Life and Career more less
Youth
Rolf Hochhuth is descended from an old-established Hessian burgess family. During World War II, he was a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk. In 1948 he did an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Between 1950 and 1955 he worked in bookshops in Marburg, Kassel and Munich. At the same time he attended university lectures as a guest student and began with early attempts at writing fiction. Between 1955 and 1963 he was a lector at a major West-German publishing house.
The Deputy
Hochhuth's plays include his 1963 drama Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy, translated by Richard & Clara Winston, 1964), that caused controversy because of its criticism of Pope Pius XII's role in World War II. The play was subsequently published in the UK in Robert David MacDonald's translation as The Representative (1965).
It is regarded by some as a work of considerable literary merit, though publisher Ed Keating and journalist Warren Hinckle, who organized a committee to defend the play as a matter of free speech, considered it "dramaturgically flawed". In 2007, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian spymaster, alleged that the play was part of a KGB campaign to discredit Pius XII. A leading German newspaper opined "that Hochhuth did not require any KGB assistance for his one-sided presentation of history..
The unedited version of the play is over five hours long and includes the true story of Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein, a devout Protestant and later a member of the SS, wrote an eyewitness report about the gas chambers and, after the war, mysteriously died as a POW.
The play was first performed in Berlin on 20 February 1963 under the direction of Erwin Piscator. It received its first English production in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1963 in a translation by Robert David MacDonald. It was directed by Clifford Williams with Alan Webb or Eric Porter as Pius XII, Alec McCowen as Father Fontana and Ian Richardson. In the United Kingdom it has since been revived at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, in 1986, and at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2006.
An abridged version opened on Broadway on 26 February 1964 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, with Emlyn Williams as Pius XII and Jeremy Brett as Father Fontana. The play ran for 316 performances.
The Deputy was made into a film Amen by Costa Gavras in 2002, which focused more on the story of Kurt Gerstein
Soldiers
Hochhuth's next play, Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva (1967) alleged that Winston Churchill was responsible for the death of the Polish Prime Minister, General W?adys?aw Sikorski, in an airplane crash in 1943, challenging the official version of events as an accident, and claiming that General Sikorski had been murdered on Churchill's orders. Unbeknownst to Hochhuth, the pilot of the plane was still alive and he won a libel case that seriously affected the London theater which staged the play.
That aspect of the play has overshadowed the main theme of the drama which was a debate on the ethics of the area bombing of civilian areas by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, with particular reference to Operation Gomorrah, the Royal Air Force firestorm raids on Hamburg in 1943, and culminating in a lengthy debate between Winston Churchill and the pacifist George Bell, Bishop of Chichester.
The play partially drew on the work of a young British historian, David Irving, who later became notorious as a holocaust denier. Since that time, Irving and Hochhuth have been close friends.
Controversy arose in Britain in 1967 when the mooted premiere at Britain's National Theatre was cancelled, due to the intervention of the National Theatre board, despite the support for the play of Laurence Olivier, under pressure from his wife, and Kenneth Tynan. At the time of the controversy in Britain, Irving was the only historian who gave "unequivocal" support for Hochhuth's thesis, others consulted by Tynan considered it highly improbable. Despite this setback, the play was produced soon after in the West End with John Colicos in the cast. The English translation was again by Robert David MacDonald. In the UK, the play was seen on tour in the early 1990s, and received much critical acclaim and full houses when revived at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2004.
A Love in Germany and the Filbinger Affaire
In 1978, his novel A Love in Germany about an affair between a Polish POW and a German woman in World War II stirred up a debate about the past of Hans Filbinger, Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg who had been a Navy lawyer and judge at the end of World War II. The affair culminated in Filbinger's resignation.
For A Love in Germany, Hochhuth was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 1980.
Alan Turing
His 1987 drama Alan Turing featured one of the fathers of modern computer science, who had made significant contributions to breaking German ciphers during World War II. The play also covered Turing's homosexuality.
McKinsey controversy
In 2004, he again caused controversy with the play McKinsey is Coming, which raises the questions of unemployment, social justice and the "right to work". A passage in which he put the chairman of the Deutsche Bank in one line with leading businessmen who had been murdered by left-wing terrorists and also with Gessler, the villainous bailiff killed by William Tell, was widely seen as advocating, or at least excusing, violence against leading economic figures. Hochhuth vigorously denied this.
Anti-Semitism allegations
In March 2005, Hochhuth became embroiled in controversy when, during an interview with the German weekly Junge Freiheit, he defended David Irving, describing him as a "pioneer of modern history who has written magnificent books" and an "historian to equal someone like Joachim Fest". When asked about Irving’s statement that "more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz", Hochhuth dismissed it as provocative black humour.
Paul Spiegel, President of the Central Jewish Council in Germany, argued that with these statements Hochhuth himself was denying the Holocaust. After weeks of uproar, Hochhuth issued an apology.
In 2008 Irving self-published Banged Up, an account of his recent imprisonment in Austria, in which he writes "Since January 1965 a close friendship has bonded me with... Rolf Hochhut" and describes a phone conversation between them in 2005.
