Die Physiker - F. Dürrenmatt

Having read it sciolto in amorosi sensi I can’t really say I focused too much on the text.

The one Überlegung I would like to register is the following: the main protagonists are three pazienti di un manicomio, going under the names of Newton, Einstein and Möbius. The first man believes himself to be Sir Isaac Newton, the second Albert Einstein, the third one sees Re Salomone talking to him or something like that. Möbius is famous in mathematics for the Möbius strip, I am not aware of particular contributions to physics, so that’s already a bit irritating.

The point about the Möbius strip is that it locally has two faces, but globally only one. So if you pick a piece “out of context” you see that there is an upside and downside of the strip, but as a whole there isn’t really a way to define upside and downside. The trick of the play is that it completely takes place in a room, secluded by the rest of the world; it does a good job of confusing the reader as to whether the three characters are really crazy or not - we have Einstein claiming in all seriousness to be perfectly sound of mind and in fact to know perfectly he is not in truth Albert Einstein, this fact being obvious to him since he actually is Sir Isaac Newton. Or Möbius claiming in perfect reasonable tone to be only acting crazy in front of his family because he doesn’t want to be a burden to them and prefers them to leave him in good conscience, and then without missing a beat going on talking about the latest apparition of Re Salomone.

So after a while of this going back and forth one is reasonably sure that the three persons are crazy and at most pretending to be sane in their craziness. Then in the very last pages it turns out that all of them are not really out of their mind: Möbius shut himself up in a sanatory in order to escape a world he deems crazy, the other two are secret agents pretending to be crazy in order to follow him.

So at the end you can really ask yourself whether Möbius is crazy or not, and you can find, as for the strip, that there really is not an answer. He does act crazy or reasonable in different parts, but when he argues that only in a world where folly reigns can people build atomic bombs, he has a point. Crazyness becomes less and less an absolute fact and always more a matter of point of view, or - mathematically - of defining an orientation, which is exactly what fails in limit cases as the Möbius stip, or this play.

Also interesting: the director of the institute turns out to be crazy in the end, just when we realise the people in the madhouse are actually sane. But the play might just as well have gone on a few more pages and turned everything on its head. We only see the room and we do not know of the world outside, which reinforces the idea of craziness being a relative concept. It always is, it just becomes clearer this way.

Justice and what justice means is also important. Salomon is the king whose justness was legendary. Why does Möbius pretend to be seeing Salomon, of all possible figures? Is Salomon talking with him because the spirit of justice/Berechtigkeit speaks to him, and he is sacrificing himself for justice? Why does the same Salomon appears to the director of the institute in the last pages?

The role of reason is played by the inspector, who exits the play in its middle, exhasperated by the various events:

For the first time Justice is on holiday - and it’s a terrific feeling. Justice, my friend, is a terrible strain; you wear yourself out in its service, both physically and morally; I need a breathing space, that’s all.