The deputy

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The deputy is a spectacle of the German writer Rolf Hochhuth 's 1963, that the attitude of the Vatican for Holocaust theme.

The play consists of five acts and is written in free iambic verse. It describes the attempts of the fictional Jesuit father Riccardo Fontana, the head of the Roman Catholic Church , Pope Pius XII. to inform about the deportation and mass extermination of Jews in concentration camps by Nazi Germany . Fontana urges the Pope to protest against the extermination of European Jews during the deportation of the Roman Jews to the Auschwitz extermination camp in October 1943 . When his appeal remains in vain, Fontana chooses martyrdom and joins the deportees.

Hochhuth's "Christian tragedy" was premiered on February 20, 1963 in West Berlin at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm - the then house of the Free People's Stage . The director of the Freie Volksbühne, Erwin Piscator, directed . The premiere aroused far-reaching controversy (“proxy debate”) and led to international diplomatic entanglements. The play has been performed in over 25 countries to date and filmed in 2002 by the Greek-French director Constantin Costa-Gavras .

action

In the summer of 1942, SS- Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein tried to convince the nuncio to protest against the extermination of the Jews in the Apostolic Nunciature in Berlin with the support of the Jesuit father Riccardo Fontana . However, the papal representative points to a lack of powers. In a bowling scene among National Socialists, the figure of the “doctor” is exposed who is carrying out medical experiments in Auschwitz. Riccardo Fontana visits Gerstein in his apartment and gives his passport and cassock to Jacobson, a Jew whom the SS officer gives shelter to.

A little later, Riccardo and his father went to the Vatican to work towards a protest against the Holocaust. A cardinal emphasizes that the Church is in the position of mediator. In addition, given the threat to Christianity from the Soviet Union, neutrality is required. Meanwhile the Italian Jews are being deported. A cardinal visits a monastery that gives shelter to privileged Jews. Riccardo and Gerstein regard these measures as inadequate. Riccardo wants to convince the Abbot General to seize the Vatican radio in order to broadcast calls for protest. However, this refuses.

In a confrontation with the Pope Riccardo raises implicitly reproaching, "God will not destroy the church just because a Pope escapes its reputation." (Rolf Hochhuth: The Deputy Reinbek 1963. p.292.). In view of the unsuccessful conversation, Riccardo expresses his intention to go to Auschwitz. After all, a priest could act as the Pope's deputy when the pontiff represented Christ on earth. The Pope remains silent, shocked at the duping.

In Auschwitz Riccardo meets the cynical camp doctor, who sees him in the role of the vain divine explorer: “You die here, if you can't stop it, like a snail under the car tire - die like today's hero dies, nameless and wiped out by Powers that he doesn't even know, much less could fight. ”(P. 326f.) Gerstein wants to save the father and demands that the doctor take Jacobson with him in his place, but the doctor has the clergyman shot. In an outlook it becomes clear that until the end of the war the Pope did not make any public statements against the deportation of the Jews to the extermination camps.

Summary of the most important scenes

1st act (1st and 3rd scene)

  • Kurt Gerstein reports to the Berlin Nuncio about deportations.
  • The Berlin Nuncio does not declare itself responsible for the fate of the Jews.
  • Riccardo is deeply affected.
  • Riccardo promises Gerstein to inform the Pope about the Holocaust.
  • Riccardo exchanges passports with Jacobson, a Jew hidden in Gerstein's house.

2nd act

  • During a visit to his father (Count Fontana) in the Vatican, Riccardo condemns the inactive Pope.

"A representative of Christ who has" that "in mind and still remains silent, for reasons of state, who only thinks about one day, only hesitates an hour, to raise the voice of his pain to a curse that will make the last person on earth shudder -: such a Pope is ... a criminal. "

- Quote from "The Deputy". Reinbek 1963. p. 137
  • The cardinal comes to visit.
  • Riccardo hopes that the Concordat with Hitler will be terminated by the Pope.
  • The cardinal pleads for a neutral stance on the part of the Vatican towards the Nazi extermination policy.
  • The cardinal transfers Riccardo to Lisbon as a punishment.

3rd act (2nd scene)

  • At a meeting between the cardinal and an abbot, at which Count Fontana is also present, Riccardo (back from Lisbon) and Gerstein join them.
  • Gerstein reports on deportations in Rome.
  • The cardinal argues for the reasons of state of the Church in the face of the threat posed by Stalin.
  • Riccardo solicits the abbot's support for a call to the priests of Europe for open protest (Vatican Radio). A planned murder of the Pope, which the abbot is to portray as perpetrated by the SS, is intended to provoke public protest by the church.
  • The abbot is horrified and breaks off the conversation with Fontana.

