Switzerland hasn’t just given the world timepieces, chocolates and money laundromats. It also boasts two of the greatest 20th century playwrights, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch.
It was Frisch who wrote arguably the century’s most significant and eternally universal play, The Arsonists (also known in English as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers).
If you ever wonder why the West is meekly looking on as Russia advances on it step by step, just read the play written in 1953, six years after the Second World War. Switzerland hadn’t taken part in it, Hitler was dead, and Putin was a year old. Yet, in common with other products of artistic genius, The Arsonists transcends its time and place.
Anyone doubting this is possible has to believe that Antigone is strictly about burying Greek war casualties, Hamlet about dynastic succession in Denmark, and The Master Builder about the state of Norway’s construction industry.
Whatever their immediate subjects, those plays shine a light on the otherwise inaccessible recesses of human nature, elucidating traits that escape philosophers and psychologists, especially the latter. The Arsonists is another such play.
Frisch hints at universality by naming his principal protagonist Biedermann, which means Mr Everyman, a worthy philistine. You know the type: self-satisfied, happy with how he and his life have turned out, certain that great upheavals befalling others will pass him by.
There he is, reading newspaper articles about a spate of arson haunting his town. Apparently, firebugs pretending to be hawkers insinuate their way into someone’s home and settle down in the attic, only then to set the house on fire.
Biedermann shakes his head. How stupid and gullible can people get? He’d never be taken in by such ruses. The warm, cosy aura of his dwelling would never be punctured by evildoers with or without matches. Let them turn up – he’ll show them what’s what.
And what do you know, a hawker does appear on Biedermann’s doorstep within minutes. Expertly combining persuasive arguments with veiled threats, he talks himself into spending a night – just one night, Herr Biedermann! – in the attic.
Don’t sell Biedermann short: no dummy, he. He senses something is wrong, suspects that the hawker is one of the firebugs. But a suspicion isn’t a certainty.
What if he is wrong? What if the poor fellow indeed only needs a bed for the night? Confronting him now, before he has really done anything wrong, would be churlish and, well, improper. It could also be unnecessarily dangerous: the fellow looks quite muscular and there’s a touch of cruelty in his grin.
Considering what’s going on in the town, Biedermann would find it hard to convince anyone with such lame arguments about no danger threatening his house. Anyone but himself, that is. He falls for his own craven musings because he wants to fall for them. Not doing so would mean taking decisive action, but that’s not what the Biedermanns of this world ever do.
Before long, another hawker joins the first one, and they begin to cram the attic with oil drums full of petrol. And still Biedermann does nothing to stop the criminals. Moreover, in common with many sedentary philistines, he succumbs to the gravitational pull of evil, readily falls under the spell emanated by wicked men.
Rather than trying to expel the arsonists, he helps them by giving them matches and making sure the detonating fuse is the right length. By now Biedermann knows his lodgers are harbouring evil designs, but surely they are after other townsfolk, not him. He feels a sense of safety ever so slightly tinged with excitement and the pride of belonging with such men of action.
Due to his cowardice, Biedermann becomes an agent of his own downfall. His house burns down to cinders, and the flames segue into the fires of hell. Meeting Biedermann and his wife at the gates are their two lodgers, who turn out to be aspects of Beelzebub. They sneer at the couple, refusing to waste their satanic time on what they call “small fry”.
There are hints strewn all over the narrative that Frisch meant it as a metaphor for Nazism and the shilly-shallying acquiescence of civilised countries in the face of evil rapidly gaining momentum. But great plays, or works of art in general, are never strictly topical even when the author wants them to be.
Like Gospel parables, they only seem to be telling stories of good Samaritans, bad tenants, mustard seeds and bakers. These may be the narrative strains but not the real subjects. The real subject is always human nature, fallen and therefore fallible, courting perdition and needing to be saved.
The stories of Antigone, Hamlet or the Master Builder could have been just as easily set in any other place and at any other time without losing any of their poignancy. So could The Arsonists, which makes it worthy of mention in the same breath as other sublime plays.
I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining how the play applies to our time, who are today’s Biedermanns and arsonists. This must be as transparent to you as the Nazi references were instantly grasped by Frisch’s contemporaries.
Art joins history on the faculty of a great educational institution teaching how people and societies perish, and how they can save themselves. The teachers are knowledgeable, eloquent and in full command of the relevant facts. But their best efforts are invariably undone by their indolent, complacent, harebrained pupils – us.
We never learn the lessons or, even when we do, we never heed them. So there is Biedermann, Mr Everyman, hospitably opening his doors to the firebugs, hoping against all hope that they really may be door-to-door salesmen. And even if they aren’t, surely they must be after his neighbour’s house, not his own comfy nest.
And then the flames burst out, consuming Biedermann and consigning him to hell. The tale is eternal; the message, up-to-date.
Well, Mr Boot, all I can say is that both you and Mr Frisch are disgustingly arsonistophobic, and probably also guilty of arsonistism. You fail completely to understand the valuable contribution that arsonists make to our country’s culture and economy. And as for the top-hatted, cigar-smoking, hook-nosed, anti-Palestinian Mr Biedermann, how dare he own an attic when downtrodden migrant workers have to make do with spacious council houses?
By the way, the BBC reports enthusiastically today that scientists have made embryos from human skin DNA for the first time. O brave new world that has such embryos in it!
This is an area where dystopic overlaps with satanic.
The world governed by Aldous Huxley’s Our Ford seems almost benign compared with the real thing as we experience it today. Tolkien’s Orcs (bred and “genetically modified” by Morgoth / Satan, presumably from the “skin DNA” of captured Elves) may be closer to our reality.
No doubt it’s all progressive and modern, and therefore good. Post hoc, ergo melius quam hoc, as BrianC recently nearly said. But I’ll continue to pray quietly but sincerely for this world to end, and from Advent Sunday to Christmas Eve you and the whole church will join me.