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Analysis of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on September 17, 2020 • ( 0 )

Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility. In the Punch-and-Judy show of our century . . . there are no more guilty and also, no responsible men. It is always, “We couldn’t help it” and “We didn’t really want that to happen.” And indeed, things happen without anyone in particular being responsible for them. Everyone is dragged along and everyone gets caught somewhere in the sweep of events. We are all collectively guilty, collectively bogged down in the sins of our fathers and of our forefathers. . . . That is our misfortune, but not our guilt: guilt can exist only as a personal achievement, as a religious deed. Comedy alone is suitable for us. . . .

But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly.

—Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “Problems of the Theatre”

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s view of the theater as a vehicle for moral revelation and universal relevance is reflected in Der Besuch der alten Dame ( The Visit ), a tragicomedy combining expressionistic devices and elements of Brechtian epic theater with an inspired sense of the shocking and grotesque. At its core the play is a serious exploration of humanity’s dark side in its conviction that economics determines morality, an idea that is found in drama as early as the 1830s, with the opening scene of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck . In The Visit the tragedy is that an entire community is caught in a sweep of events that leads to a murder by the masses; Dürrenmatt’s genius is to present what is a tragedy of commission into a work of unsettling humor.

In Friedrich Dürrenmatt the attributes of the dissident intellectual coalesced with those of the rural villager, the result of a family situation in which strict Protestant training coexisted with unorthodoxy. Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 in the Swiss village of Konolfi ngen in the canton of Bern, the older of two children of Reinhold and Hulda Zimmerman Dürrenmatt. His father was the Protestant pastor of the town church and his paternal grand father, Ulrich, was an eccentric, who had been active in 19th-century Swiss politics. A fanatically conservative newspaper publisher, Ulrich was proud to have spent 10 days in jail for composing a viciously satiric poem he printed on the front page of the paper. His grandson was also affected by the tales his father told him from classical mythology and the Bible tales recounted by his mother, all of which would later provide material for his works. Dürrenmatt’s first ambition was to become a painter, and while attending secondary school in a nearby village he spent his spare time in the studio of a local painter. He continued to paint and draw as an adult, and his first published plays were accompanied by his illustrations. In 1935 the family relocated to the city of Bern, where Dürrenmatt attended the Frieies Gymnasium, a Christian secondary school. He was adept at classical languages but was otherwise a poor student, and after two and a half years there he was asked to leave. He was then sent to a private school from which he often played hooky. Rejected from the Institute of Art, Dürrenmatt studied at the University of Zurich and the University of Bern, where he tutored in Greek and Latin to earn money. After a stint in the military and a return to the University of Zurich, a bout with hepatitis sent him home to Bern, where he studied philosophy at the university and considered writing a doctoral dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard and tragedy.

Dürrenmatt began his literary career in the early 1940s with fictional sketches and prose fragments, and in 1945 he published a short story echoing the intense style of German writer Ernst Jünger. He failed in his attempt to become a theater critic as well as a cabaret sketch writer, although the latter efforts displayed his gift for social satire. In 1946 he married Lotti Geissler, an actress, and the following year the couple relocated to Basel. His first play, Es steht geschrieben ( Thus It Is Written ), performed in Zurich in 1947, is a parody of Western history in the guise of a panoramic historical drama with Brechtian influences. Set in the 16th century the 30-scene play concerns Anabaptists, their transformation of Münster into a New Jerusalem, and the destruction of the city by a coalition of Catholic and Protestant troops. At once solemn, passionate, prophetic, religious, existential, cynical, and apocalyptic, the play is unwieldy in execution, with a large cast and dialogue ranging from the biblically hymnic to the absurd. It drew boos from its first-night audience; however, reviewers praised Dürrenmatt’s potential, and he was awarded a cash prize from the Welti Foundation as an encouragement to continue writing plays. Twenty years later Dürrenmatt reworked the play as a comedy, Die Wiedertäufer ( The Anabaptists ), which was more stageworthy but failed equally with audiences. A similar fate greeted his second play, Der Blinde (1948; The Blind Man ), considered to be a pretentious, heavy-handed blend of theology and philosophy.

Dürrenmatt’s first theatrical success was Romulus der Grosse ( Romulus the Great ), performed in 1948. It is a Shavian-like tragicomedy, in which the title ruler, personifying deliberate irresponsibility and inaction, accepts that the power and tyranny of Rome must give way to truth and humanity. He refuses to try to halt the barbarian destruction of Rome and ultimately accepts a pension from the German conqueror that will allow for a comfortable retirement. In 1949 Romulus the Great became the first Dürrenmatt play to be performed in Germany, where it became a standard offering in German theater. Nevertheless, Dürrenmatt continued to suffer financially, and to help support his family, which had grown to three children, he turned to writing detective novels, which were a great success, as were his radio plays. The royalties from the latter allowed him to purchase a home near Neuchâtel in 1952, where he lived until his death in 1990. He completed the manuscript for his next play, Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi ( The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi ), in 1950. A panorama of violence and intrigue, with expressionistic touches, in which the title character destroys himself and everyone around him with his determination to impose absolute Mosaic justice, the play was rejected by Swiss theaters but was produced in 1952 at the Intimate Theatre in Munich and established Dürrenmatt as an avant-garde dramatist. Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon ( An Angel Comes to Babylon ), also produced at the Intimate Theatre in 1952, is a satire of power and bureaucracy that validates, through the hero, the beggar-artist Akki, the values of innocence and ingenuity over institutional power and corruption.’

https://viennaoperareview.com/

The philosophical, theological, and social themes that Dürrenmatt explored in his previous plays are highly developed, straightforward, and sardonically and grotesquely amusing in The Visit , first performed in Zurich in 1956 and from then on a mainstay of Western theater. The Visit is set in Guellen, a small town somewhere in German-speaking central Europe. The once-prosperous Guellen, where “Goethe spent a night” and “Brahms composed a quartet,” has decayed in recent years to the point where it is almost completely impoverished (the name in German translates to “liquid manure”). The Visit begins and concludes with a parody of a chorus like that of a Greek tragedy, which serves to give the play a classical symmetry, that heightens its sense of irony. The first act opens at the ramshackle railroad station, where four unemployed citizens sit on a bench and interest themselves in “our last remaining pleasure: watching trains go by,” as they recite a litany of woes:

Man three: Ruined.

