Collected in Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings Volume 2: Fictions (University of Chicago Press, 2006):
The Sausage
A man killed his wife and turned her into sausages. The deed gave rise to rumors. The man was arrested. One remaining sausage was found. There was great public outrage. The supreme judge of the land took over the case.
The courtroom is bright. Sunlight pours through the windows. The walls are bright mirrors. The people are a seething mass. They fill the courtroom. They sit on the window sills. They hang from the chandeliers. On the right burns the prosecutor’s bald head. It is red. The defense attorney is on the left. His glasses are blind discs. The accused sits in the middle between two policemen. His hands are large. His fingers have blue edges. The supreme judge sits enthroned above everyone. His robe is black. His beard is a white flag. His eyes, grave. His forehead, clarity. His eyebrows, wrath. His face, humanity. Before him the sausage. It lies on a plate. Enthroned above the supreme judge sits Justice. Her eyes are bandaged. In her right hand she holds a sword. In her left, scales. She is made of stone. The supreme judge raises a hand. The people fall silent. Their movement freezes. The court room rests. Time lurks. The prosecutor stands up. His stomach is a globe. His lips are a guillotine. His tongue is a falling blade. The words hammer the courtroom. The accused flinches. The judge listens. Between his eyebrows stands a steep furrow. His eyes are like suns. Their rays strike the accused. He sinks into himself. His knees quake. His hands pray. His tongue hangs. His ears protrude. The sausage in front of the supreme judge is red. It is still. It swells. Its ends are round. The string at the tip is yellow. It rests. The supreme judge gazes down at the lowest human being. He is a small man. His skin is like leather. His mouth is a beak. His lips, dried blood. His eyes, pin heads. His forehead, flat. His fingers, thick. The sausage has a pleasant smell. It moves closer. The skin is rough. The sausage is soft. It is hard. The nail leaves a mark in the shape of a half moon. The sausage is warm. Its shape is plump. The prosecutor is silent.
The accused raises his head. His gaze is a martyred child. The supreme judge raises a hand. The defense attorney leaps to his feet. His glasses dance. Words leap into the courtroom. The sausage steams. The steam is warm. A little knife snaps open. The sausage squirts. The defense attorney falls silent. The supreme judge sees the accused. He is far below. He is a flea. The supreme judge shakes his head. His gaze is contempt. The supreme judge starts talking. His words are swords of justice. They fall like mountains on top of the accused. His sentences are ropes. They scourge. They choke. They kill. The meat is tender. It is sweet. It melts like butter. The skin is a little tougher. The walls resound. The ceiling clenches its fists. The windows grind. The doors shake in their hinges. The walls stamp their feet. The city grows pale. The forests wilt. The waters evaporate. The earth quakes. The sun dies. The sky collapses. The accused is damned. Death opens his mouth. The little knife lies down on the table. The fingers are sticky. They stroke the black robe. The supreme judge is silent. The courtroom is dead. The air is heavy. The lungs are full of lead. The people are trembling. The accused sticks to his chair. He is condemned. He may make a last request. He cowers. The request creeps from his brain. It is small. It grows. It becomes a giant. It forms into a compact mass. It takes shape. It forces the lips apart. It plunges into the courtroom. It sounds. The pervert wants to eat the remains of his poor wife: the sausage. Revulsion cries out. The supreme judge raises his hand. The people fall silent. The supreme judge is like God. His voice is the last trumpet. He grants the request. The condemned man may eat the sausage. The supreme judge looks at the plate. The sausage is gone. He falls silent. The silence is hollow. The people stare at the supreme judge. The eyes of the condemned man are large. There is a question in them. The question is terrible. It streams into the courtroom. It descends to the floor. Clings to the walls. Squats on the ceiling above. Takes possession of every person. The courtroom widens. The world becomes an enormous question mark.
