https://www.frontpagemag.com/staring-into-the-abyss/
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.
“I asked him,” explains Beidermann who, in his concern to avoid seeming like a distrustful or possibly even bigoted person, has rendered himself helpless to address what he senses is a growing threat. As a Greek-style chorus in the play proclaims, “We fail to see clearly / What’s happening right now / Under our noses / Under our roofs.”
As the play unfolds, Biedermann is taken aback to discover a second uninvited stranger in his home, an associate of Schmitz, who is storing oil drums full of petrol in the attic. “Why… why are there suddenly two of you?” sputters Beidermann. He blusters and objects but eventually even helps the interlopers measure a detonating fuse and gives them matches. Though he is well-informed about the plague of firebombings in his community, he simply cannot fathom that this evil has wormed its way into his own home – and the safety and comfort of his prosperous free society has left him neither mentally, physically, nor spiritually equipped to confront it and prevent the inevitable conflagration.
The chorus chants, “The timid are blind, more blind than the blind. / Hoping the evil is not really evil / They welcome the evil. / Defenseless, exhausted by fear, they hope for the best… / Until it’s too late.”
The success of The Arsonists, also known as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers, established Frisch as a world-class dramatist. In 1965 he was awarded the prestigious Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, among other awards. Early drafts of the piece had been produced as far back as 1948, in the wake of the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, and so Swiss audiences understood the play as a warning against Communism, but it also has been seen as a metaphor for Nazism and fascism.
