Life's Pleasures Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Durrenmatt is needling the comforting myth that truth naturally rises in solemn places. A jury box is supposed to be civilization's truth machine: formal, impartial, consecrated by procedure. He flips it. The jury, in his telling, is exactly where confession becomes hardest, because the courtroom is not built for honesty; its architecture rewards strategy, performance, and self-preservation. Coffee, by contrast, signals the low-stakes intimacy where people talk too much. It is domestic, ordinary, almost comic. That contrast is the point: the most monstrous admission slips out not under the bright light of justice but under the soft lamp of social ritual.

The line also carries Durrenmatt's signature cynicism about institutions. In his plays and crime fiction, guilt is rarely a clean moral category that the law can neatly extract. Systems meant to arbitrate truth end up manufacturing it, shaping narratives until they fit available scripts. A confession in court is immediately instrumentalized: it becomes evidence, leverage, punishment. Over coffee it can remain, briefly, human speech - tangled with shame, bravado, boredom, the desire to be seen.

Context matters: writing in postwar Europe, Durrenmatt watched legal and political systems claim legitimacy after collective catastrophe. His work repeatedly asks how "justice" operates when the world is absurd and power is uneven. The joke lands because it is bleakly plausible: we have built courtrooms to produce verdicts, not to invite truth.