The Old Man
The swarms of tanks came rolling across the hills with such might that all resistance became futile. Still the men fought, perhaps believing in a miracle. Split up into separate groups, they dug themselves in. Some surrendered, the majority were killed, and only a few escaped into the woods. Then the fighting stopped as abruptly as storms sometimes cease. Those who were still alive threw their weapons away and ran toward the enemy with their hands raised over their heads. The people were paralyzed by horror. The foreign soldiers spread across the land like locusts. They moved into the old cities. They walked with heavy steps through the streets and drove the people into their houses when evening came. Heavy armored cars rolled through the villages, often right through the huts, which collapsed on top of them, for resistance had not yet died out in the villages. It was a resistance that smoldered secretly, in the corners of the boys’ eyes, in the careful movements of the old men, in the strides of the women. It was a resistance that polluted the air, causing the strangers to breathe as one does in countries where a plague has broken out. Men emerged from the woods, some alone, some in groups, and vanished again in the impassable forests where no stranger dared to follow them. As yet there were no collisions with the enemy, but people who had collaborated with him were found dead. Then came the uprising. Using old guns, the youths and aged men threw themselves upon the enemy, who struck back as if released from a nightmare; women were seen fighting with pitchforks and sickles. The struggle lasted a night and a day, then the uprising broke down. The villages were surrounded, the inhabitants driven together and mowed down with machine guns. The burning forests lit up the nights for weeks.
Then it got quiet, the way it gets quiet in the grave when earth covers the coffin. The people walked about as if nothing had happened. They buried their dead. The peasant returned to his plow, the artisan to his workshop. But deep inside them something they had never known before had grown powerful: it was hatred. It took complete possession of them, filled them with burning strength and controlled their life. It was not a wild impatient hate that has to act precipitously in order to stay alive, it was a hate that could wait, for years, that rested calmly within them, not on the surface, but deep down, at one with their being, a hate that, not needing to find a way out, dug into the soul like a sword, not to kill it but to harden it with its fire. But as the light of those stars that move through enormous distances finds its way to us, that hatred found its way to a figure who was completely in the background, somewhere in those realms where no light can penetrate, invisible like many figures of the abyss, about whom they knew nothing definite except that all the horrors of their hell emanated from him, and so utterly was the hatred of the oppressed focused on this figure, whom they called the old man, that they ceased to care about the foreign soldiers and often even found them ridiculous. With the instinct of hate, they sensed that these men who all looked the same in their uniforms and steel helmets and their short heavy boots did not torment them out of cruelty but because they were completely in the power of the old man. These soldiers acted as instruments without a will of their own, without freedom, without hope, without meaning, and without passion, lost in a foreign land, among people who despised the stranger who had forced his way into their land, much as instruments of torture are despised, or the way the hangman is regarded as a man without honor. An enormous compulsion was placed upon everyone, chaining oppressors and oppressed to each other like galley slaves, and the law that drove them was the power of the old man. The people were at each other’s throats, all vestiges of humanity had fallen away among them, and the more the people hated, the crueler the foreign soldiers became. They tortured the women and children in order not to feel the torments they themselves had to endure. Everything was necessary, the way everything is necessary in mathematical books. The enemy army was a monstrous, complicated machine that weighed on the land and crushed it, but somewhere there had to be the brain that steered it for its own purposes, a man of flesh and blood whom you could hate with all your senses, and that was the old man, of whom they dared to speak only in whispers when they were quite sure of being among themselves. No one had ever seen him, they never heard his voice, they did not even know his name, the cruel measures they were forced to endure bore the signatures of indifferent generals who obeyed the old man without ever having heard of him, and who perhaps imagined that they were acting at their own discretion.
That they knew of the old man, and that they hated him—this was the secret strength of the oppressed that made them superior to their enemies. The foreign soldiers did not hate the old man, they knew nothing about him, just as machine parts know nothing about the man they are made to serve, nor did they hate the people they were oppressing, but they sensed that these people were becoming more and more powerful in their hatred, which was directed at something the soldiers did not know, but with which they must be mysteriously connected. They saw themselves being treated more and more contemptuously by the people, and they became more and more cruel and helpless. They did not know what they were doing and why they were among these foreigners who hated with such deadly persistence. There was something above them that treated them the way one treats animals trained to perform some action or other. And so they lived from day to day like ghosts who wander about in the long winter nights.
