The Physicists

First performed in Zurich in 1962, The Physicists (Die Physiker), is a satiric comedy in two acts by Swiss playwright and author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The story concerns three physicists in a mental asylum, each of whom is pretending to be insane for their own purposes. The Physicists is influenced by the history and scientific progress of the atomic age: from the devastating bombing on Japan during WWII to the growing global tension surrounding the nuclear arms race during the Cold War. Dürrenmatt raises questions about the moral obligations of science, the ability of humankind to ethically and responsibly use advanced technology, and the nature of sanity. The Physicists is widely considered to be Durrenmatt’s best play.

The Physicists takes place in the drawing room of a villa at Les Cerisiers (The Cherry Trees), a private, elite asylum for wealthy patients. Les Cerisiers is run by Dr. Mathilde von Zahnd, a psychiatrist with a good reputation and upper-class background. Her prestigious family includes a general, a chancellor, and a privy councilor, although several of her relatives are also in a mental institution.

Connecting to the drawing room are the rooms of three mentally disturbed patients, all physicists: they are the only ones living in the villa, the rest of the patients having been moved to another building. One of the three patients is Herbert George Beutler, known as Newton because he believes he is Sir Isaac Newton. Ernst Heinrich Ernesti thinks he is Albert Einstein, even playing the violin as the great scientist did. The third patient, Johann Wilhelm Mobius, the play’s protagonist, believes that he is visited and instructed by King Solomon. Mobius lost his career, his chance at a professorship, and his wife and family when these visions of Solomon landed him in the institution.



The play opens with the visit of Inspector Richard Voss and a group of policemen who are investigating a murder at Les Cerisiers. Einstein strangled a nurse with the cord of the floor lamp and is playing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata on his violin. The Inspector is frustrated because this is the second murder in the last three months: Newton previously killed another nurse. The staff insists that the Inspector soft coat the crimes, substituting “perpetrators” for “murderers” and using “accident” instead of “murder” in his language because the physicists are patently innocent due to their insanity. Newton tells the Inspector that he killed the nurse because they had fallen in love; his job is physics, not love. The Inspector asserts that these crimes would not have happened if the sanatorium employed male attendants instead of all female nurses.

Mobius’s ex-wife, Frau Lina Rose, and her new husband, the missionary Oskar Rose, accompanied by Lina’s three sons come to visit Mobius. Lina Rose wants her children to see their father one last time before they travel overseas to do missionary work. Mobius grows wild, says alarming things, and drives them away so they don’t feel burdened to maintain a relationship with him.

Nurse Monika believes that Mobius is not insane. She admits she loves him and wants the two of them to leave the asylum. Mobius tells her that he never wants to see her again; she should leave. Monika refuses and Mobius strangles her with the curtain cord. When the Inspector arrives to investigate this latest murder, Mobius declares that “King Solomon ordained it.” Von Zahnd brings in male nurses at the order of the public prosecutor and the asylum becomes more prisonlike.



Newton and Einstein reveal to Mobius that they are not insane, but are both secret agents for powerful, opposing eastern and western nations. They have gone undercover in Les Cerisiers to steal Mobius’s discoveries. Mobius, a genius physicist, has created the Principle of Universal Discovery: the key that opens the door to unlimited future scientific advances. Mobius, also, is not insane: rather, he put himself in the asylum to protect his discoveries from falling into the wrong hands and precipitating the annihilation of mankind. Monika was thus a threat to the future of humanity, so Mobius had to kill her. Likewise, Newton and Einstein could not put their missions at risk, so each had to kill their nurses.

Mobius announces that he has burned his research documents, so Newton and Einstein each vie for Mobius to come and join their governments. Since neither spy can promise that Mobius’s discoveries will be used ethically, Mobius refuses. Instead, he convinces the two that the scientific knowledge he has uncovered is too dangerous to be made public. Mankind cannot be trusted with such power. All three men make the self-sacrificing decision to stay in the asylum to protect the world.

Unfortunately, von Zahnd is legitimately insane and (unlike Mobius) truly believes that King Solomon is directing and guiding her to take over the world. She made copies of Mobius’s scientific papers before he destroyed them and plans to militarize Mobius’s Principle of Universal Discovery, also using it to dominate world industry. She tells the physicists that she manipulated them to murder the three nurses, and because their insanity is clearly established, no one would believe them if they tried to expose her plot.



The play concludes with each of the three physicists speaking to the audience directly, offering apologies for what von Zahnd will unleash on mankind.