So, even now, say a few Germans. In Sweden they cried (until they brought in border checks),
Flyktingar välkomna.
Dalrymple turns to Max Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1953), written
in the aftermath of the Second World War as an attempt to explain (and to warn) how a patent evil like Nazism can triumph in a civilised society.
The play’s protagonist, Dalrymple explains,
is a comfortable bourgeois living in a town that is beset by several mysterious acts of arson. He is visited at home by Schmitz, a hawker, who half-persuades, half-intimidates his way into an invitation to lodge in Biedermann’s attic, and who soon brings a second hawker, Eisenring, to stay in the house.
Gradually it becomes clear that Schmitz and Eisenring
are the ones setting the fires in the town, but Biedermann refuses to acknowledge it. His blindness arises from moral and physical cowardice, and from wishful thinking—the hope that what he sees does not really mean what it obviously means.
Schmitz and Eisenring bring barrels of gasoline into the house and Biedermann,
pusillanimous to the last, helps them make the fuses and gives them the matches with which they burn his house down.