Die Panne by Friedrich Dürrenmatt: A Trial for the Concept of Justice

This essay critically examines Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Die Panne as a profound metaphor for the complexities and perversions of justice in modern society. Dürrenmatt constructs a narrative that subverts traditional detective story conventions, presenting a reverse trial in which the protagonist, Alfredo Traps, is led to accept responsibility for a death that cannot be established as murder in legal terms. Through a mock trial staged by retired legal professionals, the story explores justice, morality, and the human condition, revealing the grotesque consequences that arise when an aesthetically compelling judgment takes the place of evidentiary certainty. The essay examines Dürrenmatt’s critique of both public justice (Justiz) and moral justice (Gerechtigkeit), while emphasizing the unresolved relation between Traps’s legal innocence, his ethical responsibility, and the narrative construction of guilt. Reading the prose narrative in relation to its framework and, where relevant, to the radio play and comedy, the analysis situates Die Panne within Dürrenmatt’s broader body of work and within recent scholarship on his poetics of justice.