LiteraturSchweiz

Reading tip

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Meteor: Alongside «Besuch der alten Dame» and «Physikern», «Der Meteor» is one of Dürrenmatt’s most well known and successful plays. In it, the playwright tells the story of the death of the nobel prize winner Wolfgang Schwitter, who actually finds he is unable to die and repeatedly gets back up. In dying, he drags the people surrounding him along with him to the grave. Dürrenmatt’s play, which was performed for the first time in the Schauspielhaus Zürich in 1966 with Leonhard Steckel in the leading role, is above all a satire on the contemporary literature business and on the other hand a piece of theatre dealing with religion and philosophy, which transposes the scandal of resurrection into the 20th century and throws light on it from the perspective of the psychology of the individual, dramatizing it through the eyes of Schwitter and in the reaction of his entourage. It is actually a modern-day story of Lazarus. As a child, Dürrenmatt was fascinated by the biblical story of Jesus resurrecting the dead Lazarus. As he wrote in his autobiography «Stoffe», he asked his father, a pastor, if Lazarus were able to believe that he was dead. With this play in 1966, Dürrenmatt returns to the questions of religion that characterised his early work. Well worth another read! (Rudolf Probst, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)