Bluebeard by Max Frisch

First published:Blaubart, 1982 (English translation, 1983)

Type of work: Psychological mystery

Time of work: The late twentieth century

Locale: The environs of Zurich, Switzerland

Principal Characters:

• Felix Theodor Schaad, a Zurich physician who had seven wives and was accused of murdering the sixth one
• Rosalinde Zogg, Schaad’s sixth wife and the victim in a brutal strangling
• The prosecuting Attorney, the unidentified tormentor within Schaad’s mind

The Novel

This short, tantalizing novel is an adaptation of the tale of Bluebeard, a villainous knight who had seven wives and killed six of them. The hero in this modern rendition is Felix Schaad, a fifty-four-year-old Zurich physician accused of strangling Rosalinde Zogg, a call girl and his sixth wife.

Unlike typical murder mysteries, the suspense in this masterpiece does not lie with the jury’s verdict, for the novel begins with the doctor having been acquitted on grounds of insufficient evidence. Instead, the drama revolves around a second, private trial within the courtroom of Schaad’s own conscience. Confused and distraught by the jury’s inconclusive verdict, Schaad relives the painful ordeal of his trial in an attempt to ascertain his own guilt. The narrative consists largely in remembered excerpts from the testimonies of Schaad’s accusers, interspersed with comments and embellishments from the accused.

Although Schaad is legally acquitted, his attempts to return to the routine of his former life prove unsuccessful. With his once-thriving medical practice in ruins, Schaad finds himself alone in his office—a physician with few patients but with an abundance of time to think about his tragic past. Tormented, yet unable to silence the voices in his mind, Schaad seeks relief in drink, travel, and billiards. Such diversions, however, offer only momentary escape. Inevitably, Schaad’s thoughts return to the testimonies of his accusers.

One by one, Schaad recalls the witnesses who brought testimony against him: his former wives, a cleaning lady, an antique dealer, a nurse, a custodian of the cemetery, and a janitor. While their testimony is contradictory and unsubstantiated, few come to his defense and an abundance of circumstantial evidence points toward his guilt. After all, he alone was known to have a key to the apartment of the victim; the crime was committed with his necktie; he was the last individual known to be present with the deceased; and it was he who sent the five lilies found lying across the breast of the lifeless body. Moreover, each of his three alibis—that he was walking in the woods, working on tax matters in his office, and viewing a Czech film—were successively disputed by other testimony. Indeed, Schaad could not recall where he was at the time of the murder.

Months pass, yet the cross-examination in his beleaguered mind continues. He is forced to sell his medical practice. His seventh wife returns from a business trip in Kenya with a new lover and announces her desire for a divorce. Meanwhile, details of Schaad’s whereabouts and activities on the day of the murder seem to become more focused in his confused mind. With his professional and personal life in shambles, Schaad falls prey to hallucinations and suicidal urgings. Ultimately, he concludes that he is guilty, drives to Ratzwil—his birthplace, a town nowhere near the scene of the crime—and confesses to the murder.

In a surprising turn of events, however, the police reject his confession and inform Schaad that the true murderer has been apprehended and is in custody. Schaad is not the Bluebeard he has admitted to being. Yet this truth makes little difference. While driving back to Zurich, Schaad crashes his car into a tree in an attempted suicide. The story ends with Schaad’s speechless body—if not lifeless corpse—lying in a hospital ward, and an anonymous female voice saying, “Why did you make the confession?... You are in pain.”

The Characters

A master of understatement and suspense, Max Frisch tantalizes the reader by systematically withholding information about his cast of characters, providing glimpses into the working of their minds but never the evidence necessary to answer the central questions of the reader’s imagination. Using few transitions or introductions, Frisch has witnesses appear, respond, or refuse to respond to the questions of the unnamed prosecuting attorney and then dematerialize. From the testimonies of these witnesses, many details can be surmised about the hero and his many wives. Yet, consistently the most pressing questions cannot be answered from the sketchy and often irrelevant information presented. For example, while the testimony reveals the names and occupations of Schaad’s ex-wives, and it suggests that each of his successive marriages was shorter and more chaotic than the last, the reader never learns why his marriages failed, why he married so many times, why he left his wives, or why they left him.

