Thomas Hürlimann

The Envoy

«Es braucht auch Männer mit Phantasie in der grossen Politik. Nicht zu viele, Gott behüte, aber ein paar davon braucht es.»

The Foehn wind is blowing up a storm but Heinrich’s blind father still wants to welcome his son with garlands, lampions and flags when he returns home from a successful mission on 8 May 1945, the day of Germany’s surrender. The son has led the Berlin legation through «momentous, testing times» and skillfully preserved Switzerland from war. However, the family welcome takes the worst possible turn in Thomas Hürlimann’s play «Der Gesandte» (first performed: Schauspielhaus Zürich 1991) as Heinrich Zwygart is dropped by the Federal Council. It is the «General’s uncompromising resistance» alone that has saved Switzerland, and not a diplomatic balancing act of adaptation and neutrality towards the Third Reich. Zwygart finds himself isolated as a «traitor to his country» and forgotten as all trace of him disappears in a flurry of thick-falling snow and strains of Wagnerian piano.

Performed for the first time in the 700th year of the Swiss Confederation, Hürlimann’s play provocatively draws attention to a period of transition in which clever opportunists changed their convictions as quickly as they redefined their understanding of Swiss history. In the confusion of such a collective living of lies, those who clung onto their historical significance like Zwygart, and Hans Frölicher, the fashionable, controversial Swiss delegate to Berlin from 1938-1945 he is based upon, simply went under.

(Severin Perrig, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)

Translation of title: Der Gesandte

Scena Theatre, Washington 1994