Man four: The Wagner Factory gone crash.

Man one: Bockmann bankrupt.

Man two: The Foundry on Sunshine Square shut down.

Man three: Living on the dole.

Man four: On Poor Relief Soup.

Man one: Living?

Man two: Vegetating.

Man three: And rotting to death.

Man four: The entire township.

This chorus of men, together with Guellen’s mayor, schoolmaster, priest, and shopkeeper, gather to meet a train and greet its famous passenger, Claire Zachanassian (née Wascher), daughter of Guellen’s builder, who is visiting her hometown after 45 years. Now 63, she is the richest woman in the world, the widow of the world’s richest man, and the owner of nearly everything, including the railways. She has founded hospitals, soup kitchens, and kindergartens, and the Guelleners plan to ask her to invest in their town:

Mayor: Gentlemen, the millionairess is our only hope.

Priest: Apart from God.

Mayor: Apart from God.

Schoolmaster: But God won’t pay.

The mayor appeals to the shopkeeper, Alfred Ill (sometimes translated as Anton Schill), who was once Claire’s lover, to charm her into generosity. For his part Ill knows that if she were to make the expected financial gift, he will be victorious in the next mayoral contest. Madame Zachanassian arrives. She is a grande dame , graceful, refined, with a casual, ironic manner. She is accompanied by an unusual retinue: a butler, two gum-chewing thugs who carry her about on a sedan chair, a pair of blind eunuchs (who, as Dürrenmatt states in his postscript to the play, can either repeat each other’s lines or speak their dialogue together), her seventh husband, a black panther, and an empty coffin. When Claire and Ill greet each other, Ill calls her, as he used to, “my little wildcat” and “my little sorceress.” This sets her, as Dürrenmatt’s stage notes indicate, purring “like an old cat.” Eventually, the two leave the fulsome (and transparently false) cordiality of the town behind to meet in their old trysting places. In Konrad’s Village Woods, the four citizens from the first scene play trees, plants, wildlife, the wind, and “bygone dreams,” as Ill tries to win Claire over. When he kisses her hand, he learns that it is made of ivory; most of her body is made of artificial parts. Nevertheless, he is convinced that he has beguiled her into making the bequest. At a banquet in her honor that evening Claire sarcastically contradicts the overly flattering testimonial offered by the mayor of her unselfish behavior as a child, but declares that, “as my contribution to this joy of yours,” she proposes to give 1 million pounds to the town. There is, however, one condition: Someone must kill Alfred Ill. For her 1 million, Claire maintains, she is buying justice: Forty-five years earlier she brought a paternity suit against Ill, who bribed two witnesses to testify against her. As a result she was forced to leave Guellen in shame and to become a prostitute in Hamburg. The child, a girl, died. The two witnesses are the eunuchs, whom Claire tracked down, blinded, castrated, and added to her entourage. The butler was the magistrate in the case. The mayor indignantly rejects the offer “in the name of humanity. We would rather have poverty than blood on our hands.” Claire’s response: “I’ll wait.”

The second and third acts chronicle the decline of Guellen into temptation, moral ambiguity and complicity. In the weeks that follow the banquet, Madame Zachanassian, who, it is revealed, intentionally caused Guellen’s financial ruin, watches with grim satisfaction as the insidiousness of her proposal manifests itself in the town’s behavior. She also marries three more times; husband number eight is a famous film star, played by the same actor as husband number seven. At first gratified by the town’s loyalty to him, Ill becomes increasingly uneasy when the Guelleners, including his family, begin to buy expensive items on credit, even from his own store, and there comes into being the kind of night life and social activities found in a more prosperous town. Guelleners are clearly expecting their financial positions to change, and with this expectation comes a withdrawing of support for Ill and collective outrage for his crime of long ago. Claire’s black panther, who symbolizes Ill, is shot and killed in front of Ill’s store. Fearing for his life Ill tries to leave town on the next train but is surrounded on all sides by Guelleners. The citizens insist they are just there to wish him luck on his journey, but a terrified Ill is convinced they will kill him if he tries to board the train. He faints as the train leaves without him. The play reaches a crescendo, with the finale becoming a grand media event, when reporters and broadcasters arrive. Ill faces up to his guilt and publicly—and heroically—accepts responsibility for his crime and the judgment of the town, despite the support of the schoolmaster, the only citizen who attempts to question Guellen’s willingness to abdicate its responsibility as “a just community.” Ill is murdered by the crowd. The death is ruled a heart attack; the mayor claims Ill “died of joy,” a sentiment echoed by reporters. The mayor receives the check for 1 million, and Claire Zachanassian leaves with Ill’s body; the coffin now has its corpse. A citizen chorus descries “the plight” of poverty and praises God that “kindly fate” has intervened to provide them with such advantages as better cars, frocks, cigarettes, and commuter trains. All pray to God to “Protect all our sacred possessions, / Protect our peace and our freedom, / Ward off the night, nevermore / Let it darken our glorious town / Grown out of the ashes anew. / Let us go and enjoy our good fortune.”

In his postscript Dürrenmatt makes clear that “Claire Zachanassian represents neither justice . . . nor the Apocalypse; let her be only what she is: the richest woman in the world, whose fortune has put her in a position to act like the heroine of a Greek tragedy: absolute, cruel, something like Medea.” Guellen is the main character and Alfred Ill its scapegoat, ritually murdered so that the community can, at the same time, purge itself and justifiably accept a portion of Claire Zachanassian’s bounty. They are not wicked, claims Dürrenmatt, but, tragically, “people like the rest of us,” concerned with sin, suffering, guilt, and the pursuit of justice and redemption in an ostensibly alien and indifferent universe.

