What was Friedrich Dürrenmatt's writing process and revision approach?

The film came first. He wrote the screenplay for Es geschah am hellichten Tag, and the trap in it works: the child murderer is caught. Then he wrote The Pledge, the same case with the ending he thought was true, and put a retired police commander in front of it to explain why the tidy version was a lie. His revision happens at that level. He reopened plays after they had been staged and printed later versions, treating a finished text as a machine that could still be recalibrated, and the recalibration is usually about consequence rather than sentences.

Why did Friedrich Dürrenmatt write comedies about serious subjects?

His essay Problems of the Theatre puts the argument plainly: tragedy needs somebody who can be held answerable, and the modern state spreads an act across so many desks that the answerable person disappears. A clerk signs. A committee approves. A department places the order. Comedy, and the grotesque in particular, is the form that can still reach that material, because it works by distortion, and distortion is how you show a reader a horror that the people inside it experience as administration.

How does Friedrich Dürrenmatt write crime fiction without a solution?

The Pledge carries the subtitle Requiem for the Detective Novel and earns it. Detective plots promise that intelligence gets rewarded. Dürrenmatt keeps the intelligence, keeps the clues, keeps the procedure, and removes the reward, which is harder than writing an unsolved case, because his inspector does solve it and the solution cannot reach the world. For the refusal to register, the genre machinery has to be in perfect order. Break a form from inside its own competence.

Which Friedrich Dürrenmatt book teaches the most about structure?

Start with The Breakdown. One evening, one house, four hosts and a guest, and the whole apparatus lies open: a rule proposed as a game, a participant who agrees to play, evidence that accumulates out of his own mouth, and a sentence handed down after the meal. Read it in a sitting and mark where each exit closes. Then read The Visit, the same construction at the scale of a town and across three acts, and the second reading will show you which parts scale up and which have to be reinvented at length.

Does his method work outside crime and satire?

The method has nothing to do with crime. What it needs is a rule a group believes, an interest that quietly contradicts it, and a decision that has to be made in public. A family working out which sibling takes the mother in, with money attached, is a Dürrenmatt situation. So is a hospital ethics board, a village vote on a building permit, a company deciding on Friday whom to let go. Keep the rules real and the interests exact, and the shape does what it does in Güllen, with no billion and no panther anywhere in sight.

How does he keep the reader on side when the whole cast is compromised?

Ill is guilty. He bought two men to swear his own child away, and the book tells you so before it asks you to care about him, which reverses the usual arrangement, where sympathy gets purchased with innocence. What Dürrenmatt gives his people instead is competence and a case. They think well, they speak well, and their arguments are the best ones available in the position they are in. A reader will follow an intelligent person into a decision he would refuse from a fool, and that following is the trap being built.

Fiction

Friedrich DürrenmattWriting Style

Born 1/5/1921 – Died 12/14/1990

Build airtight cause and effect, then allow one reasonable exception. The trap closes while everybody behaves sensibly.

Write like Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Friedrich Dürrenmatt: voice, themes, and technique.

Four men sit on a bench at the Güllen station and count the express trains that pass without stopping. The Visit opens there, in a bankrupt town with excellent manners. Then the richest woman in the world steps off a slow train and offers a billion to the community that raised her, on one condition: someone has to kill the shopkeeper who once perjured his way out of fathering her child. The mayor refuses. The shop starts selling on credit.

Dürrenmatt writes that sequence in the register of a municipal record. The town keeps its committees, its church service, its press conference and its correct phrasing, while better tobacco appears on the shelves, milk goes on account, and new yellow shoes turn up on the feet of men who are still assuring Ill that his life is safe. No sentence raises its voice. The bookkeeping does the work.

He gives the reader no villain to hide behind. Claire Zachanassian is monstrous and precise, the town is decent and murderous, and the schoolmaster who understands the whole arrangement, and says so once, drunk, in front of journalists, is the man who later stands up and renames the killing as justice. You can follow the chain link by link, and at each link the reasonable move is the one that takes the town a step closer to the body.

The same builder is behind the plays, the radio plays and the crime novels. Private anguish gets a line, not a chapter. What the page gives you instead is who owns what, who signed, who was in the room, and what the minutes will say in the morning.

