Rolf Hochhuth

Rolf Hochhuth (born 1 April 1931 in Eschwege) is a German author and playwright. He is best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy, which insinuates Pope Pius XII's indifference to Hitler's extermination of the Jews, and he remains a controversial figure both for his plays and other public comments and for his 2005 defense of Holocaust denier David Irving.

Rolf Hochhuth is descended from an old-established Protestant Hessian burgess family. During World War II, he was a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, a subdivision of the Hitler Youth. 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.

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).

Although the play has never received serious praise as either literature or history, its publisher Ed Keating and journalist Warren Hinckle, who themselves considered it "dramaturgically flawed," organized a committee to defend the play as a matter of free speech. 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 would have run some eight or nine hours. As a result, each production adapted the text in its own way. No audience saw it in its original form. It 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, died as a POW.

...
Wikipedia