4th act (1st scene)

  • Then there is a conversation between the cardinal and Count Fontana in the papal palace.
  • Fontana is of the opinion that the Pope should write to Hitler. Pius XII. does not want to provoke Hitler through an intervention.
  • Riccardo joins them and describes the conflict as a question of the honor of the Holy See.
  • The Pope only considers a covert approach (finding hiding places for the Jews, obtaining passports) to be opportune.
  • Fontana tries to get the Pope to protest.

“Fontana! ... Do not see that catastrophe is approaching for Christian Europe if God does not make Us, the Holy See, mediators. The hour is gloomy: we know that the Vatican will not be touched. But our ships outside that we are supposed to steer. Poland, the whole Balkans, yes Austria and Bavaria still. Whose ports will they get into? They could easily be smashed into pieces in a storm. Or they are drifting helplessly on Stalin's coasts. "

- Quote from “The Deputy”. Reinbek 1963. p. 273
  • However, the Pope lets himself be moved to an extremely neutral message, which Riccardo perceives as a blanket power of attorney for Hitler against the Jews.
  • The Pope, like Pontius Pilate (Mt. 27:24), washes his hands in innocence.
  • Riccardo then attaches the yellow Jewish star and wants to voluntarily take as a sign of protest martyrdom in the concentration camp in coming.

5th act (2nd and 3rd scene)

  • The “doctor”, a cynical concentration camp doctor, recognizes Riccardo as a martyr who is ready to die to save the church's ethos.
  • The doctor tries in vain to win Riccardo as a laboratory partner.
  • The cynical concentration camp doctor confesses that he wants to provoke a sign from God because he no longer believes in Hitler's victory and fears the atonement of the Allies.
  • He suggests Riccardo take him back to Rome.
  • To do this, he wants to hide behind the Petri chair in Rome with the help of a forged passport.
  • Riccardo is supposed to get a legal drive order.
  • Gerstein wants to free Riccardo from the concentration camp with the help of a fictitious order.
  • Riccardo refuses to flee.
  • Jacobson is also in the concentration camp and can convince Gerstein to at least free him instead.
  • When the dizziness is exposed, Riccardo tries to kill the doctor, but is shot in the process.
  • Gerstein is arrested (and dies in the resistance).

Historical models and sources

Maximilian Kolbe was arrested in 1941 and deported to Auschwitz, where he went to the hunger bunker for a fellow inmate (wooden sculpture in Wiślica).

Hochhuth has given several historical models for the characters in his drama. These people include Father Maximilian Kolbe (prisoner no. 16670 in Auschwitz ), who sacrificed himself for the Catholic father Franciszek Gajowniczek . Prelate Bernhard Lichtenberg , Provost of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, was arrested for including the Jews in his prayers and asking the Gestapo to share the fate of the Jews in the East. Lichtenberg died on the way to Dachau. Kurt Gerstein , a hygiene specialist with the Waffen-SS, tried to inform other countries about the extermination camps during the Second World War. After the end of the war he prepared the Gerstein report that was used in the Nuremberg Trial .

Hochhuth's sources, which he has evaluated over a period of three years and given in the appendix to the book edition, include the minutes of the Nuremberg war crimes trials , Joseph Goebbels' private notes and the speeches of Pius XII.

reception

Hochhuth submitted the drama Der Stellvertreter , on which he had been working since a three-month working holiday in Rome in 1959, in 1961, initially at the Bertelsmann publishing house Rütten & Loening . The publisher of the Bertelsmann publishing group, where he was employed as an editor, stopped printing out of consideration for its Catholic readership. A script was forwarded to Rowohlt Verlag , which published it two years later at the same time as the world premiere.

The premiere of the "Christian tragedy" in the West Berlin Theater on Kurfürstendamm (House of the Free People's Stage ) on February 20, 1963 by the artistic director Erwin Piscator sparked what had been the largest and most far-reaching theater debate in the Federal Republic of Germany and caused international controversy. Staging of the play led to clashes and tumults in several European countries. The Austrian premiere at the Volkstheater in Vienna even caused fights on the floor. The theater director Leon Epp interrupted the premiere in order to step onto the stage himself and announce: “Everyone who is attending this performance should ask himself whether he was somehow complicit in the things described here. “For a production on Broadway in New York (Brooks Atkinson Theater, February 26, 1964, 316 performances), producer Herman Shumlin received a Tony Award . Until 1966, Hochhuth forbade a performance of his play in Eastern Bloc countries out of concern about a strikingly anti-Catholic interpretation.

