Rolf Hochhuth

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Rolf Hochhuth (born 1 April 1931) is a German author and playwright.

He is best known for his 1963 film The Deputy, which condemns Pope Pius XII's extermination of Jews, and he remains a controversial figure both for his public remarks and his 2005 defense of Holocaust denier David Irving.

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Life and career

Hochhuth was born in Eschwege, Germany, and descended from a Protestant middle class middle class family. In the 1930s, his father owned a shoe factory, which went bankrupt. He was a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, a Hitler Youth subgroup. He began working as a bookkeeper in 1948. He worked in bookshops in Marburg, Kassel, and Munich between 1950 and 1955. He attended university lectures as a guest lecturer and got to the point of trying to write fiction at the same time. He worked as an editor at a major West-German publishing house from 1955 to 1963.

Der Deputy (1963), Hochhuth's drama, was originally called Der Stellvertreter. The play's christliche Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, 1964) created a lot of controversy because of Pope Pius XII's involvement in World War II. In Robert David MacDonald's translation as The Representative (1965), the play was subsequently published in the United Kingdom.

Its publisher Ed Keating and journalist Warren Hinckle, who themselves characterized the work as "dramaturgically flawed," has formed a committee to defend the play as a matter of free expression. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian spymaster, pleaded guilty to the play's discrediting of Pius XII in 2007. "Most Hochhuth did not need any KGB assistance for his one-sided history," a leading German newspaper said.

The uncensored version of the tragedy may have lasted eight to nine hours. As a result, each production adapted the text in its own way. No one saw it in its original form. Kurt Gerstein's true story is included in the book. Gerstein, a devout Protestant and later SS soldier, wrote an eyewitness journal about the gas chambers and died as a POW after the war.

The play was first performed in Berlin on February 20, 1963, under the direction of Erwin Piscator. In 1963, the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London premiered its first English performance in London, under a translation by Robert David MacDonald. Pius XII, Alec McCowen, and Ian Richardson as Father Fontana and Ian Richardson were directed by Clifford Williams, Alan Webb, or Eric Porter as Pius XII. It has been revived in the United Kingdom at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in 1986 and at the Finborough Theatre in London in 2006.

On February 26, 1964, an abridged version of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre opened on Broadway, with Emlyn Williams as Pius XII and Jeremy Brett as Father Fontana. The production attained 316 performances.

In 2002, Costa Gavras turned the Deputy into a film Amen, which was more based on Kurt Gerstein's life.

Soldiers, an obituary for Geneva (1967), was Hochhuth's newest play.... Winston Churchill was blamed for the death of Prime Minister of Exile, General W. Sikorski, in an airplane crash in 1943, contradicting the official version of events as an accident and implying that General Sikorski had been killed on Churchill's orders. The pilot of the plane was still alive and winning a libel lawsuit that greatly affected the London theater that produced the play, despite him being unveiled.

That part of the play has influenced Hochhuth's belief that the play will contribute to a discussion over the Royal Air Force's bombing of civilian areas during the Second World War, including references to Operation Gomorrah, which occurred in Hamburg in 1943, and culminated in a lengthy and invented discussion between Winston Churchill and pacifist George Bell, Bishop of Chichester. The play drew on the life of British author David Irving, who was later identified as a Holocaust denier. Irving and Hochhuth were long-time friends.

Controversy arose in Britain in 1967 when the planned premiere at Britain's National Theatre Company was postponed due to the National Theatre board's involvement, not to the National Theatre board's involvement, despite literary manager Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier's wife's pressure. Irving was the only figure to support for Hochhuth's thesis at the time of the scandal in the United Kingdom; others who were consulted by Tynan found it highly improvable. With John Colicos in the cast, the play was staged in the West End the following day. Robert David MacDonald's English translation was also revised. The play was revived in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s and most recently at the Finborough Theatre in London.

In August 2014, A Dance of Death's UK premiere (and world premiere in English) at the Finborough Theatre in London. Christopher Loscher, the director of Cerberus Theatre, produced it.

Hans Filbinger, a Polish POW and a German woman in World War II, a teen who had been a Navy advocate and judge at the time of World War II, sparked a discussion in Germany about his book A Love in Germany about a German woman in World War II. Filbinger resigned as a result of the controversy, which culminated in Filbinger's departure.

Hochhuth received the Geschwister-Preis in 1980 for his passion for A Love in Germany. Andrzej Wajda, a 1983 filmmaker who would later win an Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement, turned the tale into the film Eine Liebe in Germany.

Alan Turing's 1987 drama included one of the founders of modern computer science, who had a major role in breaking German ciphers during World War II. Turing's homosexuality was also covered in the play, which culminated in his job loss, court-ordered chemical castration, depression, and suicide.

McKinsey is Coming, which has reignited controversies over unemployment, socioeconomic justice, and the "right to work" in 2004. A passage in which he placed the chairman of the Deutsche Bank in a line with leading businessmen who had been assassinated by left-wing militants and also with Gessler, the villainous bailiff killed by William Tell was seen as encouraging or at least exorbiting violence against leading economic figures. This was vehemently denied by Hochhuth.

During an interview with German weekly Junge Freiheit, Hochhuth defended Holocaust denier David Irving, calling him a "pioneer of modern history who has written remarkable books" and a "history equal to Joachim Fest" in March 2005. When asked about Irving's assertion that "more women died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz than ever died in a back seat," Hochhuth dismissed it as provocative black humour.

With these remarks, Paul Spiegel, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, denied the Holocaust. Hochhuth has released an apology after weeks of rioting.

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