‘Scene 5: Silver candelabras, knife rests, silver knives and forks, corkscrew, silver champagne cooler, fingerbowls, damask napkins and tablecloth, Wreath with ribbon, 2 roses, comb (Schmitz), wine bottles for Biedermann.’

Harris had planted his petrol bomb in the name of ARM, an organization consisting predominantly of white English liberals who had become dissatisfied with traditional liberalism. They had lost faith that political change could be brought about through constitutional means and had begun their sabotage activities in 1961.3 This wasn’t unfounded. When the organization – first known as the National Committee of Liberation (NCL) – was established in 1960, it was in a post-Sharpeville environment where many members of the liberal party had been banned or forced underground through the strong-arm tactics of the government which included sweeping ‘counterterrorist’ legislation. By the time Schiess staged Die Brandstigters, they had already targeted several electricity pylons and a Bantu Affairs office with explosive devices.4 See ‘African Resistance Movement’, South African History Online, available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/african-resistance-movement-arm. The station bomb that followed two years later was different from any previous attack. Instead of being aimed at remote infrastructure, it targeted a public place frequented by ordinary South Africans.

Harris’s lawyer put it during his trial that he believed his actions would bring home to these ordinary citizens ‘what was in fact happening in this country […] apart from only reading about it in the newspapers.’5 S v Frederick John Harris, vol. II, 227 at 5–6 and 22–3. This radical departure from ARM’s modus operandi reflects the fact that the bomb was planned and executed by an isolated individual after the effective collapse of the organization. There was only one other ARM member at large by July 1964, John Lloyd, who testified that he had disapproved of the plot because it contravened a key policy of the organisation – ‘to avoid any possible loss of life’.6 Ibid., 210 at 22. He also testified that Harris had believed that any such risk ‘would be justified as a long-term political move’.7 Ibid., 208 at 28–9.

Harris, remembering his discussions with Lloyd somewhat differently, claimed that both men had been satisfied that the system of telephonic warnings would negate any potential danger to the public. His reasoning was very simple: ‘a) – There won’t be anybody near this thing. b) – There won’t be any danger. Finished!’8 S v Frederick John Harris, vol. III, 411 at 24–5. When Harris arrived home that day to learn that people had been injured in the attack, he was dumbfounded. It emerged under cross-examination that he had very little practical knowledge of explosives and hadn’t thought very much about what their practical effects would be: ‘All I can say is that I didn’t know that eight sticks of dynamite would do more than make a heck of a bang, in an open space.’9 Ibid., 464 at 17–19. Sitting on a bench in the glass cubicle where he would leave the bomb and anticipating ‘as big an audience as possible’, Harris had felt ‘terrifically happy, ecstatically happy’.10 Ibid., 465 at 4–5; S v Frederick John Harris, vol. II, 302 at 29–30. After all, he had his enormous faith that, afterwards, ‘everybody would have taken a healthy turning towards a completely different future’.11 S v Frederick John Harris, vol. III, 461 at 6–8.

It is easy to identify Harris with Biedermann und die Brandstifter’s Doctor of Philosophy, a character described by Frisch’s chorus as:

Frisch’s play certainly contains repeated calls for ‘Menschlichkeit’ (‘humanity’). First introduced by Schmitz, these calls are increasingly taken up by Biedermann. By the penultimate scene, he dismisses the maid’s insistence that they need a silver wine bucket on the table for dinner with the line, ‘Brauchen! Was heißt brauchen? Was wir brauchen, das ist Menschlichkeit, Brüderlichkeit’ (‘Need! What does ‘need’ mean? What we need is humanity, brotherliness’).14 Frisch, Stücke 2, 137. In a world with rigidly policed racial borders, institutionalised inequality, and a record of human rights abuses, this refrain acquires new meaning. So, too, Schmitz’s sly assertion that Biedermann still has that rare thing, ‘ein regelrechtes Gewissen’, rendered in the Afrikaans as ‘’n eerlike en opregte gewete’, an ‘honest and sincere conscience’.15 Frisch, Stücke 2, 95; Frisch, ‘Jan Alleman’, scene 1:6. Such a thing was indeed in short supply in apartheid South Africa, where, just as Eisenring asserts in Frisch’s play, every citizen who earns more than a certain amount was indeed already guilty. ‘Weet u wat Trauma is?’ (‘Do you know what Trauma is?’), Eisenring asks in a line that succinctly evokes the Black experience of living in South Africa in the 1960s.16 Frisch, ‘Jan Alleman’, scene 6:40.