Source: Daniel S. Burt  The Drama 100 A Ranking of the Greatest Plays of All Time

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The Visit: A Tragi-comedy - Act II, Scene I Summary & Analysis

Act II, Scene I Summary

Ill watches through his window as townspeople bring flowers to adorn the coffin Claire has set up as a visual reminder of her offer. Scared, he tries to organize a family meal, but his son and daughter make excuses to leave. A man enters the shop asking for cigarettes more expensive than usual and asks to charge it to his account. Next, a pair of women come into the shop and provoke Ill's curiosity by also ordering goods more expensive than they usually do. A third man comes in and orders very expensive liquor. In every case, the people ask for their purchases to be charged to their accounts. The eunuch twins pass by his window carrying the fishing implements of Claire's now ex-husband, who apparently has taken legal possession of his tobacco farms. Claire talks from...

(read more from the Act II, Scene I Summary)

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by Friedrich Duerrenmatt

The visit themes, can justice be bought.

" The Visit " raises the question of the corruptibility of justice by asking whether it can be bought in return for material wealth. As a young man, Ill himself bought "justice" at Claire's expense by presenting false witnesses during the paternity suit that she brought against him. The end-result, for Claire, was a life that she would never have chosen for herself, and one for which she now seeks revenge.

When Claire visits the town, she offers an extraordinary monetary gift - but only on the condition that the town rectifies its past failure by putting Ill to death. In her mind, Claire equates Ill's punishment with "justice". The drama of the play unfolds as a kind of "proof" of Claire's assertion: that everything, including justice, can be bought.

In the past, Claire has purchased justice many times. Boby the Butler , for instance, was previously a judge in Guellen, but ultimately opted out of the profession in order to enter into Claire's personal service. The salary, he explains to the town, was so high that he couldn't refuse her. This foreshadows the town's experience with Claire's conditional gift: the gift is so generous that the sacrifice of personal and collective dignity is not too high a price to pay in return.

In an ironic inversion of Claire's decree, Claire has rescued the characters Roby and Toby , former American gangsters who had been sentenced to death by electric chair. She purchases each man's life, thus proving that her wealth is capable of altering the very essence of the American justice system.

It is important to note that the political institutions helpful in fashioning and enforcing an idea of "justice" in society are corrupted and rendered passive in "The Visit". In the face of impending wealth and prosperity, even the Mayor , the opposing political faction, and the police become complicit in Claire's scheme.

Prostitution

Prostitution is expressed in a number of different ways throughout the play. In the wake of her failed paternity suit, Claire became a prostitute and fell into a degraded state in which she lived outside of societal norms. She was branded a corrupt woman, and learned an intense lesson about the sexual marketplace: male sexual desires can be satisfied by wealth. In other words, sex can be purchased. The purchase of sex is a physical manifestation of power, and presses the one who is purchased into a corrupted, degraded state. For Claire's first husband, the elderly Armenian millionaire from whom Claire inherited her fortune, wealth was able to purchase a beautiful, young wife.

Now that Claire has risen out of her prostituted state, she attempts to turn the world into her own, personal "brothel", as she announces to the Doctor and the Schoolteacher at the beginning of the third act. Once, she was a prostitute, an outcast; now, she is the opposite: she hovers above society in a mythic, almost goddess-like position by imposing her own "rule of law" to exact her own idea of "justice" on the town of Guellen. She employs the lessons that she learned in the sexual marketplace: all desires can be bought, if one has the money.

The Rule of Law

The "rule of law" is what governs society; it lends order and shape to a culture by tending to the idea of "justice". The rule of law is something to which all citizens of a society submit, and it is generally understood to be imposed on the citizens by the citizens via governing bodies and the political system. Claire, however, arrives in the town of Guellen and immediately imposes her own personal version of "the rule of law". She interrupts the usual judicial process, and forces the townspeople to satisfy her personal desire for vengeance.

In the first act, the audience learns from the Priest that there is no capital punishment in Switzerland. Claire's gift, however, is conditional upon the townspeople's willingness to apply capital punishment to Ill. The townspeople collectively keep Claire's decree a secret, implying that they intend to eventually carry it out. Claire's personal, almost tyrannical "rule of law" has the effect of a secret extra-judicial proceeding. The question is whether the result of such a proceeding can ever fairly demonstrate "justice", given that the process lacks accountability and occurs outside of the generally accepted laws. For Claire, however, "justice" in the ideal - that is, legal - sense is not really the issue. Her idea of justice has been conflated by her desire for personal vengeance.

Vengeance as Justice

In the style of the Old Testament, Claire's notion of justice has been transformed into the frighteningly powerful force of vengeance. "An eye for eye" becomes Claire's guiding principle: Ill forced her into a life that she did not choose, and in return she forces Ill into a situation that ultimately results in his death. Ill states early on in the play that Claire was formerly a lover of justice; now, however, having suffered injustice herself, she has little faith in the judicial process. Just as her love for Ill changed into something monstrous, her love of justice became a strangling fixation on personal revenge.

The fates of Koby and Loby illustrate Claire's view of justice. Like God in the Old Testament, she tracks down both of Ill's false witnesses on the opposite ends of the earth. Roby and Toby, her employees, blind the men and castrate them. Claire sentences Ill to an existence characterized by suffering and fear. Ultimately, the death that Claire selects for Ill is one inspired by the same material desires that drove her former lover to betray her in the first place.