How to Write Like Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

1
Draft the closing document first
Most of his endings can be written as a document: a death certificate, a pension, a court file, an old woman's confession that arrives too late to be used. Write yours before you write the story, one paragraph, in the voice of whoever files it. Then work out what your world has to permit for that paragraph to be filed without anybody breaking a law. That question generates the plot. It also keeps you from writing toward a twist, since the outcome is settled and the interest moves to how a reasonable community gets there.
2
Put the antagonist's terms in writing
Claire's offer is a contract. There is a sum, a division of the sum, a list of beneficiaries, a condition and an audience, and she reads it out in a public hall where the town has thanked her for her generosity before the condition has been reached. Write your own antagonist's demand in that form, on one page, with numbers in it. Cut every sentence that sounds like a threat, because a threat lets the other characters refuse for free. What you want on the page is an offer a decent person can be seen to consider.
3
Make each concession cost an object
Agreement is easy to assert and hard to believe. Purchases are believable. Dürrenmatt shows the drift through a policeman's new gold tooth, through brandy the shop has suddenly started stocking, through an order placed on credit that the buyer cannot cover unless something changes. Give each stage of your group's drift an object, put the object in the scene before the character admits anything, and let your protagonist be the one who notices. Your reader then does the arithmetic, which convinces more thoroughly than a speech about corruption.
4
Audit your coincidences
Two questions per accident: does it help my protagonist, and had the reader met it before it mattered? Delete the helpful ones. The one coincidence The Breakdown allows itself is the car that fails on the first page, before anything is at stake, and after that the evening runs on the appetites of the people at the table. Aristotle asked that even chance wear an air of design. In practice: introduce the mechanism early, in a sentence about something else, and let it sit in the room doing nothing until you need it.
5
Write each character's alibi sentence
Before the second draft, give each character one sentence they can say to themselves at night, in their own vocabulary, and make it a sentence a colleague would accept. The police in The Pledge have theirs ready: there is a confession. A pedlar broke down after a night of questioning, said what was wanted, and hanged himself in the cell, and the file closed over a dead man's word. Now put the sentences under pressure. One character bends it, one repeats it louder, one quietly stops saying it, and those three reactions are three different people.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Writing Style

Breakdown of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

The Judge and His Hangman opens with a village policeman finding a car parked crookedly above Twann, a dead colleague behind the wheel. The sentence reporting this would do for a fallen tree. That flatness carries weight. Dürrenmatt's default shape is subject, verb, consequence, with the qualification hung off the end, so the fact lands first and the trouble with it lands a beat later, in the order a person receives bad news rather than the order a moralist would prefer. Short sentences deliver verdicts. Long ones lay out the reasoning that made the verdict unavoidable, and they keep their grammar tidy while the content stops being tidy at all.

Vocabulary Complexity

Watch which noun does the killing. In Güllen it is justice: Claire buys it, the schoolmaster invokes it from the platform, the assembly votes for it unanimously, and a radio reporter broadcasts the vote as an act of idealism. The same killing the mayor rejected in the first act as an offence against humanity is now town business, minuted and photographed. His diction stays plain and borrowed from institutions, because institutional words arrive with permission attached: duty, order, a contribution to the community. His characters are sincere when they use those words. That is the part that hurts.

Tone

How do you make a reader enjoy a death sentence handed down after dessert? The Breakdown seats a travelling salesman whose car has failed at a table with a retired judge, a retired prosecutor, a retired defence counsel and a retired hangman, who try him for entertainment over dinner and a great deal of wine, and the salesman has the evening of his life. The narration is dry, courteous, curious. It declines to look down. Dürrenmatt lets his characters be clever and lets them be funny, so the laugh is shared, and the shared laugh turns out later to have been a signature on something.

Pacing

Dürrenmatt accelerates by removing exits. Ill goes to the station to leave Güllen, and the town turns out to see him off, friendly, unarmed, assuring him that of course he is free to travel, and the train pulls out without him because he cannot walk through a crowd that is waiting for him to be gone. No hand touches him. The scene moves faster than a chase, and it consists of people being polite on a platform. Count the exits your protagonist has and take one away per scene. Closing the same exit twice costs you the tension, because your reader learns that the story is circling.

Dialogue Style

Dialogue here is a negotiation about who has to act. The mayor calls at the shop, embarrassed, entirely courteous, and invites Ill to be his own judge, which is a way of asking the problem to remove itself while the town keeps its hands clean. In The Physicists, Möbius argues two intelligence agents into a lifetime in a lunatic asylum and wins on the merits, because inside that building he is right. Lines shift responsibility a few centimetres sideways. The courtesy holds. That is what makes the transcript funny and the situation airless.

Descriptive Approach

Claire Zachanassian arrives with a coffin among her luggage. The town does not ask what it is for, and the reader is not told, because the ending has been standing on the platform since the first act, labelled as freight. Objects arrive before their meaning. The church hangs a new bell, and the pastor tells Ill to run. Matthäi, in The Pledge, treats a murdered child's crayon drawing as a witness statement and spends the rest of his life on what he reads in it. Description here is closer to inventory: what was bought, who owns it, which door it opens, who holds the key.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Friedrich Dürrenmatt uses across their work.