Hochhuth's fictional text drew considerable potential for conflict both from his controversial theses, including the branding of an assumed economic and anti-communist calculation by the Pope and the transfer of the papal deputy function to the martyr Riccardo Fontana as well as from the historical authenticity that the author achieved through his research and presentation of individual people in contemporary history. In the course of the so-called “proxy debate”, the philosopher Hannah Arendt defended the drama several times, including in her contribution The Deputy: Guilt by Silence? in the US edition of the New York Herald Tribune of February 23, 1964, in which she commented in detail on Hochhuth's play and the historical background in the context of Herman Shumlin's Broadway production. In her correspondence with Mary McCarthy in October 1963, Arendt had previously criticized the artistic quality of the piece, but emphasized the legitimacy of the question:

“The play is not a good one, but the question that Hochhuth raises is very legitimate: Why did the Pope never publicly protest against the persecution and ultimately the mass murder of the Jews? He knew the details and, as far as I know, no one has denied that. ”The Osservatore Romano wanted to discredit this question by claiming:“ 'If Hochhuth's thesis is correct, then it wasn't Hitler, Eichmann or the SS who were responsible for all the crimes but it was Pope Pius. ' […] That was, of course, complete nonsense, and H. [Hochhuth] never said anything like that […] What the Vatican […] tried to do was to replace the real problem with an absurd, easy-to-crush claim . Because there is of course no question that a public statement by the Pope [...] would have been a factor of great importance, in Germany itself, but especially in the countries occupied by the Nazis. "

- Arendt to McCarthy, October 3, 1963. In: Hannah Arendt. Mary McCarthy: With confidence. Correspondence 1949-1975 . Munich 1995. p. 239.

Hochhuth wrote about the portrayal of responsibility in the drama in general:

“The theater would be at the end if it ever admitted that the human being in the crowd is no longer an individual ... That is one of the essential tasks of the drama: to insist, however unpopular it sounds at the moment, that the human being is one responsible being. "

- Hochhuth, “The absurd in history”, in “ Theater heute . Chronicle and balance sheet of the stage year. ”1963 p. 73ff; under the title Die Rettung des Menschen back in Frank Benseler , ed. Festschrift Georg Lukács zum 80th Geb., Luchterhand, Neuwied 1965, p. 484ff., here p. 485f.

By 1975 there had been 7,500 publications on the deputy . In contrast to the extraordinarily broad public debate, the literary studies of Hochhuth's play concentrated less on questions of content and more on questions of genre theory. The controversy surrounding the categories of documentary literature and documentary theater continues . The proxy has been played in over 80 cities worldwide. Although the play has only been staged sporadically since the 1980s, some of the later productions at the Burgtheater Vienna in 1988, at the Frankfurt Theater im Zoo in 1992 or at the Berliner Ensemble in 2001 again led to protests and criminal charges against the play or advertising material.

Regardless of the verdict issued by Hochhuths Schauspiel, Pope Paul VI opened. 1965 the beatification process for Pius XII. As a prerequisite for the beatification of Pius XII. the responsible Congregation for the Beatification and Canonization Processes voted in May 2007 in favor of the “ heroic degree of virtue ” of the Pope, which was given by Pope Benedict XVI. was confirmed in December 2009. In a sermon on the 50th anniversary of the death of Pius XII. On October 9, 2008, the Pope highlighted the achievements of his predecessor among the participants in a Synod of Bishops and defended him against criticism. "I think you really have to recognize that he was one of the great righteous people who saved so many Jews like no other," said the Pope in an interview with Peter Seewald in the interview volume Licht der Welt (2010) .

Hochhuth added:

“Of course one has sometimes asked oneself how could anyone who seriously believes he was Christ's representative on earth shut up about Auschwitz. Although even in Rome, under the windows of the Vatican, many Italian Jews were brought to Auschwitz to be killed. "

- Hochhuth : SWR2 Kultur Aktuell: The writer and playwright Rolf Hochhuth is dead , May 14th, 2020 [1]

and summarized:

“The deputy’s question is: Why is the Pope silent about this? The Pope, who had nothing to fear from Hitler; Hitler feared him , his influence. "

- Hochhuth : “One to one. The Talk - In memoriam Rolf Hochhuth, playwright ", March 2016 [2]

