The Labyrinth of Language: The Fire Raisers

Abstract

With the two parable plays, The Fire Raisers and Andorra, Frisch finally achieved international recognition as a playwright. Thematically and technically, his previous stage works can be seen as an extended theatrical apprenticeship leading to this breakthrough. And yet the origins of The Fire Raisers, at least, are far from portentous — indeed, they are both prosaic and largely fortuitous. In his conversation with Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Frisch recalls the Bayrische Rundfunk offering him DM3000 for a radio play and suggesting that he look for a suitable theme in his Sketchbook 1946–1949. ¹ There Frisch found the short prose sketch, simply entitled ‘Burleske’ (II, 556–61), which dated back to 1948. The subsequent radio play, Herr Biedermann und die Brandstifter, first broadcast on 26 March 1953, was thus a commissioned work which owed its existence primarily to Frisch’s need to earn money. The second stage in the metamorphosis of the prose sketch to full theatrical form was no more auspicious than the first. Having completed and published his novel Homo Faber in 1957, Frisch was badgered by the Zurich Schauspielhaus for a new play. Kurt Hirschfeld suggested the radio play as a possible starting point. In other words, The Fire Raisers — the enormous success of which was to make Frisch financially secure for the first time — sprang initially not from any didactic desire to put the world to rights, but from economic necessity and the chance encouragement of literary middle-men. Nevertheless, in the same interview Frisch records that these mundane circumstances in fact enabled him to tackle the work in a more satisfyingly objective state of mind than otherwise might have been the case.