Forgiveness

Even though Claire purchases amnesty for Roby and Toby in a kind of divine gesture of forgiveness, she is nevertheless incapable of forgiveness when it comes to Ill and the injustices he committed against her when he denied her paternity claim and married Matilda. The townspeople of Guellen also refuse to forgive Ill for the collective suffering his initial actions against Claire have caused them. Neither Ill's wife Matilda nor his children are willing to forgive him or offer him them support and protection. The drama implies that perhaps the only figure capable of forgiveness is Ill himself: by recognizing his own guilt and understanding both Claire's motivations and the motivations of the townspeople, Ill accepts his fate. He genially proposes a drive in his son's new car with the entire family, and sits in Konrad's Village Wood to share a few last, intimate words with Claire. He then submits respectfully to the judgment of the town, and in the end preserves an idealized image of himself in his own heart. The troubling aspect of the drama, however, is that the ideal dies with him; it is not an image that the townspeople honor, or even see.

The events in the drama unfold in a cold, logical manner that leads to a predictable outcome. Given the initial presentation of Guellen, Claire's power, the history between Claire and Ill, and the nature of Claire's decree, Ill's death appears almost inevitable. Just as Boby the Butler explains that he became Claire's employee because of the high salary she offered him, the townspeople convince themselves that Claire's offer is, in fact, impossible to refuse. The townspeople could have stood by their initial reaction to Claire's decree and preserved their dignity, but Duerrenmatt offers a cold perspective on human nature by demonstrating how Ill's death was, given the circumstances, the only possible outcome.

The townspeople of Guellen engage in a powerful process of rationalization before deciding to kill Ill. Throughout the play, they consistently - though never explicitly - justify meeting the conditions of Claire's gift. At first, they are repulsed by the idea of sacrificing a popular local figure's life in exchange for wealth and prosperity, but as their subconscious desires are fed by the slow rise in their standard of living, and once it becomes clear that Ill is the cause of the town's suffering, the townspeople come to the decision that it is just, fair, and reasonable to kill Ill. By slaying Ill, they will both appease a powerful figure and restore the town's well-being.

"Seeing"

The theme of "seeing" - or recognizing the reality of a given situation - is what motivates the play's dramatic development. In the second act, Ill sees the yellow shoes appearing on the feet of the townspeople, and recognizes that Guellen is sinking into debt in expectation of Claire's gift. The townspeople, however, tell Ill that he has nothing to worry about - they are "blind" to the reality of what is transpiring. The news of the black panther's demise solidifies Ill's awareness of what is happening, inspiring an escape attempt.

The Schoolteacher, like Ill, sees what is happening to the town, and foresees the end-result. Duerrenmatt, however, believes that "seeing" does not necessarily lead to empowerment. To the contrary, both Ill and the Schoolteacher are rendered ineffectual in the face of the collective pressure placed on them by the townspeople and by Claire.

Claire is an almost mythical figure, capable of "seeing" to the four corners of the earth. She is able to track down and punish Koby and Loby, both of whom are residing in far-flung locales. Koby and Loby are blinded as their punishment, but are nevertheless the only ones who can "see" what Ill has done to Claire.

The journalists, who represent the outside world, are "blind"; they never see the truth of what is transpiring in Guellen. They mistake Claire's vengeance for a genuine display of compassion and generosity.

Dehumanization versus Humanism

Claire's peculiar habit of giving each of her husbands (except for the first) and each of her employees rhyming nicknames suggests that she is systematically dehumanizing everyone around her. In a technique that recalls the Biblical "naming" of the animals, Claire renames each member of her entourage, thereby relegating them to a status far beneath her own and illustrating her relative power.

Claire's physical artificiality (as evidenced by her prosthetic leg and her ivory hand) reinforces the idea that Claire is "unkillable"; not quite human. As a prostitute, her status was not much higher than that of an animal; now, she has risen to the status of a god. Claire's identity raises the question of what is fundamentally human. Duerrenmatt expresses humanist ideals using the history of the town of Guellen and the character of the Schoolteacher. These values, while sincere, have little stamina in the face of someone as wealthy and powerful as Claire. In other words, Duerrenmatt appears to believe that as society becomes increasingly capitalistic, humanist ideals have little hope for survival.

Romantic Love

Like "justice", romantic love is another ideal that Duerrenmatt exposes as weak in the face of market forces. Ill had initially chosen to marry Matilda rather than Claire for material gain. Claire's idea of love is further sullied by her exposure to men's sexual appetites during the time she spends working as a prostitute. Claire's marriage to an elderly millionaire only reinforces what she has already learned about men: sexual relationships have little to do with romantic love. This belief leads Claire to cycle through a comical string of marriages, suggesting the essential emptiness of the institution. In "The Visit", husbands are treated as little more than a consumer good.

Stereotypical romantic love in the story exists in a pastoral setting. Claire and Ill conducted their romance in the idyllic, nostalgic locales of Petersen's Barn and Konrad's Village Wood: perfect symbols for the beauty and innocence of their youthful infatuation.

Over time, however, Claire's love for Ill grew into an evil, monstrous thing. Filled with rage, Claire demands her own version of justice: revenge. Duerrenmatt reveals how deeply perverted her love has become with Claire's conditional gift to the town; ultimately, however, what she wishes is to take Ill away with her to an island in the Mediterranean Sea where they will be able to spend all eternity together. Her desire is romantic, but simultaneously monstrous.

The second act positions Claire and Ill in a perverse reconstruction of Shakespeare's famous balcony scene between Romeo and Juliet . In this scene, however, Claire stands on the balcony of her hotel with her newest husband, gazing out over the town, while Ill manages the general store below. The scene is no longer an expression of young love: here, the woman looks down on the man from high above more like a tyrannical queen than a lover.

The Visit Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Visit is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What are the actors celebrating in "The Visit"?

The actors are attending a homecoming celebration.

grandparents

Ok, so i know this is weird because this answer is 4 to 5 years from when you asked this question. But, what happened is the real grandparents were working at the asylum. and the fake grandparents broke out and went to there house, knowing they...

How do I choose the best Laravel developers?

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Study Guide for The Visit

The Visit study guide contains a biography of Friedrich Duerrenmatt, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Visit
• The Visit Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Visit

The Visit literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Visit.

