Germany: Rolf Hochhuth, death of a provocateur

Text by: Pascal Thibaut Follow

The German playwright has just passed away on May 13 at the age of 89. Controversial figure, this very political author will go down in history as the one who caused the biggest theatrical scandal in Germany since the war.

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Berlin, February 20, 1963. The premiere of a play by an almost unknown 32-year-old author is on display. Less than 20 years after the end of the war, in the Germany of the economic miracle where the time is more for reconstruction than introspection on the Nazi past, the spectacle is like a bomb. The powerful Bertelsmann publishing house for which author Rolf Hochhuth worked as a reader refused to publish the play. Another publisher does not hasten to do so. He resolves it when the renowned director Erwin Piscator announces that he is going to put on the play in Berlin.

Pope Pius XII facing the Shoa

The author denounces a subject which torments him since his adolescence, the silence of Pope Pius XII in the face of Nazism and the Holocaust. The play is entitled in German Der Stellvertreter (The representative), that of God on earth namely the Pope. It will be translated into French by Le vicaire .

Two men, the SS Kurt Gerstein, an authentic character, and the young priest Riccardo Fontana (invented by Hochhuth), try to alert the world to the Nazi genocide against the Jews. The second goes to Rome hoping to convince the pope to take a stand, but the latter refuses. The young vicar then joins a column of deportees and dies in Auschwitz.

A global scandal

The play causes a worldwide scandal. The German government apologizes to the Vatican, a gesture that Chancellor Helmut Kohl will repeat in the 1980s. When The Vicar went up to the theater of the Athenaeum in Paris a few months later, Jorge Semprun, the former Spanish resistance fighter deported in Buchenwald, write the adaptation. The audience in the room screams with scandal, shouting: "  It's a shame! Long live Pius XII!  " In Switzerland, thousands of people demonstrate outside the theater where the play is performed. The scandal surrounding the play continues on the other side of the Atlantic in New York. Cardinal Francis Spellmann, a friend of Pius XII, campaigned against the staging.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt German origin who published the year before his book on the trial of the responsible Nazi Eichmann in Jerusalem , in which it develops the concept of the "banality of evil" occurs on American television to defend the Vicar . The direction on Broadway obtains the very famous Tony Award. Almost forty years later, the film Amen by Costa-Gavras adapts the play to the cinema.

The role of the Catholic Church

The work, beyond his career and controversy, influences the work of memory. Pius XII, long revered, became the most criticized pope of the 20th century. Researchers investigate the role of the Catholic Church and the Vatican during the war. The archives of the Holy See open. Germany is looking into the case of Kurt Gerstein, found hanged in a Parisian prison in 1945. This chemist in the SS organized the supply of Nazi extermination camps with zyklon B, the gas used to kill prisoners. He informed the Allies in 1942. In 1965, he was rehabilitated.

Rolf Hochhuth would never later achieve success comparable to that won by The Vicar . But the playwright remains a central figure in German cultural and political life with committed writings, denouncing individual faults in difficult situations. Rolf Hochhuth disturbs, irritates, arouses controversy, rejections and even hatred. History, starting with the Third Reich, is often at the heart of his writings. In 1967, he criticized in British soldiers, Geneva obituaries, the British bombings against German cities during the war. This piece is partly inspired by the work of historian David Irving, who later became a Holocaust denier. When Hochhuth defends the academic in a German far-right magazine in 2005, believing that Irving is not calling the holocaust into question, the condemnations are numerous. The playwright apologizes a few days later.

The Hans Filbinger case

At the end of the 1970s, a new play by Rolf Hochhuth made waves and caused the resignation of the Christian-democratic minister-president of the Baden-Württemberg region Hans Filbinger. A love in Germany tells a love story between a Polish prisoner of war and a German woman during the Second World War. The work reveals the role played by the political leader of the CDU as a lawyer in a death sentence pronounced at the end of the war.

Two years after the reunification, Rolf Hochhuth had denounced in Wessis in Weimar "the annexation" of the communist GDR by West Germany. In The McKinsey Controversy , he later attacked the role of employers with a controversial passage in which he seemed to endorse the use of violence, which recalled the assassinations perpetrated by Red Army terrorists against officials from economic circles. Germans.

The Berliner Ensemble and Rolf Hochhuth

Renowned theaters have not played Hochhuth's works for a long time in recent years. With the exception of the famous Berliner Ensemble in the German capital. The writer had bought from the rightful owners of the former Jewish owner the land on which stands the former theater of Bertolt Brecht. Since then, the city of Berlin has rented it to the foundation created by Hochhuth with the obligation once a year to mount a piece by the owner.

The author continued to polarize with provocative statements until his death. He recognized in 2016 that his many disputes were not limited to the professional sphere and that his sons did not want to talk to him anymore.

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