The former general of the Romanian Securitate , Ion Mihai Pacepa , who defected to the west in 1978 , stated in the conservative US magazine National Review in 2007 that he, along with other spy chiefs of the Eastern Bloc, had the reputation of Pius XII. wanted to damage and that he had instrumentalized Rolf Hochhuth - the Gütersloh publisher , who was still unknown as a writer at the time . Hochhuth rejected these allegations.

filming

Rowohlt Verlag sold the world film rights to Hochhuths Schauspiel in April 1963 for 300,000 marks to the French producer Georges de Beauregard and his film production company "Rome Paris Films", without being made into a film. De Beauregard sold the film rights to the filmmaker Anatole Litvak . Rolf Hochhuth later attributed the acquisition of the film rights by the French production company and other representatives of the film industry to the deliberate intention of one of the producers involved to delay a film adaptation.

It was not until 2001/02 that the Greek-French film director Constantin Costa-Gavras took on the work. Costa-Gavras brought out his film adaptation with the actors Ulrich Tukur , Mathieu Kassovitz , Ulrich Mühe and Sebastian Koch under the German distribution title Der Stellvertreter . Costa-Gavras' film adaptation was an example of the treatment of the Holocaust in film, which has become much more common since the 1990s .

literature

expenditure

Monographs and compilations

  • Jan Berg: Hochhuth's 'deputy' and the 'deputy' debate. “Coming to terms with the past” in the theater and the press in the sixties. Kronberg / Ts. 1977.
  • Klaus Drobisch (Ed.): Rolf Hochhuth: The representative. Acting + documents on Rolf Hochhuth "The Deputy" . Berlin: People and World 1966.
  • Reinhold Grimm et al. (Ed.): The dispute over Hochhuth's deputy . Stuttgart: Basilius 1963 (theater of our time).
  • Walter Hinck (Ed.): Rolf Hochhuth - Intervention in contemporary history. Essays on the work . Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1981.
  • Reinhard Hoffmeister (ed.): Rolf Hochhuth. Political impact documents. Munich 1980. pp. 23-78. ISBN 3-463-00764-9 .
  • Fritz J. Raddatz (Ed.): Summa iniuria or was the Pope allowed to be silent? Reinbek: Rowohlt 1963.
  • Nadine Ritzer: Is it all just theater? On the reception of Rolf Hochhuth's "Der Stellvertreter" in Switzerland in 1963/1964 . Freiburg i.Ue 2007. ISBN 978-3-7278-1562-1 .
  • Heiner Teroerde: Political dramaturgies in divided Berlin. Social imaginations with Erwin Piscator and Heiner Müller around 1960 . Göttingen: V&R unipress 2009. pp. 177–221.

Essays

  • Hannah Arendt : Responsibility and Judgment . New York: Schocken 2003. ISBN 0-8052-1162-4 . (contains the essays The Deputy: Guilt by Silence? and Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship from 1964)
  • Michael Bachmann: Deputy. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 586-592.
  • Thomas Brechenmacher : The poet as a trapper: Hochhuth's “representative” and the impotence of the factual - attempt on the mechanisms of a historical debate . In: history as a trap. Germany and the Jewish world. For the Research Center for German-Jewish Contemporary History, ed. by Michael Wolffsohn and Thomas Brechenmacher. Neuried 2001. pp. 217-257.
  • Hetty Burgers: The deputy receptionist in the GDR. To the reception of one German literature in the other Germany . In: ideology and literary studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1986. pp. 167-207.
  • Peter Epp: Rolf Hochhuth: The deputy . In Peter Epp: The representation of National Socialism in literature. Frankfurt a. M .: Peter Lang 1985. pp. 149-175.
  • Ferdinand Fasse: History, Historiography and Drama . In Ferdinand Fasse: History as a problem of literature. Frankfurt a. M .: Peter Lang 1983. pp. 207-233.
  • Michael F. Feldkamp : The "deputy" of Rolf Hochhuth in the domestic and foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany. With an appendix of selected files from the Vatican files of the Foreign Office . In: History in the Diocese of Aachen - Supplement 2: From Pius XII. until John XXIII. Edited by the History Association for the Diocese of Aachen eV Neustadt ad Aisch 2001. pp. 127–177.
  • Doris Rosenstein: Rolf Hochhuth. The deputy . In: Dramas of the 20th Century. Volume 2. Stuttgart: Reclam 1996. pp. 126-156.
  • Karl-Heinz Wiest: “The representative” - a piece and its effect . In: Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 2 (1983). Pp. 203-248.