• Examining Claire Zachanassian in Act One of The Visit
• An Exploration of Mob Mentality in The Visit
• The Ironic Tragicomedy
• The Effect of Dehumanization in The Visit
• Poverty and Humanistic Values in The Visit

Lesson Plan for The Visit

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Visit
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Visit Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Visit

• Introduction
• Film and television
• Literature and theatre

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We are thrilled to announce the general availability of  Exam DP-600 , which leads to the  Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate  certification.   

Microsoft Fabric’s common analytics platform is built on the instantly  familiar Power BI experience , making your transition to Fabric Analytics Engineer easier. With Fabric, you can build on your prior knowledge – whether that is Power BI, SQL, or Python – and master how to enrich data for analytics in the era of AI.  

To help you learn quickly and get certified, we created the  Fabric Career Hub.  We have curated the  best   free   on-demand and live training, exam crams, practice tests and more .  

And because the best way to learn is live, we will have  free live learning sessions  led by the best Microsoft Fabric experts from Apr 16 to May 8, in English and Spanish. Register now at the  Learn Together  page.

Also,  become eligible for a  free certification exam  by completing the  Fabric AI Skills Challenge.  But hurry, the challenge only runs from  March 19 – April 19  and free certs are first-come, first-served! (limit one per   participant,  terms and conditions  apply).  

• Version number: v: 2.128.751.0
• Date published: 4/8/24
• New Visual – 100% Stacked Area Chart 
• Line enhancements 
• Enhance Q&A with Copilot-generated Linguistic Relationships  

Snowflake (Connector Update)

Storytelling in powerpoint – improved image mode in the power bi add-in for powerpoint, storytelling in powerpoint – continuous slide show auto refresh, storytelling in powerpoint – auto populating the slide title.

• Introducing the Fabric metadata scanning sample app 
• Dynamic Subscriptions for Power BI and paginated reports 

Supporting Folders in workspace

New “clear barcode” action in the report footer, open power bi items in full screen mode.

• New Visuals in AppSource
• KPI MatrixGrowth Rate Chart by DJEENI v1.4Aimplan Comment Visual

Financial Reporting Matrix by Profitbase

Horizon chart by powerviz, drill down scatter pro by zoomcharts, image gallery, horizontal bar chart, multi-pane card 1.1.

New Visual – 100% Stacked Area Chart

Introducing the new 100% Stacked Area Chart, now available in our core visuals gallery. These visuals display the relative percentage of multiple data series in stacked areas, where the total always equals 100%. It’s perfect for showing the proportion of individual series to the whole and how they change over time. Find it in the visual gallery, on-object dialog, or format pane, right next to the Stacked Area Chart. Give it a try and share your feedback with us!

For more detailed information about this new visual, and the new line enhancements you can read our article: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pbicorevisuals_powerbi-pbicorevisuals-activity-7183990356642775041-lsFE?utm_source=combined_share_message&utm_medium=member_desktop

Line enhancements

Take your line charts to the next level with our new line control features.

• Adjust line color transparency under Lines > Colors > Transparency.
• Control the color and transparency of each series by selecting them in the ‘Apply settings to’ dropdown.
• Use Monotone and the new Cardinal smooth type for full control of smooth lines.
• Choose from before, center, and after step lines to align your visual with your story.

Try out these new features and enhance your line charts.

Enhance Q&A with Copilot-generated Linguistic Relationships

Improving your linguistic schema is an important step in making sure that the Q&A visual can understand the wide range of questions people might ask about their data. This is why, back in September , we added a new section into the Q&A setup menu to help you add linguistic relationships to teach Q&A about words which qualify or relate your data.   

But we also know that coming up with all the different words people might be using to refer to your data can take time and effort, and we’ve been working on ways to make that process easier for you! In November , we introduced a way for you to quickly generate new synonyms for the names of tables and columns in your model; this month, we’ve introduced the same functionality for linguistic relationships!   

When you open a report with a Q&A visual, if you have Copilot enabled and you’ve already added synonyms, you’ll now see a banner prompting you to get relationships with Copilot as well.   

Unlike with synonyms, Copilot-generated relationships will not be used to understand natural language inputs until you have approved them, so make sure you accept the ones which work for your model!   

Allow Copilot to help interpret Q&A questions.

You can also now use Copilot to improve the Q&A engine’s term recognition when you ask questions! This new feature will trigger when you ask Q&A a question which uses words or phrases which Q&A doesn’t recognize, but which it detects might be referring to data entities like tables or columns. Then, Copilot will also check those unknown words or phrases to see if there is any reasonable match — and, if so, return the answer as a visual as though a suggested synonym had been applied.

This feature is not a replacement for synonyms! In fact, adding synonyms for the entities in your semantic model is even more important to create good matches, as they increase the surface area to check for similarities. It will widen the range of inputs Q&A will recognize, but like a multiplier, it will improve recognition for well-modeled data much better than it will for poorly modeled data.   

This feature will be automatically enabled when you choose to get synonyms with Copilot, but you can also turn it on or off manually in the suggestion settings menu in the Synonyms tab in Q&A setup.  

Data Connectivity

The Snowflake connector has been updated to support the use of Snowflake dynamic tables .

We’ve made saving Power BI content as an image simpler and more powerful.

First, we’ve added a new dropdown menu to the add-in’s footer. In that menu, you can choose whether you want to see live data or a snapshot. So now it is much easier to find where to switch between live data and a static image.

Second, for snapshots, you now have two options:

• Public snapshot: Anyone who can view the presentation can view the image.
• Snapshot: Only those who have permission to view the report in Power BI will be able to see the snapshot.

Third, we’ve disabled the default snapshot, so that the slide thumbnail doesn’t show the image by default (this also applies when you copy & paste the slide into an email for example), but only after the add-in is loaded and the required permissions have been checked.

And lastly, we honor this setting also when you open the presentation in PowerPoint for the web. You still cannot change a live view into a snapshot in PowerPoint for the web, but if you or someone else has changed the view to snapshot in the PowerPoint desktop app, this will be respected, and you will see the snapshot also in PowerPoint for the web.

