Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born on January 5, 1921, in Stalden im Emmental, a village later absorbed into Konolfingen in the canton of Bern, the son of the Protestant pastor Reinhold Dürrenmatt and his wife Hulda; his grandfather Ulrich had been a conservative politician and poet. A pastor's son, he said later, is isolated in a village from the start. The family moved to Bern in 1935. He wanted to be a painter, studied philosophy, German literature and natural science at Bern and Zurich, planned a doctorate on Kierkegaard that he never began, and in 1946 left the university to write. That year he married the actress Lotti Geissler, with whom he had three children, and they lived in Basel and at Ligerz on Lake Biel before settling in 1952 in a house above Neuchâtel, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His first play, It Is Written (1947), caused a scandal, and to keep the family afloat he wrote detective novels, The Judge and His Hangman (1950) and Suspicion (1951), in which the dying Inspector Bärlach pursues a justice the law cannot reach. His 1955 essay Problems of the Theatre argued that an age of collective guilt could only be shown through comedy, and he proved it the next year with The Visit, in which the richest woman in the world returns to her impoverished hometown and offers it a billion for the death of the man who wronged her. It made him world famous. The Pledge (1958), subtitled Requiem for the Detective Novel, grew out of a film script whose tidy ending he distrusted, and The Physicists (1962) shut three nuclear scientists inside a private asylum. After Lotti's death in 1983 he married the actress and filmmaker Charlotte Kerr. He won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1986, and died of heart failure in Neuchâtel on December 14, 1990, three weeks after a last public speech in which he called Switzerland a prison.

As a student in 1942 and 1943, Dürrenmatt rented an attic room at Laubeggstrasse 49 in Bern and covered its walls with large colour murals: scenes from mythology and the Bible, a wall crowded with the politicians of the war years, figures from his early writing. The room survives, restored, and is let to guests of Bern's cultural institutions.