Web links

Other media

  • Indifference kills - Rolf Hochhuth on his Pope drama “Der Stellvertreter” (10 to 11). Script: Alexander Kluge. RTL, August 6, 2002.
  • The revolutionary - Erwin Piscator on the world stage . Director: Barbara Frankenstein, Rainer KG Ott. Sender Free Berlin 1988 (excerpts from the Berlin premiere in 1963).
  • Rolf Hochhuth. The deputy . Director: Erwin Piscator. Speaker: Dieter Borsche, Günther Tabor, Siegfried Wischnewski u. v. a. Production: Hessischer Rundfunk 1963. Munich: the Hörverlag 2003.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meinolf Schumacher : "Lavabo in innocentia manus meas ...". Between acknowledgment of guilt and defense against guilt: hand washing in the Christian cult. In: Robert Jütte, Romedio Schmitz-Esser (ed.): Hand use. Stories by hand from the Middle Ages and early modern times. Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn 2019, ISBN 978-3-7705-6362-3 , pp. 59–77, here pp. 59–63.
  2. ^ Peter Maxwill: Theater scandal: Attack of the pope blasphemer Der Spiegel , February 20, 2013.
  3. ↑ Anonymous: Vietnam in Basel . In: Der Spiegel, No. 40, October 2, 1963, pp. 84-88.
  4. ↑ See: Rolf Hochhuth: The ability and freedom to revolt. An open reply to Ladislav Mnacko , In: Die Zeit, October 16, 1964
  5. ↑ The date of first publication in the American edition New York Herald Tribune is not reproduced consistently. It is mentioned February 13th as well as February 23rd and 25th, 1964.
  6. ↑ There is also a recording of a discussion between Arendt and Hochhuth about the play, see Rolf Hochhuth discusses his play “The Deputy” with Hannah Arendt , information in the archive of Creative Arts Television (in English) (accessed October 28, 2008)
  7. ↑ sometimes incorrectly referred to as No. 13, the year-end number.
  8. ↑ Raimund Haas: Church resistance under National Socialist terrorism . In: Political Studies 26 (1975). S. 176. Quotation from Heiner Teroerde: Political dramaturgies in divided Berlin. Social imaginations with Erwin Piscator and Heiner Müller around 1960 . Göttingen: V&R unipress 2009. p. 216.
  9. ↑ To this in detail Heiner Teroerde: Political dramaturgies in divided Berlin . Göttingen: V&R unipress 2009. pp. 177–221, here pp. 216–220.
  10. ^ Harenberg actor leader. The whole world of theater: 265 authors with more than 750 works . Dortmund: Harenberg 1997. p. 486.
  11. ↑ See for example Holger Kulick: Criminal charges against Staeck poster . In: Der Spiegel, October 17, 2001, available at Spiegel Online .
  12. ↑ Pope recognizes the heroic degree of virtue of Pius XII. and John Paul II.  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Zenit, December 19, 2009@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.zenit.org  
  13. ↑ cf. also Ingo Langner: Rolf Hochhuth: Not from this world Die Tagespost , May 21, 2020.
  14. ^ Ion Mihai Pacepa: Moscow's Assault on the Vatican. In: National Review No. 1, January 25, 2007 (English); Hochhuth defends himself ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). In: Wiesbadener Kurier , February 3, 2007.
  15. ↑ Anonymous: A fight with Rome . In: Der Spiegel, No. 17, April 24, 1963, pp. 78-89, here p. 79. - See also: Letter from Hans Georg Heepes (Rowohlt Verlag) to Erwin Piscator, April 18, 1963, in: Erwin Piscator : Letters. Volume 3.3: Federal Republic of Germany, 1960–1966 . Edited by Peter Diezel. Berlin: B&S Siebenhaar 2011. P. 561f.
  16. ↑ See among other things: “When this scene comes, then I'll move with the police.” A conversation with Rolf Hochhuth about his drama “Der Stellvertreter” and the film “Amen” by Constantin Costa-Gavras. In: Basler Zeitung , May 27, 2002.
  17. ↑ Played in over 25 countries, total circulation over 1 million. The French edition of 1963 (publisher Seuil) contains as a foreword a letter from the Protestant churches of France to the Grand Rabbi of Paris of March 26, 1941, which at the time had been distributed in large numbers in the unoccupied zone ( Vichy France ). In it the Protestants express their "burning sympathy" for the Jews and offer them support, especially through political demarches. Through the foreword, the letter became known to a new generation and people all over France were once again aware of it. Source: Les clandestins de Dieu. CIMADE 1939 - 1944. Fayard, Paris 1968 and Labor & Fides, Friborg 1989, p. 13.