But above everyone, above the foreign soldiers, the peasants, and the inhabitants of the old cities, there circled by day and by night huge silver birds which—the people were certain of this—were under the old man’s direct control. The birds circled very high, so that one could only rarely hear the roar of their motors. Once in a while they would plunge down like vultures to drop their deadly loads on the villages, which would flare up in a red blaze below them, or on their own units when they had not carried out their orders swiftly enough.
But then the hatred of the oppressed rose to those high degrees where even weak people become capable of supreme achievements, and thus a young woman was destined to find the person she hated more than anything in the world. We do not know how she managed to reach him. We can only surmise that extreme hatred lends human beings the power of clairvoyance and makes them unassailable. She came to him without anyone’s trying to stop her. She found him alone in a small antique room, its walls lined with books and the busts of thinkers, sunlight and birdsong streaming in through its wide-open windows. There was nothing unusual, nothing to indicate that he must be in this room, and yet she recognized him. He was sitting bent over a large map, huge and motionless. He looked at her calmly as she approached, one hand resting on a large dog that was sitting at his feet. His eyes held no threat, but neither did they ask where she came from. She stopped and realized that her game was up. Nevertheless she took the revolver from the folds of her garment and pointed it at the old man. He didn’t even smile. He looked at the woman with indifference, and finally, when he understood, he stretched out his hand a little, the sort of gesture we make to a child when it wants to give us a present. She approached him and put the gun in his open hand, which enclosed it quietly and slowly laid it on the table. All these movements had something soundless about them, and there was a childlike quality about the entire transaction, but at the same time it was all terrifyingly meaningless and irrelevant. Then he lowered his eyes and looked at the map as though he had forgotten the whole event. She wanted to escape, but then the old man began to talk.
"You came to kill me," he said. "It’s completely useless, what you wanted to do. There is nothing more insignificant than death." He spoke slowly and his voice was melodious, but he did not seem to attach any importance to his words. "Where are you from?" he asked then, without raising his eyes from the map, and when she named the city, he remarked after a long pause, during which he eagerly searched the map, that this city must have been destroyed, because it was marked with a red cross. Then he fell silent and began to draw large, crisscrossing lines on the map. They were heavy, fantastical lines he drew, strangely symmetrical curves of the kind that force the eye to follow them in pursuit of a meaning that is invariably thrown into confusion. She stood just a few feet away from him, looking at him as he stood bent over the map like a huge dark mass. She stood there in the evening sun, which was casting soft gold on the old man. He paid no attention to the sun or to the woman who wanted to kill him and had failed. He was in the void, in that place where there are no more relationships and no responsibility toward others. He did not hate people, he did not despise them, he did not notice them, and the woman sensed that this was the secret source of his power. So she stood before him like one who has been judged, incapable of hating him, and waited for the death that would be her lot at his hands. But then the woman realized that he had forgotten her and her deed and that she could go where she wanted, but also that this was his vengeance, an annihilation more terrible than death. She slowly went to the door.
At that moment the black dog at his feet let out a sharp bark. She turned back to the old man, and he looked up. His hand took the revolver with which she had wanted to kill him. Then she saw the weapon lying in his open palm, which he was holding out to her. Thus, with an inhuman gesture that was infinitely humiliating, he bridged the abyss that separated them and revealed the inmost nature of his power, which would have to destroy itself in the end, like all things whose nature resides in the absurd. She looked into his eyes, which regarded her without derision and without hatred, but also without kindness, and which did not so much as surmise that he had given her back everything he had taken from her, her hatred and the strength to kill him.
Calmly she took the weapon from his hand, and when she shot, she felt the hatred human beings sometimes feel toward God. He proceeded carefully to put on the table the pencil with which he had streaked the map, but then he slowly keeled over, felled like an ancient sacred oak, and the dog calmly licked the dead man’s face and hands without paying the slightest attention to the woman.
