The premiere of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy in West Berlin generated a huge controversy over the role of Pope Pius XII and that of the Vatican during the years of the Holocaust.
The premiere of Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter: Ein Christliches Trauerspiel (The Representative, 1963; also known as The Deputy, 1964) in Berlin on February 20, 1963, generated a considerable uproar and an inordinate amount of controversy, much of it over the portrayal of Pope Pius XII. Subtitled A Christian Tragedy, the play is essentially about individual responsibility and moral choices. In opposition to literary critics or dramatists such as Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who held that in view of the anonymity of the modern industrial age the individual had become irrelevant, Hochhuth firmly believed that every individual, especially a prominent one, had the freedom of choice to make decisions that affected the course of history.
Like German dramatist Friedrich von Schiller, Hochhuth believed that it was the function of the theater to teach a moral lesson, so he sought to provoke and hoped that his play would become a force for change by helping Germans face their Nazi past. Convinced that the issues of the recent past could be presented truthfully in the style of a documentary drama, he used selected historical facts as much as possible to present historical figures. At the same time he also created fictitious characters and events, using his imagination to transform what he considered the raw materials of history into drama.
The origins of The Deputy go back to the late 1950’s, when Hochhuth became interested in the life of Kurt Gerstein, who, although an active member of the Protestant Confessing Church, had joined the Schutzstaffel
The central figure of the drama, written in free verse, is the Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana, a composite character modeled after the Polish Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe
The play was first staged in Berlin by Erwin Piscator, a veteran German theatrical director who had long been an advocate of documentary theater. However, the play as performed at Berlin and elsewhere represented only a fraction of the book version of The Deputy, which appeared simultaneously with the premiere. This 350-page play, complete with extensive stage directions, was published along with a lengthy appendix of historical documentation compiled by the author to shore up the principal contentions of the play. Because a performance of the published version of the play would have taken some seven hours, Piscator made substantial cuts, thereby reducing the performance to about three-and-a-half hours. In the process more than half of the play was cut and a number of characters and subplots disappeared. Thus, SS leaders such as Adolf Eichmann, as well as prominent representatives of German industry who are shown to be in league with the Nazi’s economic enterprises in the concentration camps, were missing from Piscator’s version of the play.
Rolf Hochhuth (right) and British writer David Irving in 1966.
Because of all these cuts, the stage play lost much of its breadth and focused largely on the relationship between Fontana and Pius XII. Act 5 of the play, which takes place in Auschwitz, proved to be the most difficult to stage, forcing Piscator and many subsequent directors to make even more drastic cuts. As a result, the allegorical figure of “The Doctor,” an SS physician meant to personify evil, was drastically reduced. For the performance at Basel, Switzerland, Hochhuth even wrote a different ending, in which the story no longer ends in Auschwitz, and in which Fontana is simply handed over to the German secret state police, the Gestapo, in Rome.
Critical reaction to the play, especially its published version, was swift. Although the reactions of German audiences turned out to be relatively mild, the performance in Basel required a sizeable police presence, while in Paris an irate audience physically threatened the actors. The limited discussion of the artistic merits of the play was from the outset overshadowed by a heated debate in the press and in some scholarly circles. Some critics attacked the play as an anti-Catholic polemic and faulted the author with a petit-bourgeois idealism, as well as with improper use of historical evidence. Other commentators praised Hochhuth for his courage to deal with a sensitive and explosive subject.
Hochhuth’s controversial first play quickly became the most successful dramatic work on the post-war German stage and propelled its author into international prominence. His style of documentary theater gave a much needed impetus to the German stage. Within a short time, other documentary plays by authors such as Heinar Kipphardt and Peter Weiss continued to make the German theater into a forum for the discussion of contemporary issues.
Hochhuth’s second, equally lengthy and controversial play Soldaten: Nekrolog auf Genf
The heated and often acrimonious debate over The Deputy generated some seven thousand written works within a decade. Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, protested the portrayal of Pius XII, while the German foreign minister issued an apology to the Vatican. Although most critics found few if any positive things to say about the artistic merits of the play or its historical accuracy, many credited The Deputy with having provided an important stimulus for Germany’s long overdue self-examination of its Nazi past.
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Bentley, Eric, ed. The Storm over “The Deputy.” New York: Grove Press, 1964. An indispensable collection of essays and articles by literary critics, historians, and social scientists. Contains an essay by Erwin Piscator and an interview with Rolf Hochhuth. -
Hochhuth, Rolf.“The Deputy.” Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Includes a preface by Albert Schweitzer and Hochhuth’s “Sidelights on History.” -
Rychlak, Ronald J. Hitler, the War, and the Pope. Columbus, Mo.: Genesis Press, 2000. Written by a trial lawyer and law professor. Offers a point-by-point refutation of the various charges leveled against Pius XII. -
Sanchez, José M. Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. Contains a brief examination of the issues raised in The Deputy, and does so within the broader context of the Vatican’s role during the Holocaust. -
Schumacher, Claude, and Derek Fogg, eds. Hochhuth’s “The Representative” at the Glasgow Citizens’, 1986. Glasgow, Scotland: Theatre Studies Publications, 1988. Contains several seminar lectures given at the Goethe Institute Glasgow in connection with the performance of Hochhuth’s play. Also contains press reviews and photographs of the stage production. -
Ward, Margaret E. Rolf Hochhuth. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Balanced and lucid discussion of the major aspects of The Deputy and other works by Hochhuth. Well documented with a useful bibliography. Ideally suited for readers new to The Deputy and Soldiers.
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