Dürrenmatt und Kierkegaard oder Auf den Spuren einer Dramaturgie jenseits des Tragischen

Friedrich Dürrenmatt has dedicated an important part of his artistic work to the composition of comedies. Although he has always refused a systematic speculative theory of his dramatic intentions, his inclination to tragicomic and grotesque elements reveals a deep link to Kierkegaard's conception of the superiority of the comic compared to the tragic experience of the paradox contradictions of human life. From the analysis of the inner philosophical motivation of this thesis and its poetological consequences there emerges the common horizon of Dürrenmatt's and Kierkegaard's intuition of the existential power and cathartic function of the comic - an intuition in which Dürrenmatt in his late works seems to have lost interest and belief.