“Farewell to the Stage”: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Achterloo IV (1988)

Abstract

quintessence of Dürrenmatt’s thinking: It is a highly intertextual, historical-political cornucopia. In the psychiatric hospital of Achterloo a patient who thinks he’s Georg Büchner designs a text template for the other inmates. This, however, foils “Büchner’s” intention of fathoming the motives for human behaviour, resulting in a grotesque independence of the play within the play. In general, each character is triply determined: once as an individual occupant of Achterloo, then as a patient suffering from a psychosis and finally as a carácter in the “Buechner”-play. In this way, Dürrenmatt deconstructs the prevalent image of a “healthy” Switzerland as a convenient locus amoenus for wealthy immigrants and presents the country rather as an asylum for historical amnesia