Rolf Hochhuth, Who Challenged a Pope’s Wartime Silence, Dies at 89 ( May 2020). By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
The theater historian Louise Kerz Hirschfeld, who was
married to the production’s set designer, Leo Kerz, remembered the mood inside
the theater on the opening night. “People were weeping,” she said in a phone
interview. “At the end there was this deadly silence. Then, people got up and
there was a 20-minute applause. For the Germans, it was catharsis.”
Rolf Hochhuth, a firebrand German writer whose play indicting Pope Pius XII for his silence about Nazi crimes led to riots in theaters and an international furor but also greater transparency in the Roman Catholic Church, died on May 13 at his home in Berlin. He was 89. The death was confirmed by his son Martin.
Mr. Hochhuth examined the moral culpability of Pius in “The
Deputy,” which had its premiere in West Berlin in 1963. Confronted with
evidence of the mass killings of Jews, the pontiff had shrunk from a public
condemnation of Hitler, and in a 65-page commentary that was appended to the
published play, Mr. Hochhuth wrote, “Perhaps never before in history have so
many people paid with their lives for the passivity of one single politician.”
Books reviewed: Pope Pius XII, Hitler’s pawn?
“The Deputy” energized a generation eager to confront the ethical implications of the Holocaust and forced the church onto the defensive. It also helped establish documentary theater as an artistic form able to shape public discourse. The cultural critic Susan Sontag, writing in The Sunday Herald Tribune’s book review supplement, called the play “extremely important” and compared it to the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. “The theater,” she wrote, “is courtroom.”
Many Catholics considered Mr. Hochhuth’s play a calumny. Defenders of Pius argued that a direct confrontation with Hitler by the pope would have led to brutal retribution against Catholics and church institutions across Europe; the Vatican’s cautious stance, they said, allowed it to quietly save thousands of Jews. In 1965, pressured by the debate ignited by “The Deputy,” the Vatican archives began to release thousands of wartime records. Last year, the Vatican said it would grant full access to the documents.
The Rev. John Pawlikowski, a church historian, said in a phone interview that Mr. Hochhuth’s indictment of Pius XII was a historical pivot point. “He was the first to shape the image of Pius XII with which we are still dealing,” he said....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/theater/rolf-hochhuth-dead.html
Books reviewed: Pope Pius XII, Hitler’s pawn?
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