat sleepy hick town of a capital, I can’t begin to tell you what it means for a writer, a man of words (not of letters!), to starve and vegetate in this place where all you get for mental food is the weekend book review section in the Bund.7
Between Glauser’s 1930s and Dürrenmatt’s 1950s, wealth has trickled down but also gushed upwards. In his Salem hospital room, Inspector Barlach spots the resemblance in a Life magazine picture between a concentration camp doctor and a contemporary practitioner working in the most expensive private hospital in Switzerland. ‘Most of the face was hidden behind a surgical mask.’ The allegory – concentration camp underwrites contemporary wealth – is clear. Dürrenmatt has Switzerland wriggling under the microscope again:
Even if it’s a crime to think what we’re thinking, let’s not be afraid of our thoughts. How can we overcome them – presuming they’re wrong – unless we examine them, and how can we do that unless we admit them to our conscience?8
Dürrenmatt’s subject is the examination of conscience. The pastor’s son coming of age in wartime Switzerland holds his father’s generation up to the mirror. Not a new theme following a war, but new for a neutral country.
In the second section of Suspicion, Barlach himself is imprisoned in the clinic, at the mercy of ex-Nazi Dr. Emmenberger and his morphine-addicted assistant. The clinic is straight out of a Hammer movie, with its resident dwarf and sliding wall revealing a Grand Guignol operating theatre. The plot turns gothic and the monster is in charge; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not far away. Dürrenmatt is fond of such medicalised set pieces. The Pledge ends with a deathbed confession in the cantonal hospital. Dürrenmatt’s best known play, The Physicists, is set in Les Cerisiers, an up-market insane asylum in a lakeside town suspiciously like Neuchâtel, ‘the once attractive little place with its castle and old town’:
rundown aristocrats, arteriosclerotic politicians (unless still in office), manic-depressive industrialists, and so on, in short, the entire mentally disturbed elite of half the Western world.9
In a chapter of Suspicion titled ‘The Hell of the Rich’, the clinic becomes a metaphor for Switzerland as the retirement home of Europe: drip-fed the best but dying at heart. Dr. Emmenberger acts in a Faustian pact with his wealthy patients:
the names of the politicians, the bankers, the industrialists, the mistresses, and the widows, celebrities all of them, and those unknown crooks who have raked in millions at our expense and at no cost to themselves. So here’s where they die, in this hospital. Some of them make blasphemous jokes about their own decrepitude, others revolt and spit out wild curses against their fate, against the fact that they own everything and yet have to die, and still others whine the most revolting prayers in their rooms full of silk and brocade, begging to be spared the substitution of paradise for the bliss of living down here.10
Dürrenmatt’s morality tale pits extreme wealth and mortality. The land of milk and honey dreamed up at the beginning of the century by H.G. Wells has curdled with money. Contemporary Switzerland may be as close as we get to heaven for
those who can pay, but Dürrenmatt suggests that it comes at the price of turning a blind eye.
The moral conscience of the tale comes from the mouth of a boulevard littérateur called Fortschig, who is killed by a dwarf for exposing the evil doctor:
That a human being, a Bernese, went about his bloody trade under an assumed name in an extermination camp near Danzig – I dare not describe in detail with what bestiality – appals us; but that he should be permitted to direct a clinic in Switzerland is a disgrace for which we can find no words, and an indication that these may very well be our own latter days … for our reputation is at stake, the harmless rumour that we are still honestly muddling through the sinister jungles of these times – (perhaps earning a little more money than usual with watches, cheese, and some weapons of not very great significance).11
Vera B. Profit (a name Dürrenmatt might have dreamed up himself) suggests that the Sonnenstein is partly based on a clinic in Berlin where mentally ill patients were systematically liquidated from 1940.12 Dürrenmatt locates his Sonnenstein on the Zürichberg where Dr Bircher-Benner – of muesli fame – treated his patients with a diet of fruit and nuts in monastic conditions. (Bircher’s clinic now belongs to Zürich Financial Services.) Dürrenmatt means to point the finger at Swiss materialism – ‘that unfortunate tendency to regard morality as unprofitable and to equate profit with morality’.13 He suggests that the whole of Switzerland is a health farm for the wealthy, where an ageing population is served up the best that life has to offer. The search for prolonged life at any cost becomes the ultimate expression of materialism.
