Politics & Power Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Durrenmatt isn’t offering Communism advice so much as setting a trap for it: to survive, it must become what it was built to denounce. The line is structured like a conditional mercy, but it’s really an indictment of the system’s core operating myth: the Party as a machine of history, incapable of error because it claims to embody historical necessity. “Infallible” is the giveaway word. It’s the religious vocabulary Communism supposedly banished, smuggled back in as a secular priesthood.

The brilliance here is how he frames “thinking” as an act of political rebellion. In one stroke, Durrenmatt suggests that a Communist movement that stops thinking ceases to be Marxist in any meaningful sense; it becomes catechism, then policing, then fear. The subtext is the mid-century European lesson: when a party declares itself correct by definition, every contradiction becomes sabotage, and every reformer becomes a heretic.

Context matters: Durrenmatt wrote from the vantage point of a small democratic country watching Cold War superpowers harden into systems. His theater and prose fixate on moral compromise and institutional hypocrisy, so the quote reads less like a left-to-right conversion than a dramatist’s insistence on fallibility as the precondition for sanity. “Become democratic” isn’t a garnish; it’s the demand that power accept limits, opposition, and accountability - the things an “infallible” party can’t tolerate without unmaking itself. That’s the sting: survival requires self-negation.