In a more direct, less complex and ambiguous manner than Dürrenmatt, Frisch made a worthy, honest attempt in his plays (more private themes dominate his prose writing) to state and analyse some of the uncomfortable problems left in the wake of the Second World War. Above all he tried to elucidate the process of 'how it came about', 'how it could come to this', with guilt, inevitably, as the central motif in every case. Frisch subtitled his second play, Nun singen sie wieder (Now They've Started Singing Again), written in 1945, 'Attempt at a Requiem': in the German soldiers who shoot helpless hostages and the Allied airmen who bomb defenceless civilians he portrays and deplores the mentality that sees the enemy as totally black and satanic. But the humanistic pacifism of this play lacks a trenchant cutting edge—at most it is to be found in the flagellation...