‘Raucous singing in the distance.’
2 ‘Andorra schedule of sounds and music’.Set in a semi-abstract world, Andorra is peopled with two-dimensional characters named for their professions and roles, such as The Carpenter, The Priest, The Soldier, and The Mother. The exceptions are Can, his daughter Barblin, and his foster son Andri, an allegedly Jewish foundling he rescued from the antisemitic Blacks. Most of the play’s action revolves around Andri and Barblin; rather than being siblings, they are in love and plan to get married. The play is structured into twelve scenes interspersed with confessions in which the town’s inhabitants testify as to why they bear no responsibility – and by extension, no guilt – for Andri’s death. The details of Andri’s parentage are also revealed in these asides – he is not a Jewish foundling, but Can’s illegitimate son.
Hypocrisy rears its head early on. The Soldier, watching Barblin whitewashing, makes unwanted sexual advances and suggests that the church isn’t as white as The Priest would like to think. Made of clay, it needs only a cloudburst to wash away the whiting, leaving it looking as if a pig had been slaughtered on it. Similarly, the townsfolk of Andorra are less free of prejudice than they imagine. Casual racism follows Andri wherever he goes as they project their antisemitic stereotypes on him. When he finally declares his intent to marry Barblin, Can is horrified and forbids it. Unaware that Barblin is his half-sister, Andri interprets their father’s reaction as antisemitism.
Can tries to tell Andri the truth – he is not Jewish, but rather Can’s illegitimate son from an affair with the Señora in the neighbouring ‘black’ country. Yet Andri has identified so completely with the image projected on him that he can no longer imagine himself otherwise. When the blacks finally invade and Andri is murdered, he meets his fate without protest. Crucially, the Andorrans quickly become complicit: their white soldiers defect to join the black army, and their citizens obey orders, ultimately surrendering the ‘Jew’ they believe they have been harbouring.
A parable about the damaging consequences of prejudice,
Andorra stages ‘patterns of behavior that begin with preconception and compliance and end with complicity in murder’.
3 Schaumann and Schaumann, ‘Max Frisch’s Andorra’, 60. Interviewed to mark the US premiere
, Frisch was asked about the origins of racial stereotypes. ‘I think that’s a question of intellectual vitality’, he answered.
4 Max Frisch, directed by Anthony Farrar, videorecording, 1997, original production c.1963, Reserve Film and Video Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, VTH 4150. ‘We are not always alive enough. We are not always ready to face reality. So we try to make it easier. And by making clichés, images … because as soon as I’m going to make a cliché, I’m not forced to think about … the reality is, in a way, ready for use. Though I think making clichés, making images is very normal, very human, and if I say, to put it in these terms, Bible terms, you shouldn’t make an image, that is very important, that is true, but on the other hand, we can’t avoid to do it.’
A frequently quoted passage from Frisch’s sketchbook, where he developed the play’s core idea, sheds further light. ‘Thou shalt not, it is said, make unto thee any graven image of God’, he wrote. ‘The same commandment should apply when God is taken to mean the living part of every human being, the part that cannot be grasped. It is a sin that, however much it is committed against us, we almost continually commit ourselves – Except when we love.’
5 Frisch, Sketchbook, 21.Frisch’s theory is that love creates space for the Other to be a multitude, a suspended mystery, so that ‘we never come to the end of the person we love’.
6 Ibid., 16. Conversely, when love ends, ‘one creates for oneself an image’, forever constraining the other’s possibilities.
7 Ibid., 17. If
Andorra warns against creating and maintaining damaging stereotypes, it simultaneously exhorts love – and the individual responsibility that comes with exercising love. Its indictment of groupthink shows that passive bystanders, by doing nothing, are not absolved of guilt.
Writing in the shadow of the Second World War, Frisch grappled with the
condition helvétique and the ‘pressure of having to imagine an abyss that cannot be experienced’.
8 Peter Rüedi, ‘Almost a friendship’, in Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Correspondence, trans. Birgit Schreyer Duarte (London: Seagull Books, 2011), 30. For him, it was the Jew who had been failed by lovelessness, not only by the Germans, but also by the Swiss. It is instructive to read between the lines of Frisch’s disclaimer in the printed play: his Andorra has nothing to do with the actual state, nor any other real small state; it is merely a model. Yet why risk comparison to a small, independent, wealthy state isolated by its terrain – a state not unlike Switzerland? Embedded in the very disavowal is the implied comparison. Pointing to the characters’ ‘stereotypical Swiss characteristics’ and contrasting the ‘Swiss-like dialect of the Andorrans and the High German of the Señora and the physician’, Schaumann and Schaumann call it ‘the first literary work addressing the role of Switzerland in the Second World War’.
9 Schaumann and Schaumann, ‘Max Frisch’s Andorra’, 60–2.