[ book tip by Literatur Schweiz ] Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote an autobiography? Yes, and he even worked near exclusively on it for the last twenty years of his life. At the Swiss Literary Archives SLA, which represents his estate, over 24,000 typescript and handwritten pages for his great later oeuvre with the working title «Subject Matter» are recorded – an oeuvre which Dürrenmatt published in the two volumes «Labyrinth» (Diogenes, Zürich 1981) and «Turmbau» (which translates approximately into «building towers» – Diogenes, Zürich 1990). It is, however, a highly refined autobiography, an «autobiografie à la bande», as the Dürrenmatt biographer Peter Rüedi describes it using an image from billiard.
Dürrenmatt does not recount the story of his life, much rather he reconstructs the history of his subject matter, as he terms his unwritten projects, the drafts that never surpassed the fragmentary stage and the literary intentions that never left behind a single trace. Only indirectly, through the stories about these subject matters, the text also reveals the biography.

Like few others, Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a master of the closed form and the assured payoff. Yet the «Subject Matter» project presented him with a new challenge: the realisation that past life and events elude target-oriented access and constantly change under scrutiny, as well as the realisation that remembering is always a process of constructing the past anew, that a juxtaposition of biographical reality, then, and literary fiction is dubious, making any conclusion problematic. A process of endless reflection, of imagining and remembering is set in motion. Increasingly, this «History of My Writing» transforms from an autobiographical retrospective of the beginnings of authorship into an introspection of writing in the face of death.

(Rudolf Probst, trans. by Simon Froehling)
      
Excerpts printed in: Selected Writings, vol 3, trans. by Joel Agee, University Of Chicago Press 2006.

[ Favourite quote ] «Es ist immer wieder von irgend jemandem versucht worden, sein eigenes Leben zu beschreiben. Ich halte dieses Unterfangen für unmöglich, wenn auch für verständlich.»

[ book info ] Dürrenmatt, Friedrich: Stoffe. . (original language: Deutsch) Subject matter. Diogenes, Zürich, 1981 / 1990 . ISBN: 3-257-01614-X / 3-257-01867-3.