PowerPoint allows you to continuously playback a presentation. This is especially useful when you want to present information in public displays without any human interaction.

If a presentation that is running continuously has slides that include the Power BI add-in, the data in the add-in might become outdated, since the add-in gets the data from Power BI when the slide is loaded, or when the user manually refreshes the data being presented.

With the new automatic refresh in slide show feature, you can set the add-in to automatically pull fresh data from Power BI while the presentation is in slide show mode, ensuring that the presentation will always show the most recent data.

Note that auto refresh only happens in slide show mode and not while you’re editing the presentation.

When you add the Power BI add-in to an empty slide that doesn’t have a title yet, the Power BI add-in is here to help. It offers you suggestions for the slide title based on the content of you add-in. The title can be the report name, the page/visual name, or both. Just select the desired option and hit Add title .

Introducing the Fabric metadata scanning sample app

We’re delighted to announce the availability of the new Fabric metadata scanning app. This sample application builds upon the metadata scanning capabilities of Fabric’s set of Admin REST APIs collectively known as the scanner APIs. This new app can be used as a reference for admins interested in utilizing the Scanner API to catalog and report on all the metadata of their organization’s Fabric items.

The Fabric metadata scanning sample app handles all the steps for calling the scanner API including authentication, parallelism, throttling, and incremental scanning. In addition, it provides a central configuration file which can be easily modified to suit the specific needs of the caller. Currently authentication is supported both by using a service principal and a delegated token.

The app is available as a Microsoft open-source project, and is open for suggestions and improvements here:

https://github.com/microsoft/Fabric-metadata-scanning/

Dynamic Subscriptions for Power BI and paginated reports

We’re pleased to announce that you can now send dynamic per recipient subscriptions to up to 1000 recipients instead of the earlier limit of 50 recipients from the data in the Power BI semantic model. For existing subscriptions, we will automatically send subscriptions up to 1000 recipients if your Power BI semantic model contains that many rows of data. You need to edit the subscription if you don’t want to automatically send subscriptions. Learn more about creating dynamic per recipient subscriptions for Power BI Reports and paginated reports .

This feature will be available in some regions as soon as today, however depending on the geography in which your Power BI tenant is located, it may take up to two weeks to appear.

The Power BI Mobile apps support folders in workspace. So, you can access items that are organized in folders inside of your workspace directly from the mobile app.

Workspace and folders are Fabric entities, which means that you can add items that are not necessarily Power BI items to a workspace. But the Power BI Mobile apps only support a subset of Power BI items. Therefore, only the Power BI item will be accessible when you are browsing the folder content from the app. If a folder contains only non-Power BI items, it will appear empty in the mobile app.

When a field in your model is marked as a barcode, you can use your mobile device camera to scan the barcodes of real objects to filter reports that are built on this model. This feature is extremely useful for retail, where you can scan the barcode on a piece of merchandise to get a report showing data about the item directly in your mobile app (for example, inventory information, product selling data, etc.).

To make it easier and more intuitive to use barcodes and based on feedback we’ve gotten from our users in stores, we’ve added a new button to the report footer that makes it a one-click action to clear any previously scanned barcode from the report’s filter.

Learn more about scanning barcode from the mobile app

We continue to simplify the experience of using the Power BI Mobile apps, always keeping in mind the frontline workers who need quick access to their content. In this monthly update we’ve made it possible to open Power BI items on full screen, so users can view their data at its max.

Opening an item on full screen is supported both for launch items and when using a universal link.

A launch item is a Power BI item (report, page, app, etc.) that the user has selected to automatically open when they open the app. Now, you can also tell the Power BI Mobile app to open this item in full screen mode.

To set a launch item to open in full screen mode, go to Settings > Launch item and enable the Open in full screen toggle.

Using an MDM tool that supports an AppConfig file, mobile device administrators can also configure a launch item to be opened in full screen mode for their users.

You can also add the query parameter? fullscreen =1 to a Power BI item’s link. When you use a link with this parameter on your mobile device, the mobile app will open the item in full screen mode.

Visualizations

New visuals in appsource kpi matrix growth rate chart by djeeni v1.4 aimplan comment visual.

Making financial statements with a proper layout has just become easier with the latest version of the Financial Reporting Matrix.

Users are now able to specify which rows should be classified as cost-rows, which will make it easier to get the conditional formatting of variances correctly:

Selecting a row, and ticking “is cost” will tag the row as cost. This can be used in conditional formatting to make sure that positive variances on expenses are a bad for the result, while a positive variance on an income row is good for the result.

The new version also includes more flexibility in measuring placement and column subtotals.

Measures can be placed either:

• Default (below column headers)
• Above column headers

If you have multiple fields showing on your column headers, you can now decide which of these fields you want a column subtotal for.

This is in addition to the already existing features of the Financial Reporting Matrix:

• Adding custom rows
• Applying company/customer specific themes
• Expand/collapse columns
• Conditionally hide columns
• + much more

Highlighted new features:

• New Format Pane design
• Measure placement – In rows
• Select Column Subtotals
• Row Options

Get the visual from AppSource and find more videos here !

A Horizon Chart is an advanced visual, for time-series data, revealing trends and anomalies. It displays stacked data layers, allowing users to compare multiple categories while maintaining data clarity. Horizon Charts are particularly useful to monitor and analyze complex data over time, making this a valuable visual for data analysis and decision-making.

Key Features:

• Horizon Styles: Choose Natural, Linear, or Step with adjustable scaling.
• Layer: Layer data by range or custom criteria. Display positive and negative values together or separately on top.
• Reference Line : Highlight patterns with X-axis lines and labels.
• Colors: Apply 30+ color palettes and use FX rules for dynamic coloring.
• Ranking: Filter Top/Bottom N values, with “Others”.
• Gridline: Add gridlines to the X and Y axis.
• Custom Tooltip: Add highest, lowest, mean, and median points without additional DAX.
• Themes: Save designs and share seamlessly with JSON files.

