The Visit

 Airport book kiosks would appear to be unpromising places to find literary reads these days. With each passing year they seem to carry fewer and fewer actual books; and those that remain are almost exclusively recent bestsellers. Which is perfectly fine in itself, no doubt, but does no good to an eccentric like me, who is perversely obsessed with picking over the intellectual ruins of the twentieth century and rarely reads a book published in the last two decades. 

There is one small newsstand in the Chicago-Midway airport, however, that always brings me luck. By all appearances, it is an unpromising as all the others. It, too, has been steadily denuded with the passage of the years of most of its stock of books. But the handful of shelves that remains always seems to carry at least one slim volume that beckons to me—a literary classic, say, that I had always meant to read but never gotten around to, and which is just the right short length for a plane ride. This weekend, that book for me was Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit. 

I had been vaguely familiar with the play's existence since high school, but I wish I had concerned myself earlier on with its contents. This mid-century tragicomedy by a Swiss playwright turns out to be a book for our times—perhaps for all time. Its relevance stems from what it has to say about group psychology, the decay of post-industrial societies, and the latent potential for majoritarian fascism lurking beneath the surface of self-professed liberal democracies dedicated to the rule of law. It is a play about Trump, J.D. Vance, modern globalized capitalism, and the contemporary refugee crisis, all avant la lettre. 

The Visit is set in what we would now think of as a "rust belt" town; except this is Switzerland, and the play was written in the 1950s. The town is a post-industrial community where once-thriving factories have shut down and the once-well-compensated blue collar jobs have all dried up. If set in twenty-first century America, the existence of such depressed communities would need no special explanation in a play. But in the context of Western Europe at mid-century, where the postwar industrial revival and widespread affluence were kicking in, the town's poverty is an "economic enigma" to its inhabitants. (Agee translation throughout.)

The explanation for the community's ill fortune turns out to lie with a fantastically-wealthy divorcee who grew up in the town and now returns on the titular "visit." The town—called Güllen—hopes that this local girl who made good will be their savior. To the contrary, she reveals (spoiler alert for all that follows) that she was the cause of the town's misfortunes. She deliberately engineered its economic decline in order to hold the town for ransom. Now, she has come back and promises to donate billions, divided evenly among the citizenry, on one condition: one of them must kill the former lover who tricked and abandoned her. 

The former lover in question is the town's favorite son at the beginning of the play, and at first, the townsfolk denounce loudly the visitor's extortionate proposal. They cite "Western" values and Güllen's tradition of "humanism," saying that these values compel them to choose an honest poverty over cold-blooded murder. 

Still, the visitor's offer of billions works an insidious magic among the townspeople. Her intended victim starts to see his neighbors— Güllen's leading figures—the police, pastor, and physician—and finally members of his own family, taking on unprecedented debts and spending lavishly. 

He begins to suspect they are all secretly hoping that someone else among them—one of their neighbors—will succumb to temptation and kill him, so that they can reap the rewards. They do not wish to do the ugly deed themselves, but the thought that someone else almost certainly will do it (it only takes one townsperson to give in, after all) suddenly opens up streams of credit and leads them to act as though they can count on future riches. They are, as the intended victim—Mr. Ill—puts it, "speculating on [his] death."

In the end, the townspeople stop resisting. They accept the visitor's satanic bargain. Rather than admit they are giving in to greed, however, they manage to convince themselves they are acting for high-minded reasons: they are seeking "justice" for the wrong that Ill did to the visiting divorcee all those years earlier. In the play's final scenes, even the town's teacher—the one who had stood most firmly for the tradition of humanism and the values of rights and dignity—turns on Ill, and endorses his killing. Not, the townspeople all hasten to assure themselves, for the money; no, they repeat; they are doing it all for the sake of justice...

What does it mean—the play, that is? Certainly most plays should not be read as allegories, but Dürrenmatt puts enough editorializing into the mouths of a final chorus that The Visit invites such an interpretation. Is the play, then, a parable about the rise of fascism? Possibly; and, to be sure, it must rank as one of the twentieth century theater's greatest analyses of mass conformity, up there with Ionesco's Rhinoceros. But I think the work, which was first performed in the mid-1950s, is not only or primarily about the events in Western Europe of the previous decade: it was even more about the events of its own present. In other words, it is about the West's newfound postwar prosperity, and the questionable moral foundations on which it rested. 

The tale of the townspeople's corruption, after all, is a disturbingly apt allegory for the way in which moral responsibility is diffused under modern capitalism. Every one of the townspeople believes that they themselves would never commit heartless murder, no matter the potential reward. But each can passively profit—through credit—from the likelihood that someone else will do the deed. The parallel invites itself to the modern global economy. Most of us would never dream of being involved personally in the violence of "primitive accumulation" (to use the Marxist term) as it occurs in the Global South—assassinations of environmental activists or Indigenous land rights defenders or labor leaders, say; but how many of us profit from it indirectly as speculators or shareholders, at a far enough stage of remove (such as through an index fund in which we are never even conscious of the source of the dividends that flow to our bank accounts each quarter) that we absolve ourselves of guilt? 

Dürrenmatt seems to be saying that Western Europe's vaunted postwar prosperity and welfare state egalitarianism were built on precisely such a rotten moral core. Hence the townspeople's frequent invocation of "humanism," the "rule of law," and "Western values," even while they are taking out loans on the assumption that someone else shortly will be willing to commit murder for their sakes. In doing so, they are mirroring the hypocrisy of Western liberal democracies that profess values of equality and social justice internally, but fund their welfarist policies through the exploitation and dispossession of people in the Global South. One is reminded too of how today, even as Western democracies reach ever more refined definitions internally of human rights and due process in their own legal systems, they are meanwhile working externally to ensure that fewer refugees and asylum-seekers are ever able to access these systems in the first place. 

And one is reminded, too, finally—and most painfully—of how so many of us Americans—including those who consider ourselves liberals or at least moderates—prove willing to benefit from evils so long as we don't have to dirty our own hands with the deed. During the 2016 election of Donald Trump, most U.S. elites publicly decried the candidate's xenophobia and demagoguery—yet, after he was elected, stock values rose precipitously. Some at least of the same people who denounced Trump in public were nonetheless willing to bet with their pocketbooks that his low-tax, low-regulation policies would be good for business. So too, a Democratic president has lived to fulfill many of Trump's most brutally majoritarian policies, such as dismantling the U.S. asylum system, and many of the liberal and moderate voters who would never claim openly to detest immigrants and asylum-seekers, nonetheless seem to be breathing a sigh of relief at the thought that more people will now be turned away at the border—even if it means they are sent back into the hands of their persecutors. 

In short, we are not so different from the people of Güllen, speculating gleefully on a crime they do not intend personally to commit. In a majoritarian and capitalist society, Dürrenmatt seems to be saying, we can hide behind the actions of the group as a whole and thereby cover and disguise—even from ourselves—our individual responsibility. We can proclaim our own moral superiority, and take by our own actions all the morally correct steps, yet secretly hope all the time that someone else—the chairman of a company, say, of which we are a shareholder—will make the ruthless staff cuts that will send the stock price soaring. Or that the president of the country will ban asylum, so we don't have to think any more about the suffering and persecution of others, and the claims of desperate humanity can be consigned once again to the category of "out of sight; out of mind." 

This is what I mean when I say: The Visit is a play for our time.