Read the Book or Watch the Movie? "Der Richter und sein Henker" at the Intermediate Level

Abstract

Visualization has become a key concept in foreign language pedagogy and is a lightning rod within professional debates on how best to teach language. Where some teachers emphasize the rewards that well-placed visuals yield, other wellfounded arguments decry the displacement of the written word with what is often perceived to be the less substantive image. A film adaptation of a literary work only raises the stakes and its value as a primary course text is likely to meet with polarizing response. This debate has practical ramifications for language learners at the intermediate level, for this is the level at which students' needs are most varied and for which appropriate materials are consequently most scarce. If teachers agree that secondyear students should increase their active vocabulary, hone grammatical proficiency, and expand their critical thinking skills, there is widespread disagreement on the texts or media that best enable such progress. I would like to reframe this debate. Instead of simply favoring the written word over the image, I shall suggest strategies for using the best-and even the worst-of each to their fullest extent.1 My insights center on the combined use of a beloved, much-read literary text, Friedrich Durrenmatt's Der Richter und sein Henker (1956)2 together with a little-known, and in my opinion, vastly inferior adaptation,3 Maximilian Schell's eponymous film of 1976. Such an admittedly uneven combination is bound to raise questions, so allow me to acknowledge my biases here with a brief description of each work. Dorrenmatt's detective novel intertwines within a dramatic investigation of crime and character an engaging debate on good vs. evil and the nature of chance. As younger men, Barlach and Gastmann had taken opposing sides on a wager that the perfect crime could or could not be committed. Gastmann killed a man before Barlach's eyes and challenged him to prove his guilt. Despite being a witness to the crime, Barlach is unable to prove to the authorities that Gastmann was responsible for the man's death, a fact that has haunted him throughout his professional life and bound him to Gastmann in pursuit of justice. The reader meets Barlach as an older man, sick with cancer, as he investigates another murder, that of his young colleague, Schmied, killed during an undercover investigation. Together with a new partner, Tschanz, Birlach encounters Gastmann once again and uses his knowledge of human nature