Other features included are ranking, annotation, grid view, show condition, and accessibility support.

Business Use Cases: Time-Series Data Comparison, Environmental Monitoring, Anomaly Detection

🔗 Try Horizon Chart for FREE from AppSource

📊 Check out all features of the visual: Demo file

📃 Step-by-step instructions: Documentation

💡 YouTube Video: Video Link

📍 Learn more about visuals: https://powerviz.ai/

✅ Follow Powerviz : https://lnkd.in/gN_9Sa6U

ZoomCharts has just launched the latest addition to their suite of user-friendly custom visuals – Drill Down Scatter PRO . It provides all the features you would expect from a great scatter chart visual, but what sets Scatter PRO apart is the ability to easily drill down . Simply click on a data point and see all the values underneath it.

This way, you can quickly find your answers while also gaining a full understanding of where they come from. Furthermore, the visual’s UI is designed to be smooth and user-friendly for PCs and touch devices , and with cross-chart filtering you can use Scatter PRO to build incredible reports for immersive data exploration.

Main features:

• Drill Down: Create a multi-level hierarchy and drill down with just a click.
• Dynamic formatting : Apply custom marker colors, shapes, or images to each data point directly from data.
• Trendlines: Show a linear or polynomial regression line on the chart.
• Thresholds: Display up to 4 line or area thresholds on each axis.
• Area Shading: Highlight up to 8 custom areas with rectangles or ellipses.

🌐 Learn more about Drill Down Scatter PRO

Documentation | ZoomCharts Website | Follow ZoomCharts on LinkedIn

The Image Gallery is the first visual to be certified by Microsoft that allows for the display of high-quality images and their exportation along with other report content. There is no need to upload images to the Cloud, a CDN, or use any datasets . Simply import your images directly into the visual and share them instantly with your colleagues.

This visual boasts several impressive capabilities:

• Microsoft certification ensures that the visual doesn’t interact with external services , ensuring that your images are securely stored and encrypted within the report, consistent with your report’s sensitivity settings.
• Automatically saves your selected image in preview mode , allowing your colleagues to view the exact image you have highlighted.
• Images can be uploaded or removed exclusively in Edit Mode. Users in View Mode can only view the images.
• The visual is compatible with Power BI’s export functionality to PDF and PowerPoint.

LINK: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/power-bi-visuals/pbicraft1694192953706.imagegallery?tab=Overview

A space-saving horizontal bar chart designed with category labels placed inside the bars for clarity

This horizontal bar chart serves as an efficient filter to navigate through your data more effectively, optimizing space by placing the category labels within the bars themselves.

• Adjustable Bar Thickness and Spacing: Offers the flexibility to adjust the thickness of the bars and the spacing between them. This allows for optimal use of space and improves readability, especially when dealing with large datasets.
• Tooltip Details on Hover: Displays detailed information about each category when the user hovers over a bar. This feature provides additional context and insights without cluttering the visual.
• Data-Driven Category Labels: Automatically updates category labels based on the data source. This ensures that the chart remains accurate and up to date, reflecting any changes in the underlying data.
• Support for Hierarchical Data: Allows users to drill down into hierarchical categories within the chart. This functionality enables a more detailed data analysis without leaving the context of the initial visual.
• Export Options: Offers the ability to export the chart as an image or PDF, facilitating easy sharing and reporting outside of Power BI.

Link: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/power-bi-visuals/pbicraft1694192953706.horizontalbarchart?tab=Overview

Introducing the “ Trends ” visual for Power BI – your gateway to leveraging Google Trends data for strategic business analysis. This innovative visual tool allows you to compare brand popularity, monitor market trends, and gain insights into consumer search behaviors directly within your Power BI environment.

With Trends visual, you can:

• Analyze the ebb and flow of brand interest over time to identify market opportunities and competitive threats.
• Compare the popularity of products to inform marketing strategies and product development decisions.
• Understand seasonal trends to optimize your marketing campaigns and inventory planning.

Securely integrated and easy to use, “Trends” transforms your Power BI reports into a dynamic analysis tool, offering a comprehensive view of the market landscape. Dive into data-driven decision-making with “Trends” and stay one step ahead in the competitive business environment.

New visual: Multi-pane Card can be used to group and show data in multiple collapsible panes in Power BI reports. It is an alternative to multi-row card visual, but it can combine columns into a few groups and put each group’s data in each pane. It is suitable to show data in detail with a reduced number of report pages.

Screenshot 1 (Show data in 3 groups: Area and Population, GDP and Foreign Exchange Reserves for countries)

Data can be sorted by a specified column and numbers can be converted to a human readable string. You can also set up how many rows that you want to show on the card. Using these features, it will be very easy to show “Top 10 best performing stores” or “Top 10 worst performing stores” for retail businesses.

Screenshot2 (Combined with drilldown choropleth map to show the top 10 richest countries by GDP per capita for each continent and subregion)

You can go to Microsoft AppSource( https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/power-bi-visuals/mylocsinc1648311649136.tcard )to download and try it.

To learn more on how to use it, please read tutorials ( https://www.mylocs.ca/tutorials.html#multi-pane-card ).

Introducing Copilot pane in Power BI Desktop 

Earlier this year, we announced preview of Copilot for all customers with Premium/Fabric capacity in Power BI web . We’re thrilled to share that the same Copilot experience for report creation is now available for preview in Power BI Desktop. With our current preview, users can create reports faster and easier in the Power BI Desktop experience. You can now open the Copilot pane in report view and ask Copilot to:

• Create a report page – Copilot will create an entire report page for you by identifying the tables, fields, measures, and charts that would help you get started.
• Summarize a semantic model – Copilot will help you understand your Power BI semantic model by summarizing the data in your model.
• Suggest a topic – Copilot will suggest topics for your report pages.

Click here to learn more about how to get started.

