Later Life
In 1990, he gave two famous speeches, one in honour of Václav Havel (Die Schweiz, ein Gefängnis?/Switzerland a Prison?), the other in honour of Mikhail Gorbachev (Kants Hoffnung/Kant's Hope). Dürrenmatt often compared the three Abrahamic religions and Marxism, which he also saw as a religion.
Even if there are several parallels between Dürrenmatt and Brecht, Dürrenmatt never took a political position, but represented a pragmatic philosophy of life. He traveled in 1969 to the United States, in 1974 to Israel, and in 1990 to Auschwitz in Poland.
Dürrenmatt died from heart failure on 14 December 1990 in Neuchâtel.
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“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
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