‘Scene 2: Briefcase, coffee in cup for Biedermann, milk jug, table for breakfast, small breakfast napkins, 2 eggs, sheepskin, breakfast of bread, cheese etc as for scene.’
2 ‘Biedermann props’.At the start of
Biedermann und die Brandstifter, citizen Gottlieb Biedermann knows one thing: there are arsonists in his city, and there is danger afoot. ‘Aufhängen sollte man sie. Hab ich’s nicht immer gesagt? Schon wieder eine Brandstiftung’ (‘They should be hung. Haven’t I always said so? Another arson attack’), he rails from his comfortable chair, cigar and newspaper in hand.
3 Max Frisch, Stücke 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 91. Although there are several translations of Biedermann available, all English translations in this text are my own. If it were up to him, he would condemn all of them to execution by hanging. Minutes later, a homeless stranger, Schmitz, walks into Biedermannn’s house and, appealing to his conscience, makes himself at home. Over a glass of wine and a tray of food, the stranger leans into the two men’s shared humanity, and, above all, into Biedermann’s fear of being regarded an ‘Unmensch’.
4 Ibid., 100. Eventually, Biedermann allows Schmitz to move into his attic. A day or so later he discovers Schmitz’s friend, Eisenring, there as well. But despite his mounting unease that the two men in his attic are the very arsonists he has been so vocal about, Biedermann feels increasingly powerless to act against them.
Biedermann gleans his name from the German ‘bieder’, meaning ‘upright’, ‘respectable’, or ‘honest’. Often used ironically or critically, it can also mean ‘narrow-minded’ or ‘conventional’. Informed by these cultural nuances, Frisch’s Biedermann is a member of the middle-class bourgeoise, encountering the atrocities around him only through the newspaper.
He also has a special reason for wanting to appear decent and just, being, in truth, a ruthless capitalist who exploits other people’s labour. A case in point is Knechtling, the inventor of the hair lotion that Biedermann sells and whom Biedermann has recently fired because he doesn’t need him anymore. During the course of the play, Knechtling commits suicide, leaving behind a sick widow and three children. Just as Biedermann fails to acknowledge his culpability, he turns a blind eye to the activities under his own roof. He allows Schmitz and Eisenring to store drums of petrol, helps them measure a fuse, and finally, after a dinner of roast goose and red wine, hands them a box of matches.
In the ‘Nachspiel’, Biedermann and his wife wake up in Hell to recognize the figures of Schmitz and Eisenring as Beelzebub and Satan. Convinced that they don’t belong there, the Biedermanns attempt to ingratiate themselves with the devils, a scene that Frisch himself described as ‘Herr Biedermann als deutscher Bourgeois, der aus Angst met den Nazi fraternisiert’ (‘Mr Biedermann as German bourgeois fraternizing with the Nazis out of fear’).
5 Max Frisch in Walter Schmitz, Materialien zu Max Frisch ‘Biedermann und die Brandstifter’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 153. But Biedermann and his wife needn’t have feared. The fires of Hell are soon put out on account of Heaven deciding to admit a whole row of criminals, as Satan alias Eisenring despairs: ‘Wer eine Uniform trägt oder getragen hat, als er tötete, oder zu tragen verspricht, wenn er tötet oder zu töten befiehlt, ist gerettet’ (‘Whoever wears or did wear a uniform while he killed, or who promises to wear a uniform when he kills or orders that others kill, is saved’).
6 Frisch, Stücke 2, 339.The obvious parallels of the ‘Nachspiel’ with post-war Germany and its failure to prosecute all its war criminals point to an interpretation hinging on the complacency of German citizens during the rise of the Third Reich. Yet however much Frisch may have desired such an interpretation on the German stage in 1958, he never considered staging the ‘Nachspiel’ mandatory. Later, he began to regard it as damaging to the play’s interpretation, tying
Biedermann, as it did, to the past and to a specific country.
7 See Schmitz, Materialien, 153–4. From 1973 to 1978, he went so far as to ban its performance entirely.
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Figure 1: Braam Cilliers as Biedermann in the opening scene of Schiess’s Die Brandstigters, 1962.
Frisch intended his play to be read as a parable and, indeed, it is its very openness to different interpretations and its ability to speak to different political and social circumstances that keeps it in the repertoire. It follows, then, that
Biedermann has been interpreted vis-à-vis various historical events, in the first instance against the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 – something suggested by the fact that ‘Burlesque’, the sketch containing the germ of
Biedermann und die Brandstifter, follows directly after notes in Frisch’s sketchbook on the coup d’état. Today, much as in the Cold War, it is tempting to read
Biedermann as a warning about the rise of totalitarian regimes and the use of weapons of mass destruction; about the atom bombs, if you will, that are kept under our own roofs. And so, its premise has been distilled as something along these lines: ‘a society can just as well be at risk from the inaction of its citizens as the actions of criminals.’
8 Amanda Charitina Boyd, ‘Max Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter and Die Große Wut des Philipp Hotz’, in A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch, ed. Olaf Berwald (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 40. What Frisch is calling for, scholars have argued, is vigilance and an awareness that each individual in society has a responsibility in this regard. After all, any society is vulnerable to dangerous elements, perhaps especially those who imagine themselves too civilised, too cultured, to be at risk.