That is all for this month! Please continue sending us your feedback and do not forget to vote for other features that you would like to see in Power BI! We hope that you enjoy the update! If you installed Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store,  please leave us a review .

Also, don’t forget to vote on your favorite feature this month on our community website. 

As always, keep voting on  Ideas  to help us determine what to build next. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

• paginated reports
• power bi desktop
• Visualization

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50 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Act Summaries & Analyses

Character Analysis

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Claire Zachanassian, née Wascher

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By Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The Physicists

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Two gangsters from Manhattan, sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing. Released at my request to carry my sedan chair. One million dollars per petition is what it cost me. The sedan chair comes from the Louvre, a gift from the French president. A nice gentleman. Looks just like he does in the papers. Carry me into town, Roby and Toby.

ILL: I wish time were suspended, my little sorceress. If only life hadn’t torn us apart. CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: You wish that? ILL: Just that, nothing else. You know I love you! (He kisses her right hand.) The same cool white hand. CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: You’re wrong. Another prosthesis. Ivory. ILL: (Dropping her hand, horrified) Clara, is everything about you artificial?!

You have remained unforgettable. Truly. Your academic achievements are still held up as an example by our educators, especially the interest you showed in the most important subject, botany and zoology, thus expressing your sympathy with every living being, indeed with all creatures in need of protection. Even then, your love of justice and your charitable nature were widely admired.

CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: I will tell you the condition. I will give you a billion, and with that billion I will buy myself justice. MAYOR: What exactly do you mean by that, Madam? CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: I mean what I said. MAYOR: But justice can’t be bought! CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: Everything can be bought.

Correct. Chief Justice Hofer. Forty-five years ago I was Chief Justice of Güllen and then moved on to the Court of Appeal in Kaffigen, until twenty-five years ago Mrs. Zachanassian offered me the opportunity to enter her service as her butler. I accepted. A peculiar career for a man of learning, perhaps, but the salary was so fantastic—

BUTLER: What happened to you? CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: I became a prostitute. BUTLER: Why? CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: The court’s verdict turned me into one.

Life has gone on, but I have forgotten nothing, Ill. Neither the woods of Konradsweil nor Petersen’s barn, neither Widow Boll’s bedroom nor your treachery. Now we have grown old, the two of us, you down at the heels and me cut to pieces by surgeons’ knives, and now I want us both to settle accounts: you chose your life and forced me into mine. You wanted time to be suspended, just a moment ago, in the woods of our youth, so full of impermanence. Now I have suspended it, and now I want justice, justice for a billion.

Mrs. Zachanassian, we are still in Europe; we’re not savages yet. In the name of the town of Güllen I reject your offer. In the name of humanity. We would rather be poor than have blood on our hands.

Zachanassian’s favorite piece. He always wanted to hear it. Every morning. He had class, all right, that old tycoon with his tremendous fleet of oil tankers and his racing stables, and billions in the bank. A marriage like that was still worthwhile. A great teacher, a great dancer, a master of all sorts of devilry. I learned all his tricks.

ILL: You’ve got new shoes. New yellow shoes. SECOND MAN: So? ILL: You, too, Hofbauer. You, too, are wearing new shoes. (He looks at the women, walks over to them slowly, horrified.) You too. New yellow shoes. New yellow shoes.

ILL: The customers I’ve had this morning. Usually there’s no one for the longest time, and now, for the past few days, they’re coming in droves. FIRST MAN: It’s because we stand by you. We stick by our Ill. Firm as a rock.

MAYOR: You forget that you’re in Güllen. A town with a humanist tradition. Goethe slept here. Brahms composed a quartet. These values impose an obligation. A man enters, left, with a typewriter. MAN: The new typewriter, Your Honor. A Remington.

Human kindness, gentlemen, is made for the purses of millionaires. With financial power like mine, you can afford yourself a new world order. The world made a whore of me, now I’ll make a whorehouse of the world. Pay up or get off the dance floor. You want to join the dance? Only paying customers merit respect. And believe me, I’ll pay. Güllen for a murder, boom times for a corpse.

If he tries to expose Clara by claiming she put a price on his head or something like that, when actually it was just an expression of unspeakable suffering, we’ll just have to take action.

The temptation is too great and our poverty is too wretched. But I know something else. I too will take part in it. I can feel myself slowly turning into a murderer. My faith in humanity is powerless. And because I know this, I have turned into a drunk. I am scared, Ill, just as you have been scared. I still know that some day an old lady will visit us too, and that then what is happening to you now will happen to us, but soon, maybe in a few hours, I will no longer know it.

Your Honor! I’ve been through hell. I saw you all going into debt, and with every sign of prosperity I felt death creeping closer. If you had spared me that anguish, that horrible fear, it would have all been different, we could speak on different terms, I would take the rifle. For all of your sake. But then I shut myself in, conquered my fear. Alone. It was hard; now it’s done. There is no turning back. Now you must be my judges. I will submit to your decision, whatever it turns out to be. For me it will be justice; I don’t know what it will be for you. May God help you live with your judgment. You can kill me, I won’t complain, I won’t protest, I won’t defend myself, but your action is yours, and I can’t relieve you of it.

ILL: The town’s holding a meeting this evening. They’ll sentence me to death and one of them will kill me. I don’t know who he will be or where it will happen, I only know that I’m ending a meaningless life. CLAIRE ZACHANASSIAN: I loved you. You betrayed me. But the dream of life, of love, of trust—this dream that was a reality once—I haven’t forgotten that. I want to rebuild it with my billions, I will change the past, by destroying you.

MAYOR: The Claire Zachanassian Endowment has been accepted. Unanimously. Not for the sake of the money— THE COMMUNITY: Not for the sake of the money— MAYOR: But for the sake of justice— THE COMMUNITY: But for the sake of justice— MAYOR: And to allay our conscience. THE COMMUNITY: And to allay our conscience. MAYOR: For we cannot live if we sanction a crime in our midst— THE COMMUNITY: For we cannot live if we sanction a crime in our midst—