After the 650th anniversary celebrations in 1941, the stage works of van Arx began to fall out of favour with mainstream audiences, while he himself increasingly retreated into private life, preoccupied with the danger that Switzerland was sliding into a subservient relationship with its National Socialist superpower which, before 1942, was widely expected to win the war and dominate the continent. During 1942 he became ill with serious pulmonary inflammation from which, however, he recovered.