What is the significance of the time, place, and events from real life that are implied in The Visit?

In one sense The Visit takes place in a town which, as in the play Andorra by Durrenmatt's fellow Swiss writer Max Frisch, is a kind of mythical and timeless fantasy-land that has somehow landed in Europe. But the town of Guellen, in The Visit, is also a representation of contemporary Germany, and of Western culture in general.
We know from references in passing to Eisenhower and Nehru that the play is set contemporarily, in the 1950s. At that time the German-speaking peoples were still attempting to come to grips with the magnitude of the suffering and destruction perpetrated by the Nazis in World War II and the Holocaust. The fact that the people of Guellen are willing to carry out the murder of Schill (in the original German version he is called Ill) must be seen in this context. At the same time Claire Zachanassian is a woman who, though she's been wronged and is therefore a protagonist in the play, has also become inhuman. She carries with her an entourage of ex-husbands and servants (including two who have been castrated) who are symbols of her destructiveness. In seeking revenge on Ill, she believes she is carrying out justice but is actually perpetuating a cycle of wrongdoing and violence. Both she and Ill are thus guilty, Ill because he abandoned Claire during their youth, and Claire because she seeks revenge. They are both symbols of the evil that cannot be expunged from human nature.
At various times the townspeople mention their "Western values." The irony of course is that the violence, hatred and war that have engulfed Europe recently and since the beginning of history have been committed by people who claimed to believe in those values. And in The Visit, in order to rebuild their poverty-stricken town, the townspeople are willing to commit murder, to obtain the huge monetary reward offered by Zachanassian. They rationalize the killing by the principle that anything is acceptable if it's allegedly being done for the benefit of the community. This is basically a metaphor for the way governments—in other words, human beings collectively—in modern times and earlier, have justified war and mass killing.