If the camp near Danzig was the hell of the Jews, the Christians, and the Communists, this hospital here, in the middle of dear old Zürich, is the hell of the rich.14
Dürrenmatt’s Huis Clos situations turn farcical. The nurses are fit for assisted suicide. Reproduction masterpieces adorn the walls as kitsch panacea for the dying – guests? Inmates? Customers? Cocooned in cotton wool and tortured by an ex–concentration camp doctor, these terminal cases are a blistering judgement of the Swiss post-war economic miracle.
Dürrenmatt achieved even wider international fame with his novel The Pledge (1958), adapted for the screen for the second time in 2001 by Sean Penn, starring Jack Nicholson as investigating detective Matthäi. Its subject is that most contemporary of crimes: child abuse. An eight-year-old girl is brutally murdered in Mägendorf, a quiet lakeside village near Zürich. She is the third victim.
Dürrenmatt frames his story with a chance encounter between a writer of detective fiction and Dr. H., former chief of police of the canton of Zürich:
Last March I had to give a lecture in Chur on the art of writing detective stories. My train pulled in just before nightfall, under low clouds, in a dreary blizzard. As if that wasn’t enough, the roads were paved with ice. The lecture was being held in the hall of the Chamber of Commerce. There wasn’t much of an audience.15
This leisurely opening points the way to a fast-paced thriller. The Pledge shows small-town Switzerland seething with elemental revenge. Men are farmers, hunting and fishing types. Their womenfolk don’t yet have the vote (granted only in 1971). Church bells ring. The village bar is called The Stag. The reader might even be tempted to see the murdered girl as Heidi, that emblem of Swiss innocence:
The farmers and workers stood again as before, silent, threatening, motionless under the sky, which was putting on the first shining lights of the evening; street lamps swayed over the square like pale moons. The Mägendorfers were determined to seize the man they took to be the murderer. The police cars stood like large dark beasts, at bay in this human tide. Again and again they attempted to break loose, the motors roared and howled, then subsided, discouraged, and were turned off again. No use. The whole village – the dark gables, the square, the crowd in its uncertainty and rage – staggered under the burden of the day’s event, as if the murder had poisoned the world.16
Investigating detective Matthäi confronts Dr. Locher in the first of the thriller’s two clinics. They try to profile the psychology of the murderer. Dürrenmatt sets his elemental crime at the heart of a bell-ringing nation:
Bells ringing all around, the whole country seemed to be clanging and chiming; and somewhere in Schwyz canton I got held up by a procession. One car after another on the road, and on the radio, one sermon after the other. Later the sounds of guns banging, whistling, clattering, booming away in shooting booths in every village. A monstrous, senseless commotion – the whole of eastern Switzerland seemed to be on the move.17
This hunting and shooting description of a Swiss Sunday has a Wild West quality. Matthäi sets a trap for the serial murderer, using an eight-year-old girl as bait, in a gas station on the Graubünden highway. She wears red. The big bad wolf plies the child with chocolate truffles and ‘drives a black American car’. Guns, gas station and US car: is Dürrenmatt suggesting the post-war Americanisation of federal life?
A visit to a second clinic eventually solves the crime. The Chief of Police is summoned to a deathbed confession from Frau Schrott, ‘waxen, unreal, but still curiously animated’. Dürrenmatt presents this old doll as hailing from patrician military stock:
My grandfather was Colonel Stänzli who led the retreat to Escholzmatt in the Sonderbund War, and my sister married Colonel Stüssi of the Zürich General Staff in the First World War, who was General Ulrich Wille’s best friend and knew Kaiser Wilhelm personally.18
Her sister ‘owns half the Bahnhofstrasse’. Dürrenmatt seems to suggest that the crime is due to the sclerosis of Swiss values. On the one hand, Heidi the victim in her red dress; on the other, this old-money crone whose second marriage was to her ‘chauffeur and gardener and general handyman’,19 a toy-boy thirty-two years her junior. Shades of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that other allegory of social classes in bed with each other. Bertie the handyman has ‘limited mental capacity’ and loves to eat, ‘especially noodles, all sorts of pasta in fact, and chocolate. That was his passion, chocolate.’20
As with the two earlier detective stories, Bertie the handyman and old-money Frau Schrott are emblematic of something rotten in the confederation. He drives her vintage pre-war Buick. ‘There were truffles missing from the bonbon box,’ she says.21 This marriage of convenience between old military money and the simple-minded chauffeur with his passion for chocolate becomes an allegory for wartime Switzerland: chocolate and arms. Dürrenmatt discouraged such readings, but they are clear for all to see.
Mrs Rose in The Physicists, Dürrenmatt’s most enduring play, is a similarly benevolent sugar mamma:
When I first met him, he was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. He had rented an attic room in my father’s house. He was an orphan and miserably poor. I made it possible for him to enter college and later to study physics … To provide for my family, I went to work in a chocolate factory. Tobler’s Chocolate.22
Toblerone keeps the marriage sweet. Bertie the child-killer, for his part, takes his justification from God, although not very convincingly. ‘“Mumsie,” he replied, “please let me do it just this one time; it’s commanded by heaven, I have to obey, and she has a red skirt, too, and blond braids.”’23 God shines light on this marriage of convenience. The priest waits with Extreme Unction, that panacea for the sins of the world.
Dürrenmatt employs a wicked humour throughout these parables of post-war Switzerland. The retirement clinics where his plots tick along are kept going with money from the dead.
Dr. H. the Chief of Police likes to eat in Zürich’s Kronenhalle restaurant under a painting by Miró. Dürrenmatt enjoys juxtaposing high art and lowbrow business:
The place was full – everyone who was anybody in Zürich and interested in a good meal was there. Waitresses scurrying around, the food on the trolley steaming, and the rumble of traffic sounding in from the street. I was sitting under the Miró, all unsuspecting, eating my liver dumpling soup, when the sales representative of one of the big fuel companies came up to me.24
The atmosphere of wellbeing here belies the undercurrent of crime: chief of police and fuel company representative in a consumer paradise. In the final chapter of The Pledge, Dr. H. returns with his family to Chur, where the bonbon box is taken out again:
In Chur we had trouble parking. The pastry shop was crammed full of people from Zürich and their screaming children, all stuffing their bellies and sweating. But finally we found a table, ordered tea and pastry. But my wife called the waitress back again.
‘And please bring us half a pound of chocolate truffles.’25
Dürrenmatt’s most scathing comment on Swiss material smugness is an essay, originally a speech for Václav Havel, dramatist, dissident and president of the Czech Republic. ‘Switzerland – A Prison’ was delivered in 1990 following the Velvet Revolution. Dürrenmatt has chosen his occasion with mischief and an eye to history.
Thus Switzerland can be juxtaposed with your tragic grotesques as another kind of grotesque: a prison, albeit very different from the kinds of prisons into which you were thrown, dear Havel; a prison in which the Swiss have taken refuge.26
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Switzerland’s scourge
Switzerland has historically provided safe haven for refugees. Dürrenmatt sees it as safe haven for the Swiss themselves, a mountain redoubt as General Guisan conceived of it during the Second World War. The writer builds his prison metaphor by alluding to immigrant labour:
On the one hand, there are not enough free prisoners to keep the prison clean, to polish the luxury cells, the hallways, the prison bars themselves, so people have to be let in from outside who will renovate, restore, reconstruct, and maintain the prison just in order to make a living, while prisoners, who also earn a living but are free look down on these outsiders as prisoners who are not free.27
The Swiss blow hot and cold about Dürrenmatt’s portrayal of their country as asylum, wealthy funny farm and prison. It spoils an image of themselves as squeaky-clean, their history above reproach. He knows all the sore points:
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