PROFILE: ROLF HOCHHUTH A PLAYWRIGHT WHO REVILED THE POPE AND CHURCHILL

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31902, 1 February 1969, Page 12

PROFILE: ROLF HOCHHUTH A PLAYWRIGHT WHO REVILED THE POPE AND CHURCHILL

(By

SIMON KAVANAUGH)

After the first night of “The Representative” at the Kurfurstendamm Theatre in West Berlin, the correspondent of “The Times” of London reported that “one may predict a distinguished future for Mr Rolf Hochhuth.”

Up until that moment Rolf Hochhuth was almost as little known in his native Germany as he was in London, Paris, Rome and New York. By the time of the premiere of his second play in Berlin, mention of his name was enough to start a row in almost every capital of the West, and German “scalpers” were picking up £5O a time for black-market first-night tickets.

Neither Shaw nor Shakespeare ' ever knew anything like it. But then neither the Irishman nor the Englishman had attacked the Pope or accused the age’s greatest political figure of complicity in a squalid assassination plot. Notabilities Attacked If Rolf Hochhuth is now one of the best-known names in the international theatre it is not wholly due to literary merit. It is also because in “The Representative” he attacked Pope Pius XII, implying that he might have been a Nazi collaborator, indifferent to the fate of countless Jews, and because in “The Soldiers" he accused Sir Winston Churchill of having connived at the death of the Polish General Sikorski and ordered barbarously punitive air-raids against German cities to keep Stalin sweet In the almost inevitable arguments that mention of Hochhuth inspires there might have been more people arguing for him If his plays had attacked living men who could hit back. In an age which has a minor industry of exposing feet of clay, iconoclasm can indeed be highly profitable especially the legally safe posthumous kind. But no matter how much one may deplore Hochhuth’s plays, it is a great deal less than fair to the man to dismiss him as a sensation-monger with a calculating eye on the box-office. A Middle European To get at the truth about Hochhuth you have to start with his background. He is a Middle European. Born into a middling prosperous shoemanufacturer’s family near Kassel, his formative years were spent in Hitler’s Germany. At the age of ten he joined the Hitler Youth Movementforced to, say his admirers—and by fourteen he was watching the American occupation forces rolling into his home town. Like all Middle Europeans since the Thirty Years War he was a pawn caught up in the international power game. And like so many Middle Europeans, trapped in the labyrinthine politics of that part of the world, he seems to have developed the Gothic tortuousness of mind which is incapable of taking almost anything at face value. It is a form of scepticism that in less complicated countries is left behind with adolescence. Newspapermen who have worked as correspondents in Middle European cities are only too familiar with having to distil the essential truth from the mass of sinistersounding tip-off material they get from “knowledgeable” natives. Endemic Pessimism It is not so much cynicism as a sort of endemic pessimism, an inability to believe that there can be a bud without a worm in it, cheese without a maggot. Most Middle Europeans accept it with an enigmatic worldly-wisdom which exasperates no-non-sense Anglo-Saxons and devastates impressionable middleaged American ladies. But now and again the odd one revolts against it. No matter what the cost to himself he will expose the truth. It is such a climate that

throws up men like Rolf Hochhuth. He has at the same time been accused of being a Nazi apologist and a Communist propagandist. In fact, he is an incurable Middle European Romantic. It takes a romantic to confide to an intimate—as Hoch-

huth did—his fear that the British Secret Service were after him because of what he knew about Churchill and the death of Sikorski. A realist might have worried about the Churchill family lawyers being after him, but hardly the British Secret Service. Churchills Indignant Two generations of Churchills —the late Randolph and his spn Winston—have denounced Hochhuth’s implications about Sir Winston in “The Soldiers" as “a bloody lie” and “an infamous libel.” Churchill’s wartime intimates have heaped scorn on Hochhuth’s version of the death of Sikorski, as has the pilot of the aircraft in which he died off Gibraltar and, by extension, the court of inquiry into the incident. Against this Hochhuth can pit only mysterious evidence which he says is locked up in a Swiss bank vault and which may not be disclosed for 50 years. There can be little doubt that this nervous and complicated man really believes his “evidence”—whatever it may be. But then it would be in the nature of a romantic to prefer a cache of mysterious documents to the cold denials of stolid Englishmen. Just as it would be in the nature of a romantic to see the delicate complexity of the Pope’s position at a time of global con-

flict in the black and white terms of novelette morality. Advocate Of Coups The measure of his romanticism was revealed when he told an Italian audience: “It is a waste of time to make riots in the streets. That is nonsense. The only way is to infiltrate the army. We have to build up a body o£»army officers who are ready to make a Left-wing revolution.” Ideally, according to Hochhuth both the Kremlin and the White House should succumb to such military coups. If Hochhuth has a thirst for romance it is hardly surprising. Until the furore caused by “The Representative” his life had been humdrum. Failing to get into university when he left school he became a bookseller and then graduated to being a publisher’s reader. For a Middle European romantic it was a heady atmosphere a constant supply of fuel for ideas without the saving catharsis of action. Romance To Reality Inevitably there had to be an eruption. It took the form of “The Representative” which had its genesis in a passage Hochhuth read in a book about Nazi documents. In it the Nazi ambassador to the Vatican in 1943 was quoted as reporting: “Although said to have been pressed hard from many quarters, the Pope would not be persuaded to make a public protest against the transportation of the Jews from Rome. . . .’’ The resultant play was staged in Berlin. The subject matter alone guaranteed an international row and world-wide publicity. There were processions, riots, attacks and counterattacks over acres of newsprint, special television and radio programmes. There was even the gentleman from “The Times” talking about “a distinguished future." And suddenly for Rolf Hochhuth romance became reality. Fishing Rivers Reports received by the North Canterbury Acclimatisation .Society yesterday on the state of the fishing rivers were:—Waiau, Hurunui, Ashley, Waimakariri, Selwyn, Ashburton, Rangitata and Hinds, clear and fishable; Rakaia, slightly discoloured but fishable at the gorge, discoloured at the mouth.