About the work
Friedrich Dürrenmatt's two-act comedy was premiered in 1962 at the Schauspielhaus Zürich and became, after The Visit, his second international success. The play examines the moral responsibility of scientists in the atomic age within the framework of a classic crime story set in a Swiss sanatorium. Dürrenmatt appended 21 theses on physics and the theatre, which have become a key document of 20th-century dramaturgy.
Plot
In the private sanatorium Les Cerisiers live three patients believed to be insane. Two of them pose as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein; the third, the brilliant physicist Möbius, ostensibly believes that King Solomon appears to him and dictates his formulas. Each of the three has killed his nurse — and gradually the reasons emerge. Möbius has grasped the world-altering implications of his discoveries in physics and has withdrawn voluntarily into the asylum to hide his knowledge from humanity; his nurse had to die because she saw through his feigned madness. The other two are not mad at all, but secret agents of rival great powers, sent to watch Möbius and steal his formulas — they too killed to preserve their cover. Möbius convinces them that responsibility for their knowledge compels them to remain in the asylum forever and keep silent. But in the devastating finale it emerges that the truly insane one is the hunchbacked director, Fräulein Doktor Mathilde von Zahnd. She has long since secretly copied Möbius's papers and built an industrial empire to seize world domination with his formulas. The three physicists' sacrifice was in vain — they are now truly imprisoned.
Cultural significance
Die Physiker is the most significant theatrical meditation on scientific responsibility in the atomic age and a fixture of the German-language school curriculum. Dürrenmatt's thesis "What has once been thought can no longer be taken back" has become an almost proverbial formulation of intellectual ethics. With the twist that it is not the scientists but the institution itself that succumbs to madness, Dürrenmatt delivered a bitter point about the uncontrollability of knowledge once it has been released. The play has been performed continuously since its premiere and remains a warning without an expiry date in the international repertoire.