The fundamental questions of the work—Did Schaad commit the crime? If so, what was his motive? If not, who was the true murderer?—also are not answered in the interrogative scenes. Several of his ex-wives testify that Schaad was pathologically jealous. Evidence gathered from the doctor’s private notebooks also suggest that Schaad was insanely protective of his wives. “I watch her peeling asparagus,” Schaad confides, “We talk about nothing in particular, then suddenly I find myself counting the stiff peeled stalks of asparagus on the kitchen table, twenty-four; I say nothing, of course, but I think to myself: There’s one missing.” Other evidence, however, shows the doctor as an extraordinarily complacent husband who responds calmly and rationally to discoveries of his wife’s extramarital relations.

Was Schaad capable of murder? His mother, coming to the witness stand from beyond the grave, admits that, as a boy, Schaad cut open his pet rabbit with a razor. In another flashback to childhood, the reader sees Schaad with several of his school chums binding the feet of a boy and leaving him exposed to the elements. As a witness himself, even Schaad admits: “Not since I was fourteen have I had the feeling of being innocent....” Yet, others testify that the doctor was meek, harmless, and a man of great charity.

As to the victim and her relationship with Schaad, the evidence suggests that Rosalinde never enjoyed sex (though she had numerous lovers) and chose to become a call girl only after her divorce from Schaad. She had many friends of high social standing, gave parties for them, and retained, until the day of her death, a close friendship with her ex-husband. On one occasion, in an attempt to expose the irrationality of her former husband’s jealousy, Rosalinde demanded that Schaad view a videotape of her coupling with her customers—an experience that, according to Schaad, cured him of his jealous tendencies.

The sum of the testimony brings the reader toward the same verdict as the original jury: There is suspicion but no proof; the evidence is inconclusive: Uncertainty prevails. Thus, whether Schaad is an innocent victim driven to madness by a cruel form of judicial torture or a “Bluebeard,” a sadistic wife strangler, is a question never answered until the final page of the book. Even when the full truth is revealed, questions remain unanswered. The killer is a once-mentioned character, Nikos Grammaticos—a Greek student, bald with black beard, who speaks no German. Still, the revelation is unsatisfying. The novel ends without hint as to how or why the villain accomplished his grisly deed.

Critical Context

Bluebeard is a logical next step, perhaps the final step, in the intellectual and literary development of the Swiss author Max Frisch. A variant of this tale first appeared in Frisch’s novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964; A Wilderness of Mirrors, 1965). In this story, as in Bluebeard, a cultured man is accused of the murder of his former lover, a prostitute, and despite a lack of substantial evidence is unable to persuade the public of his innocence. Moreover, the themes and the plot of Bluebeard are reverberations of previous works. For example, in expressing his ideas about the deteriorating human condition, the relativity and unknowability of moral truth, the manner in which guilt erodes true identity, and the near impossibility of living truthfully, Frisch returns to themes about which he wrote with great inventiveness in his first grand masterpiece, Stiller (1954; I’m Not Stiller, 1958).

While Frisch’s works reveal an underlying consistency, in more recent years he has developed a decidedly different narrative technique. Unlike his earlier novels, which were filled with eloquence and abundance, Montauk (1975; English translation, 1976) and Der Mensch erscheint im Holozan (1979; Man in the Holocene, 1980) underplay his storytelling genius. In these works, he deliberately strips away all decorative speech until nothing is left but the pure, functional form. With Bluebeard, Frisch continues this stylistic shift toward literary silence. Blunt and more objective, the mature Frisch limits his expressiveness, often combining short introductory phrases with laconic sentence fragments. Such narrative techniques leave more space for interpretation and masterfully serve to remind his readers how little one truly knows.

Perhaps the last sentence of Bluebeard, “You are in pain,” is in part an autobiographical statement of a chillingly frank artist who understands well the ontological suffering that accompanies moral uncertainty. At any rate, Bluebeard preserves Frisch’s much-deserved reputation as a creator of cerebral labyrinths in the tradition of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. This novel is another fitting encore to a brilliant career.

Bibliography

Butler, Michael. The Novels of Max Frisch, 1976.

Library Journal. CVIII, June 1, 1983, p. 1156.

The New Republic. Review. CLXXXIX, July 11, 1983, p. 32.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. LXXXVIII (July 10, 1983), p. 9.

The New York Review of Books. XXX, September 29, 1983, p. 14.

Newsweek. Review. CII (July 18, 1983), p. 69.

Probst, Gerhard F. and Jay F. Bodine, eds. Perspectives on Max Frisch, 1982.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIII, June 10, 1983, p. 55.

World Literature Today. LX (Autumn, 1986). Special Frisch issue.