Of course, in the play, these appeals are also humorous. Schmitz directs them, in the first instance, at Biedermann’s bourgeois conscience, tricking him into giving him shelter for the night. Later it becomes one of the ways in which Biedermann justifies his blindness and inability to act against the men that he knows, deep down, are arsonists. Finally, the play’s appeals turn out to be false – they lead only to wholescale disaster when the entire city burns down. All Biedermann’s talk of brotherly love and common humanity come to nothing, and the audience is left with a warning not to listen to their (guilty) consciences after all.

The effects of Harris’s bomb on ordinary white South Africans were not dissimilar. In its aftermath, Laurence Gandar, editor of the Rand Daily Mail, compared the incident with the Sharpeville Massacre of four years previously. Describing the events as ‘the two main emotional upheavals in recent history’, he wrote:

Biedermann und die Brandstifter’s paradoxical yet apt subtitle, ‘Lehrstück ohne Lehre’ (‘a morality play without a moral’), nods towards Brecht’s radical call in the 1930s for plays to be didactic and political, while at the same time refusing any straightforward moral message. In the context of 1960s South Africa, one possible reading is that equitable change is impossible without a radical, and dangerous, reconfiguring of reality. In this reading, it becomes a warning to white South Africans against letting the disenfranchised Other into their houses, and by implication into a position of equality, lest the entire country burn down. It is also a reminder that the prime agents of the state – the police – are always at hand to help its citizens maintain their vigilance.

The role of the police in unsuccessfully preventing arson attacks is certainly underlined in the play, from their questioning of Biedermann to the fact that it is illegal to sell or own ‘Holzwolle’ (‘wood shavings’). This precaution against arson attacks in Biedermann is reminiscent of the anti-sabotage laws in South Africa that made it illegal to possess explosives. This, incidentally, was one of the counts on which Harris was found guilty in 1964. At one point in the play, Eisenring even exclaims, ‘Wenn das kein Polizeistaat ist!’ (‘If that isn’t a police state!’).19 Frisch, Stücke 2, 132. Curiously, the Afrikaans translation renders this line as ‘As dit nie die polisie is nie!’ (‘If it isn’t the police!’).20 Frisch, ‘Jan Alleman’, scene 4:29. Considering that apartheid South Africa is generally regarded to have been a police state, this is a significant mistranslation.21 See John David Brewer, Black and Blue Policing in South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

In particular, the ‘Nachspiel’ parallels the South African situation closely. Despite the possible reading given above, there is no doubt that it can be read as a wholescale condemnation of apartheid and a foreshadowing of the concerns that would plague the country once it ended.

After Biedermann and his wife wake up in Hell, they protest their innocence, maintaining that they never broke any of the ten commandments. In the eyes of the church, therefore, they are innocent, just like so many of the white Afrikaners who remained innocent in the eyes of their church. Perhaps the treatment they receive in Hell is simply designed to try and give them a guilty conscience, Biedermann muses. It remains inconceivable to him that he has done anything wrong – except perhaps to give the arsonists a pair of matches, an act he isn’t sure anyone witnessed anyway.

In a startling reversal, Biedermann and Babette are now the homeless ones. When they are offered bread and wine, exactly what Biedermann offered the homeless Schmitz at the start of the play, they refuse it. ‘Ons het ’n huis van ons eie gehad’ (‘we had a home of our own’), Babette says, while Biedermann points out that they are simply insisting on their rights, phrased as ‘ons goeie en eenvoudige reg’ (‘our good and simple right’).22 Frisch, ‘Jan Alleman’, epilogue, 7.

