Understanding Friedrich Durrenmatt

Roger A. Crockett’s comprehensive overview of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s dramatic and narrative oeuvre reveals the international importance of one of Switzerland’s most talented and scandalous playwrights. Durrenmatt gained fame beyond the Swiss borders in the early 1950s with the serialized detective novel The Judge and His Hangman and a series of radio dramas. His worldwide acclaim, however, rests largely on two dramas that have been canonized and anthologized as 20th-century classics of the world The Visit (1956) and The Physicist (1962).