★★★★☆ How to corrupt a town, or a country

Der Besuch der alten Dame: Eine tragische Komödie

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

** spoiler alert **

I lived in Germany for a year, in Bremen and Göttingen, May 1983 - July 1984. One of my goals during that time was to become fluent in German. To do that I read several books. When I started, I looked for brief, easy-to-read books, and one of the first was Der Besuch der alten Dame. Playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt is (or was at that time) regarded as one of the foremost German-language writers, and Der Besuch was a thin book. When you're new to reading in a foreign language, you read VERY, VERY SLOWLY, so thin books are attractive.

The story is fairly simple. It takes place in the fictional small city of Güllen. The alte Dame of the title came from there. In her youth, she was badly treated by one of the men of the town and was driven out. Now old and fabulously wealthy, she returns to town intent on revenge. She tells the people of the town that she wants her old enemy murdered, and that if this happens, she will bestow on the town "a million". (What she will give the town a million of is never specified, but it is clearly understood to be a whole lot of money, enough to make everyone in town prosperous.) She makes it clear that she doesn't care who does it or how, and will not inquire, but that if her enemy is killed, the whole town will get the money.

What follows is the heart of the play. The townspeople of course protest that they will not commit murder for money. But then they start behaving as if prosperity was just around the corner. They go into debt to buy themselves all sort of goods they cannot possibly afford in the current economic state of the town. (It's an interesting little point that in German, "debt" and "guilt" are the same word: "Schuld".) It is obvious that everyone expects someone to murder the old Lady's enemy eventually, and pretty soon, at that. And in this way the entire town finds itself corrupted and committed to the murder, without any individual ever clearly deciding to do it.

Does this story have a happy ending? I'll leave that to you to guess.

As often happens, I liked the idea of the play more than the play itself. It was clever, and I absolutely believe that this is how, under the circumstances, people would and do behave. It's not hard to think of examples of people and peoples who have innocently allowed themselves to become committed to evil -- they're all around us.

It's a good lesson. But it was a bit too much like a lesson to be a truly engrossing story, for me.

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AnonymousJanuary 29, 2023 at 1:10 PM
Another excellent Avery review.
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