The Firebugs
For many years Switzer-land–that clean, neat, neutral country nestled in the pristine Alps–seemed exempt from the collective guilt of World War II. The ultimate bourgeois country, a country of bankers and watchmakers and rational businessmen, it had weathered the war without taking sides, providing a safe haven for all comers.
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No one knows how Swiss playwright Max Frisch would have reacted to the news of how badly Swiss bankers treated their Jewish customers–he died in 1991. But I’m sure he wouldn’t have been surprised. Frisch built his career revealing the hypocrisy, conscious and unconscious, of respectable citizens. In fact, like his friend Bertolt Brecht, Frisch took a positive delight in showing the world what worms we really are.
Not that Frisch’s play is mere left-wing business-bashing agitprop. It can be played that way, but only if you distort his meaning. Like his countryman C.G. Jung, Frisch knows that all people have their dark sides, and again like Jung, he feels duty bound to break through the facades, short-circuit the denial mechanisms, and bring people face-to-face with their shadows. There are no angels in his world. The firebugs, for example, turn out to be simple pyromaniacs. And the firemen–who act as a Greek chorus of sorts, commenting on Biedermann’s plight–behave like storm troopers in helmets and red suspenders when they’re on duty. In their zeal to stop the firebugs, they’re willing to trample every citizen’s civil rights.
Brecht relished such moments, when the play awakens the audience from its suspension of disbelief. Clearly, so do Frisch and Graney. And like Brecht, they have a good reason for employing what he called the alienation effect: they want to awaken us to the hypocrisy of the world and to the dangers of denying the darkness in our own souls.