The worst possible turn

The twenty-one points he appended to The Physicists state the rule he worked by: a story has been thought through to its end when it has taken the worst turn it can take. Worst carries a technical sense here. Among the outcomes your own rules still permit, it is the one that costs the characters most and leaves them least able to object. The Meteor runs the rule on a man who wants to die and keeps waking up, while the visitors at his bedside are the ones who go. The tool fails when the turn is merely cruel, because a turn the rules do not allow reads as spite from the author.

Guilt divided by the number in the room

Güllen kills Ill in a gymnasium. The men form a lane, the reporters are ushered out, the lights drop, the lane closes, and what comes out is a body with a heart attack on the certificate and a mayor calling it death from joy. Each participant supplies one defensible movement. The sum is a murder with no murderer in it. That arrangement is the one Dürrenmatt found most interesting, and your reader recognises it from committee minutes.

Accidents that only subtract

Matthäi's trap in The Pledge is well built. His reading of the case is right, his patience is inhuman, and the man he is waiting for dies in a car crash on the way to him. What remains is a girl playing beside a petrol pump, an officer behind a window, and a correct solution with nothing left to solve. Chance in Dürrenmatt takes things away. It hands nothing back. Sort your own coincidences into the rescuing kind and the ruining kind, then keep the second kind and give it a mechanism the reader has already seen.

Procedure that outlives the facts

In The Tunnel a student works out that the tunnel his usual train has entered is going on too long. The staff consult the timetable. They keep consulting it while the train goes down, because a timetable is what they have and reading one is what they know how to do. Put a procedure in front of a catastrophe and let the procedure continue. Comedy and dread come out of the same source, which is people doing their jobs correctly at the wrong scale.

The borrowed hangman

Bärlach is dying and can prove nothing against Gastmann. So he takes the young officer who murdered a colleague, aims him at Gastmann, and lets him shoot a man who did not commit that particular murder, which settles a wager the two old men made decades earlier. The judge supplies the sentence. Somebody else's guilt supplies the execution. Give your protagonist a verdict he cannot reach legally and a person who can be steered toward it, and the reader's own position becomes the subject of the book.

The standing offer

Claire does not repeat herself. She makes the offer once, takes the hotel above the town, sits on the balcony with a cigar and waits, and the waiting does the work, because a price left on the table stops being a proposal and becomes a fact of the local economy. She needs no acceptance. The town only has to keep living next to it. Put your pressure in the room early, then leave it alone and write the people.

Literary Devices Friedrich Dürrenmatt Uses

Literary devices that define Friedrich Dürrenmatt's style.

Structural irony

Romulus the Great gives its emperor a hobby: he breeds chickens named after his predecessors while the Germanic army crosses the border. The hobby is a verdict. Rome has earned its end, he has decided, and he means to hand it over and be killed for it, which makes him the only competent man in the play. Then Odoaker arrives, admires him, turns out to breed poultry himself, and pensions him off to a villa. The narration signals none of this. The action produces the opposite of every stated purpose while the sentences stay straight, and that is where his irony sits: in outcomes rather than in the voice.

The grotesque, kept exact

Claire travels with two blind men who speak in chorus. They are the witnesses who swore for money at the paternity trial, and she found them, bought them, had them blinded and castrated, and kept them. Her butler presided over that trial as judge. The distortion is enormous and the accounting around it is exact, which is the condition O'Connor set for the grotesque: you may rearrange nature only if you can first describe it accurately. Güllen's poverty has a cause, its shops have prices, its officials have procedures. The eunuchs are credible because the ledger is.

Paradox as a constraint

Möbius has worked out something that would let anyone build anything, so he feigns insanity, strangles the nurse who loves him and wants to take him out of the asylum, and talks two enemy agents into staying locked up with him. Every step is reasoned. Every step is monstrous, and the reasoning makes it monstrous rather than excusing it. Then the physician who owns the sanatorium explains that she has been photocopying the manuscripts and has built her trust on them. Two correct principles that cannot both survive: that is the shape he builds around, and it is why his plots move without an antagonist who wants anything.

Reversal delivered as paperwork

In The Execution of Justice a cantonal councillor shoots a professor dead in a crowded restaurant, in front of witnesses, and goes to prison without explaining himself. From his cell he hires a young lawyer for a piece of research: reconstruct the case on the assumption that he did not do it. The lawyer takes the money. The assumption grows a second suspect, the suspect grows a file, the file reaches a court, and the man who shot somebody in public walks out. Aristotle wanted the turn to come out of the action, with no god lowered in on a rope. Dürrenmatt's version arrives through the proper channels, stamped, every signature legitimate.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

Stacking misery and calling it Dürrenmatt

He gets read as a pessimist, so misery arrives in bulk on the theory that the mood is the method. What is missing is the ledger. His darkness is an output: a rule the town accepts, an interest each household has, and a sequence in which every reasonable step removes an option, until one exit is left and each participant can name a small contribution. Take that arithmetic away and your reader stops fearing the machine and starts noticing the author's preferences, which is the moment a hard book turns into a childish one.

