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The German playwright Rolf Hochhuth is 85

“This Pope was a criminal,” wrote Rolf Hochhuth in his 1963 debut album “The Deputy”. It was the Silence of the Vatican on the Holocaust. The piece made it with 28 world famous.

Rolf Hochhuth’s gotten old. And stiller than before. He now lives next to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It kind of matches, because a admonisher of the well-known playwright. A very controversial admonisher, of the said without fear, what he thought.

Hochhuth has understood the task of the playwright as a political – and was therefore on a regular basis with politicians and cultural workers together can do The research for his play “lawyers” (1979), contributed decisively to the former Nazi Navy judge Hans Filbinger, who was at that time still the acting Prime Minister of Baden-württemberg, in August 1978, of his office had to resign. Hochhuth had called him publicly a “terrible lawyers”.

Early on, the playwright laid the focus of his writing on the confrontation with national socialism. Born on 1. In April 1931, he experienced in 1945, two days after his birthday, the invasion of the Americans in his birth town of Eschwege. A profound experience for the 14-Year-old.

In the 1960s, Hochhuth was one of the main representatives of the so-called documentary theatre. His pieces of work with documentary Material, the Hochhuth assembles in a complex Research with fictional elements mixed in.

World premiere of the controversial play “The Deputy” in 1963

“The Deputy”: a scandal and world fame

Equal to his first play “The Deputy. A Christian tragedy” made in 1963 to international acclaim. The staging of Erwin Piscator made its Premiere in February in Berlin in 1963, is a scandal and made Hochhuth world. In the piece, he poses the question as to the complicity of the Catholic Church to the persecution and murder of Jews by the national socialists. “A Diplomat must things to see and remain silent”, Hochhuth, Pius XII say. The playwright accuses the head of the Catholic Church, despite his knowledge about the Holocaust is not sufficient for the Jews.

To makes heroes of his play Hochhuth, the Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana and SS-Obersturmbannführer Kurt Gerstein. Both try to convince the Curia to inform the world public about the atrocities of the Nazis. But you will fail. The figure of Riccardo Fontana is fictional, the of Kurt Gerstein partially authentic: As is evidenced, for example, that the SS-Obersturmbannführer in the Nunciature in Berlin. In 2002 The Deputy was made into a film by Greek-French Director Costa-Gavras (original title: “Amen”). Starring Ulrich Tukur, Mathieu Kassovitz and Ulrich Mühe were to be seen.

Ulrich Tukur as a Nazi SS officer Kurt Gerstein in the movie “The Deputy”

Troublemaker and morality

In the first decades of its Author, Rolf Hochhuth, has become one of the most successful – and most controversial – German-language playwright. Of critics, he was perceived as a obsessive know-it-alls and trouble-maker. In his Essay, “The class struggle is not to end” (1965) he criticized the German society, harsh and illustrated his Belief that writers should have a political function. The then Chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, and called him a “Pinscher“, the “incorporation of bubbles and no idea“. Also, the Bavarian Prime Minister and Federal Minister Franz Josef Strauss had to speak anything other than good to him. Hochhuth saw himself as a moral authority.

Rolf Hochhuth also wrote comedies, the Berlin staging of his “island Comedy,”

In his pieces he takes no sheet before the mouth: “soldiers, necrology on Geneva” (1967) before he throws, Winston Churchill, a co-responsibility for the air attacks by the British on German cities in the spring of 1943. His suggestion that Churchill had instructed the head of the Polish government-in-exile, Władysław Sikorski, murder, ensured that the appearance of the book for great displeasure. Performances in the UK were banned. Hochhuth was repeatedly sued. In the piece the author also refers to publications of the controversial British author David Irving. In 2005, it came to a head, because Hochhuth in an Interview with Irving in front of the accusation that he tried to deny the Holocaust, in protection. The German publishing house refused to publish Hochhuth’s autobiography. Later, Hochhuth was balanced by his statements.

The social significance that one could ascribe to Hochhuth in the first decades of his work, and he could not be later. Critics accuse him that he wanted to create aware-scale scandals attention.

It became silent for Rolf Hochhuth. A admonisher he is today.