Suspicion by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

 



Aare River and the old section of Bern, location of Salem Hospital - the building with the tower on the right is the town hall.

"Inspector Barlach had checked into the Salem - the hospital overlooking the town hall and the old parts of Bern - in the beginning of November 1948. A heart attack had delayed the urgent and difficult surgical intervention by two weeks. The operation was finally performed with success, but the surgeon's findings confirmed his belief that Barlach's sickness was incurable."

So begins this short, tight, engrossing novel told mostly in dialogue, a work you'll want to finish in one sitting as soon as you read the first page where Inspector Barlach hands his doctor a back issue of Life with a black and white photo of a surgeon at Stutthof concentration camp performing an abdominal operation on a prisoner without anesthesia. And Barlach's doctor is in for a shock: he turns pale since he recognizes the beast with the surgical mask standing over his victim on the operating table is none other than Fritz Emmenberger - sole owner and head doctor at a clinic for the wealthy in Zürich. But how can that be? The magazine clearly states the camp doctor's name is Nehle.

We're off. Friedrich Dürrenmatt structures Suspicion in two parts: Part One, where old, ailing Barlach lies in bed at Salem Hospital, and Part Two, when the inspector, still confined to his bed, checks himself into that posh Zurich clinic under an assumed name. You might not think a crime novel set in a hospital and convalescent center where the detective, old, sickly, bedridden, diagnosed with incurable cancer and given a year at most to live, would be the stuff of a suspenseful thriller, but, if you're like me, you'll get caught up in the drama and not want to put the book down.

As we quickly discover, there's action aplenty, of a kind, however much of the novel focuses on the psychological and philosophic, as when Inspector Barloch reflects on the possible link between Emmenberger and Nehle and tells his doctor, “suspicion is a terrible thing, it comes from the devil. There's nothing like suspicion to bring out the worst in people.” The inspector's statement is indeed ironic since he himself suspects the clinic's doctor is, in fact, the Nazi criminal, a suspicion so deep he's willing, as unwell as he is, to risk his life by checking into Emmenberger's convalescent center.

Barlach's first visitor in Salem Hospital is none other than his boss from the police station. In the course of conversation, Barlach states his view that there is something very wrong with the way the world is run. “They let the big scoundrels go and lock up the little ones. And there's a whole heap of crimes no one pays any attention to, because they are more esthetic than those blatant murders that get written up in the newspapers.” This fact was continually on Friedrich Dürrenmatt's mind since, in his longest novel, The Execution of Justice, the author has his protagonist, a young, truth-seeking lawyer, delve into the sordidness and criminality of Zürich's multimillionaires.

But the heart of the novel deals with philosophic questions revolving around Good versus Evil and our capacity as humans to make our intentions manifest by the use of power. We witness Barlach discussing these critical issues with a former inmate of the concentration camps, a radical journalist – and ultimately with Emmenberger himself. Reading Suspicion is gut-wrenching, a novel where Friedrich Dürrenmatt compels each of us to face our human condition nakedly and with complete honesty.


Swiss author and artist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, 1921-1990

"When our friends from the SS accidentally left me lying in some miserable lime pit among fifty men of my poor race whom they had shot on a beautiful day in May forty-five - I particularly remember a little white cloud - and when, hours later, covered in blood, I was able to crawl into a lilac bush that was blooming nearby, so that the troops who shoveled the whole thing under overlooked me, I swore that from that moment on I would lead the existence of an abused and defiled animal, since in this century it appears to have been God's pleasure to have so many of us live like beasts." - Suspicion


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