The Swiss-born Austrian Gottfried von Einem (whose centenary falls this year) wanted it to put alongside his other classic takeovers of Büchner and Kafka. This classic moral dilemma (spoiler alert) has the townfolk yielding to their basest instincts, like German literature’s other satirical targets of the economic ‘miracle’ of the time. Claire will gift the town and its inhabitants ‘a billion’ to recover their failing economy if they will have Ill killed and let her take him away in the coffin she has brought with her. The man responsible was her lover, local shopkeeper and would-be mayor Alfred Ill. A slightly surreal, progressively more frightening plot has the titular heroine Claire Zachanassian (a catch-all of the rich-man names Zaharoff, Onassis and Gulbenkian) returning in her now millionaire old age to seek revenge on the little town of Güllen (the name means ‘liquid manure’), where she was made pregnant and an outcast as a young girl. In the late 1950s or ’60s, if you were studying for A level, the tragicomedy The Visit of the Old Lady by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt may well have been the first contemporary play in German that you read.
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