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The catastrophic fault line in the Western world exposed.
The absurdist play The Arsonists, written by Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch and staged in 1958, opens with the middle-class protagonist, a businessman named Biedermann, commenting in exasperation on a wave of arson attacks in the community. The perpetrators reportedly manage to talk their way into people’s homes, take up residence in their attics, then proceed to carry out the destruction of the houses from within. Biedermann doesn’t understand how people can be so trusting and agreeable as to let this happen. “They should hang the lot of them!” he fumes about the firebombers.
No sooner are those words out of his mouth than his maidservant announces that there is a stranger in the hall who came in to get out of the rain and refuses to leave. The maidservant is too intimidated by the hulking stranger to send him away, and Beidermann himself is reluctant to seem insensitive or inhospitable. He offers the stranger, Schmitz, a little bread and wine; soon they are having dinner and cigars together. Schmitz compliments Beidermann both for his “humanity” in taking him in and for his “civic courage” in speaking out against the firebombers.
Through a deft combination of intimidation and persuasion, Schmitz talks his way into spending the night in the attic. Beidermann becomes defensive when his wife is alarmed to learn about the stranger upstairs. “How do you know he’s not an arsonist?” she demands…