The Theater Director
The man to whom the city would eventually succumb already lived among us before we paid him any heed. We didn’t notice him until he began to attract attention by his behavior, which seemed ludicrous to us and gave rise to a good deal of mockery at the time: but he was already in charge of the theater when we became aware of him. We didn’t laugh at him the way we laugh at people who entertain us by their simplicity or their wit; it was more the sort of amusement we sometimes find in things that are indecent. But it is difficult to indicate what it was that provoked our laughter when he first began to perform, especially since later he was met not only with slavish deference—this we could still understand as a sign of fear—but also with sincere admiration. His appearance above all was peculiar. He was short. His body seemed to have no bones, so that he emanated a kind of sliminess. He had no hair, no eyebrows either. He moved like a tightrope walker who is afraid of losing his balance, with soundless steps whose speed varied unpredictably. His voice was soft and halting. When he came into physical contact with a person, he always directed his gaze at inanimate objects. But it is not clear when we first sensed the possibility of evil in him. Perhaps it occurred when certain changes attributable to him became noticeable on the stage. Perhaps, but we must consider that changes in the aesthetic realm are not generally associated with evil when they excite our attention for the first time: What we really thought then was more that this was in bad taste; or we would poke fun at his presumed stupidity. No doubt these first performances he directed at the City Theater did not have the importance of those later ones that became so famous, but there were indications of what he was planning. For example, his productions evinced a peculiar tendency early on to use masklike effects, and that quality of abstraction in the sets that became so pronounced later on was already present then. These characteristics were not particularly obtrusive, but there were more and more signs that he had a definite purpose in mind, which we sensed but were unable to assess. He might have resembled a spider about to weave a gigantic web, but he seemed to be operating without a plan, and perhaps it was precisely this planless approach that tempted us to laugh at him. Of course, after a while I could not fail to notice that he was imperceptibly striving to get into the forefront, which was something everyone noticed once he was elected into parliament. By misusing the theater, he was preparing to seduce the masses in a place where no one suspected any danger. But I did not become aware of the danger until the changes on the stage had reached a degree that uncovered the secret aim of his actions: as in a chess game, we perceived the move that would destroy us only after it had been made, too late. We often asked ourselves then what it was that drove the masses to go to his theater. We had to admit that this question was almost impossible to answer. We thought of an evil instinct that forces people to search out their murderers and deliver themselves to them, for those changes revealed that he was intent on subverting freedom by proving its impossibility, so that his art was an audacious attack on the very meaning of humanity. This intention led him to eliminate everything accidental and to establish the most intricate reasons for everything, so that the events on the stage became subject to a monstrous coercion. It was also remarkable how he dealt with language, suppressing those elements by which one author differs from another, distorting the natural rhythm of speech to produce the steady, unnerving beat of hammering pistons. The actors moved like marionettes, but the power that controlled their actions did not stay in the background, on the contrary, it was that power above all that revealed itself as a meaningless violence, so that we had the impression of gazing at an engine room where a substance was being produced that would have to annihilate the world. Here I should also mention the way he used shadow and light, which did not serve to suggest infinite spaces and thus establish a connection with the world of faith, but to reveal the finiteness of the stage, using peculiar cubic shapes to block and limit the light, for he was altogether a master of abstract form; also, by the use of secret contraptions, he saw to it that there were no half shades, so that the action appeared to be taking place in the narrow rooms of a dungeon. He employed only red and yellow in a fire that injured the eye. But the most devilish thing of all was that, imperceptibly, every occurrence took on a different meaning and the various genres began to get mixed up, a tragedy being turned into a comedy, a farce misconstrued as a tragedy. At the time we also often heard of revolts on the part of those unfortunates who were eager to improve their lot by means of violence, but there were only a few who lent credence to the rumor that the driving force behind these incidents was to be found in him. But actually his only use for the theater, from the beginning, was as a means to acquire the power that would eventually unmask itself as the brutal dominion of terror and violence. What prevented us at the time from recognizing these developments for what they were was the fact that, to a discerning observer, the actress’s situation was beginning to look more and more precarious. Her fate was peculiarly linked to that of the city, and he was trying to destroy her. But by the time his intentions toward her became apparent, his position in our city was so firmly established that this woman’s cruel fate could come to pass, a fate that would prove calamitous for all, and which not even those who could see the nature of his seduction had the power to avert. She succumbed to him because she despised the power that he embodied. It cannot be said that she was famous before he took over the direction of the theater, but she did hold a position in the theater that was uncontested, if minor, and thanks to the general esteem in which she was held, she was also able to practice her art without any of those concessions that others, who aspired to more or whose position was more important, had to make to the public; and it was characteristic of him that he would use this circumstance to destroy her, for he knew how to bring about a person’s downfall by exploiting his or her virtues.
The actress had not subordinated herself to his regulations. She paid no attention to the changes that were taking place in the theater, thus distinguishing herself more and more clearly from the others. But it was precisely this observation that worried me so, for it was quite obvious that he was taking no steps to force her to acquiesce in his regulations. Her setting herself apart was his plan. He was said to have once made a comment about her acting, shortly after he had taken over the theater; however, I have never been able to confirm that this altercation really took place. But since then, he left her alone and did not undertake anything to remove her from the theater. Instead, he placed her more and more clearly in the foreground, so that eventually she was the star of the theater, even though she was not equal to this task. So it was this procedure that made us suspicious, for after all, her art and his conception were opposed to such a degree that a conflict appeared inevitable, and the later it occurred, the more dangerous it would have to be. There were also signs that her position was beginning to alter in a decisive way. Where at first the crowd praised her acting with enthusiasm and a unanimity that was quite thoughtless (she was considered his great discovery), there was now a first stirring of voices determined to find fault with her, reproaching her for not measuring up to his directorial genius, and praising his rare patience (and humanity) in allowing her to remain in her leading position. But since she was being attacked especially for abiding by the laws of classical acting, her defenders were precisely those people who had recognized the real limitations of her art, a lamentable struggle that unfortunately confirmed her in not voluntarily leaving the theater—a recourse that might still have saved her, even though our city at that point had almost no chance of escaping him. But the decisive turn did not come about until it started to become clear that her art was producing a peculiar effect on the masses that had to be painful for her, and that consisted in people beginning to laugh at her, first in secret and then during her performances as well; an effect that he of course had precisely calculated and was intent on developing more and more. We were dismayed and helpless. The cruel weapon of inadvertent comedy was something we had not reckoned with. Even though she continued to perform, there could be no doubt that she noticed this, just as I suspect that she knew before we did that her downfall was inevitable. Around this time, a project was being completed about which there had been a great deal of talk in our city, and to which we had looked forward with great expectation. Now while it is true that many have expounded their views about this building, I must, before giving my own opinion, mention that to this day I would find it impossible to understand how he managed to acquire the means for this new theater, were it not for the arising of a suspicion that, in my view, cannot be dismissed out of hand. But at the time, we were not able to lend credence to the rumor that linked this building to those unconscionable circles of our city that have always been solely intent on increasing their riches beyond all limits and against whom the uprisings were directed, which he also influenced. Whatever the case may be, this building, which is said to have been destroyed since then, was tantamount to an act of sacrilege. But it is difficult to speak about this building, which presented itself outwardly as a monstrous mixture of all styles and forms, not without an undeniable grandeur. This building was not a revelation of the living spirit, which can be brought to expression in rigid matter by the transformative action of art; instead, it consciously set out to emphasize deadness, which is without time and is nothing but motionless gravity. But all this presented itself to us without mitigation, naked and shameless, without any beauty, with iron doors that were often huge beyond measure and then again squat like the gates of a prison. The building seemed to have been heaped up by the ponderous hands of a Cyclops, meaningless blocks of marble with heavy columns pointlessly leaning against them, but this was only apparently so, for everything about this building was calculated to produce specific effects that were intended to violate human nature and bring it under the spell of an arbitrary and despotic will. Thus, in contrast to these crude, massive volumes and brutal proportions, there were individual objects crafted with a precision that was said to be calibrated to the ten thousandth part of a millimeter. Even more frightening was the interior with the auditorium. It was modeled on the Greek theater, but its form became meaningless, because a strangely vaulted ceiling extended above it, so that as we walked into this hall, we did not seem to be going to a play but to a festival in the bowels of the earth. And so the catastrophe happened. We were awaiting the play in soundless expectation. We sat pressed together in ever-widening circles, our faces pale, staring at the curtain, on which a crucifixion was depicted as a mocking farce: this, too, was taken for art, not sacrilege. Then the play began. There was talk later on about how this revolution had been brought about by unruly elements from the street, but sitting in the auditorium at that time where those people of our city who had most prided themselves on their brilliance and education, who celebrated the theater director as a great artist and revolutionary of the stage and regarded his cynicism as wit, never realizing how soon this fellow would start breaking out of the aesthetic stance they so admired in him, to advance into realms that were no longer aesthetic; which was why, on the opening night of the new house, even before the play began, our nation’s president awarded him the Shakespeare Prize amid thundering cheers from the festive assembly. I no longer remember which classical work was played for the occasion, perhaps it was Faust or Hamlet, but as the curtain with the crucifixion rose, the director’s inventions were such that this question became irrelevant before it was possible to pose it: what was taking place before our eyes, frequently interrupted by the enthusiastic applause of the government and the social and academic elite, no longer had anything to do with a classic or with the work of another author. A terrifying force took possession of the actors the way a tornado whirls houses and trees about and leaves them lying in a heap. The voices did not sound human but more the way shadows might speak, but then suddenly and without transition their tone would resemble the mad drumming of savage tribes. We sat in his theater not as human beings but as gods, taking delight in a tragedy that was actually our own. But then she appeared, and I had never seen her as awkward as she was in those moments preceding her death, but also never as pure. If the crowd’s first response when she stepped onto the stage was to burst out laughing—so precisely was her entry calculated that it had the effect of an obscene punch line—that laughter soon turned into rage. She appeared as a heretic who had the temerity to oppose a force that not only crushes everything but also absolves every sin and cancels all responsibility, and I understood that this was the real means by which the masses were seduced to relinquish freedom and surrender to evil, for guilt and atonement only exist in freedom. She began to speak and her voice was to them a sacrilege against those cruel laws that men will embrace when they want to raise themselves to the level of gods by nullifying good and evil. I recognized his intention and knew now that he had planned all along to bring about her destruction in front of everyone and with the approval of all. His plan was perfect. He had opened an abyss, and the masses plunged into it, avid for blood, demanding new murders again and again, because only in this way could they find that insensate delirium that alone enables one not to freeze in infinite despair. She stood in the midst of the crowd as a criminal, and the people turned into beasts. I saw that there are horrible moments when a deadly upheaval takes place and the innocent must appear to the others as guilty. Thus our city was prepared to witness an act that was tantamount to a savage triumph of evil. It began with a peculiar contraption that descended from the ceiling of the stage. It may have been light metal rods and wires to which clamps and knives were attached, as well as steel bars with strange joints that were connected in such a way that the device seemed to resemble a monstrous supraterrestrial insect, and we did not take notice of it until it had seized the woman and lifted her up. No sooner had this happened than the crowd broke into boundless applause and shouts of "bravo!" Then, as more and more clamps descended on the actress and held her athwart, the audience was virtually rolling in the aisles with amusement. When the knives began to slice off her clothes, so that she hung naked, there arose from the mass of tightly wedged bodies a shouting that must have originated somewhere, that was picked up and passed on again and again, spreading with the speed of thought, until it rose to infinity and became a single scream: Kill her! and her body was severed by the knives, in such a way that her head fell into the midst the spectators, who had risen to their feet, seized it, soiled themselves with its blood, whereupon it was tossed like a ball from one person to another. And as the stream of people poured out of the theater, forming dense, thickening clots, trampling each other down, kicking the head before them as they moved through the winding streets in long undulating chains, I left the city, in which the garish flags of the revolution were already flaming and the people were attacking each other like animals, surrounded by his rabble and, as the new day dawned, forced into submission by his order.
The Tunnel
Available to read here.
Smithy
Readable for free on the University of Chicago's site.
Submitted January 09, 2019 at 08:07AM by MilkbottleF http://bit.ly/2Fh3IT5
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