Reading the grotesque as permission to be strange

The odd detail gets copied and the exactness beside it gets dropped. A panther shows the difference. Claire brings one, it escapes, and the town arms itself and hunts it through the streets, which is the rehearsal for what the town does next, and which is also a real animal with a real municipal response and a marksman who has to be found. Strangeness in his books gets paid for in consequences. An invention that generates no paperwork is decoration, and decoration would be the first thing his method cut.

Sneering at the characters

Mockery is the most tempting shortcut and the one that wrecks the trap. If the townspeople are fools, your reader has nothing at stake, because a fool's decision is not a decision. Dürrenmatt keeps his people intelligent and gives them the best argument available. The pastor in The Visit names the temptation out loud, tells Ill to run, and stays. A reader has to be able to go two or three steps along before noticing what was agreed to. A narrator who has finished deciding has nothing left to disclose.

Saving the meaning for a closing speech

The instinct at the end of a serious book is to say what it meant. Dürrenmatt closes on facts and leaves the meaning in the reader's hands. The Judge and His Hangman ends with a dying policeman ordering an enormous meal, having just told a murderer exactly what he was used for. Then the book stops. An explanation would give your reader somewhere to stand, and standing is the thing he takes away.

Books

Explore Friedrich Dürrenmatt's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

The Visit
The Visit

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Friedrich Dürrenmatt's writing style and techniques.

What was Friedrich Dürrenmatt's writing process and revision approach?: The film came first. He wrote the screenplay for Es geschah am hellichten Tag, and the trap in it works: the child murderer is caught. Then he wrote The Pledge, the same case with the ending he thought was true, and put a retired police commander in front of it to explain why the tidy version was a lie. His revision happens at that level. He reopened plays after they had been staged and printed later versions, treating a finished text as a machine that could still be recalibrated, and the recalibration is usually about consequence rather than sentences.
Why did Friedrich Dürrenmatt write comedies about serious subjects?: His essay Problems of the Theatre puts the argument plainly: tragedy needs somebody who can be held answerable, and the modern state spreads an act across so many desks that the answerable person disappears. A clerk signs. A committee approves. A department places the order. Comedy, and the grotesque in particular, is the form that can still reach that material, because it works by distortion, and distortion is how you show a reader a horror that the people inside it experience as administration.
How does Friedrich Dürrenmatt write crime fiction without a solution?: The Pledge carries the subtitle Requiem for the Detective Novel and earns it. Detective plots promise that intelligence gets rewarded. Dürrenmatt keeps the intelligence, keeps the clues, keeps the procedure, and removes the reward, which is harder than writing an unsolved case, because his inspector does solve it and the solution cannot reach the world. For the refusal to register, the genre machinery has to be in perfect order. Break a form from inside its own competence.
Which Friedrich Dürrenmatt book teaches the most about structure?: Start with The Breakdown. One evening, one house, four hosts and a guest, and the whole apparatus lies open: a rule proposed as a game, a participant who agrees to play, evidence that accumulates out of his own mouth, and a sentence handed down after the meal. Read it in a sitting and mark where each exit closes. Then read The Visit, the same construction at the scale of a town and across three acts, and the second reading will show you which parts scale up and which have to be reinvented at length.
Does his method work outside crime and satire?: The method has nothing to do with crime. What it needs is a rule a group believes, an interest that quietly contradicts it, and a decision that has to be made in public. A family working out which sibling takes the mother in, with money attached, is a Dürrenmatt situation. So is a hospital ethics board, a village vote on a building permit, a company deciding on Friday whom to let go. Keep the rules real and the interests exact, and the shape does what it does in Güllen, with no billion and no panther anywhere in sight.
How does he keep the reader on side when the whole cast is compromised?: Ill is guilty. He bought two men to swear his own child away, and the book tells you so before it asks you to care about him, which reverses the usual arrangement, where sympathy gets purchased with innocence. What Dürrenmatt gives his people instead is competence and a case. They think well, they speak well, and their arguments are the best ones available in the position they are in. A reader will follow an intelligent person into a decision he would refuse from a fool, and that following is the trap being built.

Ready to improve your draft with direction?

Open Draftly, bring your draft, and move from stuck to a stronger draft without losing your voice. Editors are on standby when you want a deeper pass.

Fix My Draft

Free welcome credits included. No credit card needed.