Among the German-speaking authors in Switzerland who rose to international fame after the Second World War, playwright, novelist and essayist Friedrich Dürrenmatt is the most prominent. Already during his lifetime, his texts ranked high in the modernist canon for students, theater audiences and readers around the globe. His most celebrated plays, translated into virtually all written languages, remain in the repertoire of theaters worldwide to this day. Like his countryman Max Frisch with whom he has been often – and not always perceptively – compared, Dürrenmatt owed his tremendous early success to the stage and to this particular moment in history. During the post-wa

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First published 19 March 2004

Citation: Knapp, Gerhard P.. "Friedrich Dürrenmatt". The Literary Encyclopedia. 19 March 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1114, accessed 9 February 2010.]