These lines echo apartheid idealogue Geoffrey Cronjé’s ominously titled ’n Tuiste vir die nageslag: Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se rasse-vraagstukke (‘A home for the descendants: A lasting solution for South Africa’s racial questions’),23 Geoffrey Cronjé, ’n Tuiste vir die nageslag: Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se rassevraagstukke (Johannesburg: Publicité, 1945). a publication considered seminal to the theory of apartheid. Implicit in his title is the contention that whites could only really have a home in South Africa if the racial ‘problem’ were solved in their favour. Instead, Cronjé’s fears had been realised by the time he died in 1992, just two years before the first democratic election. Not only were schools and neighbourhoods allowed to integrate, but the Act of Parliament banning mixed marriages had already been repealed in 1985, allowing for Cronjé’s very worst, almost pathological, fear to be realized, that which he called ‘blood mixing.’24 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The mind of apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907–)’, Social Dynamics 17, no. 1 (1991): 10.

But the most startling connection between the ‘Nachspiel’ and post-apartheid South Africa is that the Hell that Biedermann and his wife have just entered is about to go on strike. The devils had expected personalities of some notoriety and import and are deeply disappointed. ‘G’n enkele Minister, g’n enkele Maarskalk’ (‘Not a single minister, not a single marshal’), the Meerkat fumes.25 Frisch, ‘Jan Alleman’, epilogue, 5. The reason for this soon becomes clear – they have been pardoned: ‘Elkeen wat ’n uniform dra, of gedra het toe hy mense doodgemaak het, en elkeen wat belowe het om ’n uniform te dra, hulle is almal gered’ (‘Everyone who wears a uniform, or did wear a uniform while he killed, and everyone who promised to wear a uniform, they are all saved’).26 Ibid., 15. These lines that usually remind scholars of post-Nazi Germany are even more applicable to post-apartheid South Africa where, instead of attempting to prosecute human rights abuses, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission pursued a form of restorative justice that allowed perpetrators to ask for amnesty from prosecution.

Finally, the fires of Hell are put out, and the devils return to earth to continue their work among mortals. Given the problems that plague post-apartheid South Africa – widescale corruption, gross inequality, violent lootings, and rampant crime – this is food for thought. Without true accountability, the ‘Nachspiel’ seems to suggest, there will be Hell on earth. The Devil concludes: ‘Ek brand van verlange om my ou kliënte weer te sien, daardie fyn geselskap, wat nooit in die hel kom nie, en om hulle van nuuts af te bedien. Waarlik ek brand van verlange! Nou kan ons weer ’n keer lekker geniet, van die vonke en vlammegeknetter, van die sirenes wat altyd te laat is, van die hondegeblaf en die rook en geskree van mense in doodsangs … en die as!’ (‘I burn with desire to see my old clientele again, that rarefied company that never comes to Hell, and to serve them anew. Really, I burn with desire! Now we can enjoy once more the sparks and crackling flames, the sirens that are always too late, the barking of dogs and smoke and the screams of people in mortal fear … and the ash!’).27 Ibid., 18.

Biedermann und die Brandstifter exemplifies a recuring phenomenon. When Frisch and Dürrenmatt grapple with the themes of their own time and place – the atrocities committed by the Germans during the Holocaust, the culpability of the Swiss in their supposed neutrality, and, above all, collective versus individual guilt – their writing resonates in a particular way with apartheid South Africa. This is not to suggest that these two historical moments are equivalent, but that they have in common the institutionalization of human rights abuses, with some human beings treated as inferior to others, and with dire consequences for all.

In Afrikaans, the play remains extremely ambiguous: it holds up a mirror to apartheid South Africa, yet offers few, if any, answers. Perhaps the most fitting interpretation comes from Martin Esslin, who describes the world of the play as one ‘where the destruction of values has reached a point where the bewildered individual can no longer distinguish between the things that ought to be preserved and those that should be destroyed.’28 See Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 294. Another can be inferred by these lines, given to Frisch’s chorus of firemen: ‘Der die Verwandlungen scheut/ Mehr as das Unheil,/ Was kann er tun/ Wider das Unheil?’ (‘He who fears change/ More than evil,/ What can he do / Against evil?’).29 Frisch, Stücke 2, 125.

Holding the memory of John Harris in mind, another interpretation is suggested by the pessimistic conclusion of the choir over the explosions of ‘Gasometers’ at the end of the play: