Rolf Hochhuth Research Articles

Was Rolf Hochhuth's Play, The Deputy , the Result of a KGB [Plot]? Assessing a Conspiracy Theory

Abstract: This article seeks to debunk a conspiracy theory regarding the origins of the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's incendiary play from 1963, The Deputy , which denounced Pope Pius XII for his alleged silence about German crimes in the Holocaust. According to these conspiracy theories, this play's success was the result of a masterstroke by Soviet intelligence, which had infiltrated the Vatican and stolen documents from the Vatican archives. By examining letters and correspondence pertaining to the play's origins, including its original drafts, this article argues that this conspiracy theory is chronologically implausible. Hochhuth's own account of the play's origins remains more or less correct, some inaccurate details notwithstanding.

When Poetry Is Not Enough

Abstract Controversy has come to be a predictable feature of Holocaust studies. It is hardly surprising, then, that a process of constructing a transnational canon of Holocaust drama, slowly unfolding in critical commentary since the premieres of Rolf Hochhuth's Der Stellvertreter [The deputy] and Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung [The investigation] in the 1960s, has been fraught with accusations that this questionable project is as much about forgetting as about remembering. Some critics point out, for example, that it gives scant attention to plays written during World War II and in the first years of peace. Though such oversights may be innocent, they signal the hermeneutical difficulty of recognizing works that for various, often non-artistic reasons have been consigned to oblivion with barely a second glance. One consequence of the oversights is to render the history of Holocaust memory and representation partial, not to say misleading. In this article, I want to recover Czesław Miłosz's only play, Prolog [Prologue, 1942], from obscurity and to argue that this text, written in the bloodiest year of the Holocaust, circles around an unstated center, the Shoah, wrestling with questions that continue to resonate some eighty years later.

Holocaust denial, Le Vicaire, and the absent presence of Nadine Fresco and Paul Rassinier in Jorge Semprún's La Montagne blanche

The importance to Jorge Semprún of confronting Holocaust denial in Vichy Syndrome France is not central to analyses that have been done of La Montagne blanche. To detect it, we must do what Semprún never stops asking readers to do: visit the external worlds to which his text directs us and reread his corpus so as to return with new insights and questions to pose to the text at hand. This essay examines La Montagne blanche in light of Semprún's presentation of Jewish characters in Le grand voyage; his adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth's Le Vicaire; his critique of the Communist party's belated acknowledgment of the gulag; his relationships to the Holocaust denier and severe critic of the Communists at Buchenwald, Paul Rassinier, and to Nadine Fresco, the most penetrating analyst of Rassinier; and his attention to Holocaust denial when he wrote fiction rooted in historical situations. Holocaust denial is an erasure. La Montagne blanche draws our attention to that erasure in a novel in which the subject is hardly mentioned.

The Vatican in World War II: Dynamics and New Directions in Western Historiography

The article examines the historiography of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, especially the phase that fell during the Second World War. Accusations that the Pope had not publicly condemned the crimes of Fascism and Nazism emerged in Soviet historiography shortly after the war and were faintly echoed by radical historiography in European countries. At the same time, an apologetic trend emerges in historiography. The situation changed dramatically with the publication and production of the play Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, A Christian Tragedy also published in English as The Representative) by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, in which the Pope is accused of remaining silent in the face of the Nazi crimes. It marked the beginning of a critical trend in historiography. In historiography, a heated debate between the critical and apologetic ‘schools’ has been termed the “Pius War”. The revival of the critical movement has usually been associated with various politicised events such as the beatification process of Pius XII at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a new step in that direction in 2009, namely the declaration of Pius XII venerable by Pope Benedict XVI, etc. At the same time, the introduction of new archival documents into scholarly discourse (in particular, the opening for academic examination of the collections of Pius XI and Pius XII in the Vatican Archives) has led to an enormous expansion and diversification of the source base. Studies have also demonstrated the need for a more active exploration and contextualisation of the policies of the Holy See during the war years. All this contributes to a more balanced and objective appraisal of these matters on the part of historians and political scientists.

Work and Play: Rolf Hochhuth's The Representative in Tel Aviv (1964)

This paper probes into the 1964 Israeli performance of Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama The Representative. Staged by Habima National Theatre under the direction of Avraham Ninio, the majority of the cast engaged in this production comprised European-born Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors. In its cultural context, the theatrical image of Jewish refugees dressed in Nazi uniforms or, conversely, staging visual, gestural or aural markers of Auschwitz prisoners imbued the drama with political meanings, triggering a debate about agency and forms of social and material participation in the aftermath of calamity. Examining the subterranean world of artists and craftsmen and women whose labour is deliberately obscured from view, I argue that the work of theatre emerges as a creative and generative energy that filters from the staged fiction into the ‘real’ world.

Recepcja sztuki Rolfa Hochhutha Namiestnik (Der Stellvertreter 1963) w Polsce

Celem artykułu jest analiza pierwszych reakcji polskiego odbiorcy na dramat Rolfa Hochhutha Namiestnik, który zyskał powszechne uznanie jako tekst inicjujący między-narodową debatę wokół postawy papieża wobec Holocaustu. Utwór wzbudził wiele kontro-wersji, gdyż autor winił Piusa XII za jego milczenie, burząc tym samym istniejący mit „dobre-go pasterza". Wyniki analizy reakcji prasowych na inscenizację dramatu Hochhutha wykaza-ły, że utwór stał się w Polsce wydarzeniem politycznym polaryzującym opinie widzów. Część krytyków podzielała negatywne zdanie dramatopisarza o osobie Pontifexa, inni dostrzegli w sztuce próbę zrzucenia części niemieckiej winy za zbrodnie hitlerowskie na osoby trzecie. Było to spowodowane traumatycznymi doświadczeniami II wojny światowej, których pamięć była nadal świeża w pamięci kolektywnej narodu polskiego. Inscenizacja dramatu posłużyła władzom PRL-u za instrument walki ideologicznej z Kościołem. Biorąc pod uwagę fakt, że pre-miera Namiestnika w Teatrze Narodowym w Warszawie miała miejsce zaledwie dwa dni po rozpoczęciu obchodów Milenium Chrztu Polski, nasuwa przypuszczenie, że sztuka, zakłócając uroczystości, posłużyła władzom PRL-u za instrument walki ideologicznej z Kościołem.

The Hochhuth case

stunning success of Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy (1963) was no accident. Carefully planned, with renowned German theatre director and producer Erwin Piscator, to be a mass-media breakthrough, it also benefitted from a harsh article written by Cardinal Montini before he became he became Pope Paul VI, but published in «L'Osservatore Romano» after his election. This essay focuses on several papal interventions against Hochhuth's play and in defence of Pius XII - the target of The Deputy. Thenceforth questions of «Pius XII and Holocaust» and «Pius XII and the Jews» arose and became a never-ending dispute. In the meantime, the Second Vatican Council condemned anti-Semitism (but not the Holocaust). Following the Pope's intervention, several scholars and political personalities - among them Italian statesman Giulio Andreotti, the former Israeli Consul in Milan Pinchas Lapide, and Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander - joined the dispute.

The Policies and Politics of Pope Pius XII: Between Diplomacy and Morality by Frank J. Coppa, and: The Life & Pontificate of Pope Pius XII: Between History and Controversy by Frank J. Coppa (review)

The Policies and Politics of Pope XII: Between Diplomacy and Morality. By Frank J. Coppa. (New York: Peter Lang. 2011. Pp. viii, 205. $36.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4331-0521-0.)The Life & Pontificate of Pope XII: Between History and Controversy By Frank J. Coppa. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2013, Pp. xxx, 306. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8132-2016-1.)These additions to the Pius Wars are worthy contributions to bringing greater understanding to that conflict. Along with Robert Ventresca's Soldier of Christ (see review, ante, 99 [2013], 379), these books approach the wartime pontiff with such a clear mastery of the arguments that both Pius's supporters and his denigrators will find it difficult in the future to expect any serious student to accept the hoary myths that have clouded or exalted that pontiff's reputation.The two works of Frank Coppa under consideration here are virtually the same in their assessment of Pius. They differ, however, in organization and level of editing. The Life & Pontificate is more informative and much better edited. Both are based on a sound reading of the available sources. It should be noted that Coppa's citations are too often based on secondary works when the primary sources are easily available and citable; furthermore, many citations of fact appear unnecessary, and he tends to use sources indiscriminately. These quibbles aside, these books provide significant insight into Pius's life and works; in Life & Pontificate especially, he details the interpretations of both sides on practically every issue of controversy.We are now past the polemic that characterized the two periods of interpretations: the first, stimulated by Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy (New York, 1964) and the second by John Cornwell's Hitler' s Pope (New York, 1999). Serious scholars agree that was not Hitler's pope, favoring the Nazis, nor was he the single person who did more than anyone else to save Jews from the Holocaust. As Coppa points out, there is much more to than the Holocaust, and what best serves our purpose now is to find his motivation for not making that great thundering denunciation that, Coppa believes, his predecessor would have made had he lived to see the Nazi machine at its most deadly.Coppa finds that motivation in Eugenio Pacelli's home background and in his long service in the papal diplomatic corps. Pacelli as pope did not rise above his background and training. He was a taciturn child in a family devoted to the papacy. He was spoiled by his mother to the extent that he was able to avoid seminary boarding by living and eating at home, and to develop extraordinary self-confidence. Along with his intellectual brilliance and mastery of languages, by the time he was ordained he was fully prepared for a career in the papal diplomatic service. So important does Coppa feel these factors to have been and so instrumental in Pius's papal actions that he devotes nearly half of each book to his family background and his years as a diplomat. Pacelli spent thirty-eight years (1901-39) in the diplomatic service, twice as long as his pontificate.In what is the best part of both books, Coppa details those years and emphasizes the lessons learned by Pacelli, primarily under the tutelage of the Vatican secretary of state, Pietro Gasparri, from whom the young diplomat learned caution and moderation when dealing with problems. …

Ghostly Business: Place, Space, and Gender in Christian Petzold’s Yella

In the wake of 09/11, the bursting of the “dot.com bubble” and the ensuing collapse of the “Neuer Markt” – mere precursors of today’s global financial meltdown – fuelled economic insecurities in the German-speaking countries. Much of the postmillennial aesthetic production demonstrates how painfully aware German-speaking artists are of the “flip side” of global capitalism, echoing Heiner Muller’s assessment that the phantom of a free market society finally replaced the ghost of communism (Muller 233). The toll that uncanny economic dealings inflict upon fragile individuals became a topic on the German stage (Rolf Hochhuth, McKinsey kommt, 2003; Moritz Rinke, Cafe Umberto, 2005), in prose fiction (Rainer Merkel, Das Jahr der Wunder, 2001; Kathrin Roggla, wir schlafen nicht, 2003; Johannes Ullmaier, ed. Schicht! Arbeitsreportagen fur die Endzeit, 2007; and most recently Terezia Mora, Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent, 2009), as well as film (Lichter, dir. Hans-Christian Schmid, 2003; Import/Export, dir. Ulrich Seidl, 2007). These and other narratives suggest that globalized, postnational societies governed by neoliberalism increasingly turn the flexible, cooperative, and efficient individuals living in them (cf. Sennett) into zombie-like creatures disenfranchised from themselves and their environment. This ghostliness shapes notions of subjectivity and identity constructions. Christian Petzold’s filmic work is a notable example for the connection between the economic woes of our time and a curious surge of the ghost motif in contemporary culture. Petzold is also the most prominent representative of the “seismographic, minimalist, existentialist” cinema (Suchsland) commonly referred to as “Berlin School,” a brand of films “devoted to the real as well as to realism, of a rare formal rigour and a stubborn tenderness” (Moller). By rendering visible aspects of social reality that are all too often absent from the consciousness of citizens in postwall Germany, filmmakers of its first generation, such as Petzold, Thomas Arslan, and Angela Schanelec, analyze the present of a country that still struggles with finding its “true” identity six decades after the end of World War II and two decades after unification (Abel, “Intensifying Life”).

Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (review)

Reviewed by: Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity Christopher Bigsby Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity, by Gene A. Plunka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 446 pp. $99.00. In 1965, I saw the British production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall. It was staged in Coventry, a city that had been mercilessly bombed in the Second World War, the ruins of the cathedral being close to the theatre. I was so impressed [End Page 142] by the play, with its dominating image of a concentration camp tower, that when I read a newspaper article about the guilt of the survivor I sent it to Miller who was then convalescing from hepatitis in a British hospital. He replied immediately confirming its centrality to the play. Miller had visited Mauthausen just three years earlier and then the Frankfurt trials of concentration camp guards. These experiences changed him. He had, to be sure, written a novel about American antisemitism (Focus) in 1945, but otherwise his connection with his Jewishness had remained problematic. Now it moved close to the center of his work and did so at a time when others, too, chose to register the delayed shock of the Holocaust. What followed was Incident at Vichy, and Broken Glass, works explored by Gene A. Plunka in his study of Holocaust drama, subtitled The Theater of Atrocity. The fact is that drama was as slow in responding to the Holocaust as any other genre. Though there are now those who insist that it was widely discussed, in fact, for the most part, silence had seemed to many the only legitimate response, the silence of trauma, of respect, of willed forgetfulness. For Miller, the Holocaust was a story of defeat, for the Jews but more widely for everyone. In Israel the preferred narrative was of resistance. There was no space for stories of victimhood. Beyond that, where were the words adequate to address an event that seemed to lie equally outside of history and language? To bring it within history and language was in some sense to normalize what lay beyond discourse, beyond the parameters of rational discussion. There were others, though, for whom silence was acquiescence, collaboration, denial. What was needed above all was to speak out, to recall, to testify. In the Vilna ghetto, in Lithuania, librarian Hermann Kruk might declare, "In a cemetery there can be no theatre," as Elie Wiesel would announce that there could be no such thing as a Holocaust novel since if it was a novel it could not be about the Holocaust and if it was about the Holocaust it could not be a novel. Only memoirs, eye witness accounts, he believed, had legitimacy, though Primo Levi confessed that a book "drenched in memory" could not be accurate. There were, however, such novels and there were such plays, even in Vilna, and Gene A. Plunka has written a startlingly comprehensive study of the latter. He quotes Alvin Goldfarb as identifying 257 Holocaust plays by 1997. Holocaust Drama, though, is not an encyclopedia. Plunka explores a number of such works in an attempt to assess their faithfulness to the events that provoked them. It was Yeats who warned against unearned emotion, in other words the emotion casually generated by subject matter. There would be writers for whom the concentration camp provided little more than a convenient location. One such was William Styron, with Sophie's Choice. The plays Plunka [End Page 143] invokes and analyzes are not such, even as he readily engages with the question of legitimacy. Plunka ranges widely. Some of the plays are well known—Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, Peter Weiss's The Investion, Peter Flannery's Singer, Joshua Sobol's Ghetto—but many more are not. One of the virtues of this book, however, is the extent to which it ranges across national literatures as it also explores different aspects of the Holocaust. In the background, sometimes breaking surface and sometimes not, are the rumbling debates and arguments that greeted some of these works, indeed, more profoundly, that were stirred up by any attempt to understand something which seemed to resist analysis. Hannah Arendt seemed to lay blame at...

«Les silences de Pie XII» entre mémoire et oubli. 1944-1958

In 1963, Rolf Hochhuth, a young German author, instigated a huge scandal by accusing Pius XII of being reticent when faced with the extermination of the Jews in a piece entitled “Le Vicaire”. Whilst the scandal spread throughout Europe, the United States and Israel, Germany was often polemic or apologetic. Defenders and prosecutors of the Holy Father clashed over the issue of the silence of the papacy, a silence which many others seem to have found at the time. However, this debate is nothing new: Born out of the turbulence of the 1930s, it continued its course during the war and developed further in the many voices of the Liberation. Supported mostly by those closely associated with Communists and a few Catholic and Jewish intellectuals, critics were quickly stifled. On the contrary, an overwhelmingly dominant image of a pope of charity, peace and justice prevailed, whose authority and prestige was considerably reinforced by the war: the majesty of a pope exercising his infallible teaching authority from Rome whilst exalting the centre of Catholicism.

Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (review)

Reviewed by: Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity Erika Hughes Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. By Gene A. Plunka. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; pp. vi + 447. $99.00 cloth. Gene Plunka’s Holocaust Drama offers a broad introduction to the genre from which it takes its title. As such, the book covers much ground, dealing with over thirty plays from the United States, Europe, and Israel. Fortunately, Plunka does not race through his material, but, rather, describes each play thoroughly. He buttresses his analysis with performance histories, background information about the playwrights, and critical commentary by scholars of Holocaust theatre and literature, notably Alvin Rosenfeld, Lawrence Langer, Robert Skloot, Christopher Bigsby, and Terrence Des Pres. In this sense, his contribution offers a useful introduction to Holocaust performance and its scholarship. Like most studies of dramatic interpretations of the Holocaust, the book is organized thematically. The fourteen chapters cover a range of topics, which include “Transcending the Holocaust,” “The Holocaust as Literature of the Body,” “Marxism and the Holocaust,” “Survivor Syndrome and the Effects of the Holocaust on Families,” and “The Holocaust and Collective Memory.” The chapters read as standalone essays which avoid jargon and, for the most part, are clearly written. The Holocaust is not a universally understood historical event, and the book’s target audience (readers [End Page 311] in the US and UK) will have certain frames of reference that do not correspond with how the Holocaust is understood in other countries, particularly Germany and Israel. The author acknowledges these cultural differences in his discussion of the plays, yet his analysis frequently focuses on historical and theatrical similarities instead of differences in the ways that the Holocaust experience is remembered worldwide. His examination of Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel and Ben-Zion Tomer’s Children of the Shadows presents struggles of postwar immigration and assimilation common in both the United States and Israel. Likewise, in “Historical and Moral Responsibility in the Ghettoes,” Plunka draws parallels between playwrights from Israel and the United States who were indirectly affected by the Holocaust and who instead experienced it through stories of relatives and neighbors, Holocaust literature, and formal interviews with survivors. In his introduction, Plunka notes the large number of plays about the Holocaust: one of his sources records “257 Holocaust plays written through to 1997” (18). He therefore limits his analysis to “those plays written about Nazi genocide conducted between 1933 and 1945,” and of these, “the most salient plays of the last half of the twentieth century” (18). The American plays discussed include many well-known works, such as Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank, Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, and Martin Sherman’s Bent. Similarly, German examples include such oft-discussed plays as The Investigation by Peter Weiss, Nelly Sachs’s Eli, and Erwin Sylvanus’s Dr. Korczak and the Children. Plunka also deals with a number of French plays, such as Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? and two that were new to this reviewer, Michel Vinaver’s Overboard and Gilles Ségal’s All the Tricks but One. Holocaust Drama also includes notable Israeli plays such as Motti Lerner’s Kastner and two of the three plays in Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto Triptych, Adam and Ghetto, among others. For those not familiar with Michael Taub’s anthology Israeli Holocaust Drama, this book will serve as an important introduction to this aspect of Israeli theatre, which asks its audience some of the most difficult questions regarding the Holocaust—questions about responsibility and individual choices—of any of the theatrical cultures discussed herein. Plunka rightly notes that, in Sobol and Tomer, the Israeli theatre has a tradition of innovation with respect to form (269). He also succeeds in describing the complicated ways in which German and Israeli audiences have received the stagings of their difficult Holocaust legacies, charting the controversies surrounding productions like Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy and Sobol’s Ghetto. Absent from Plunka’s study are unpublished works, performance pieces, and dramas deemed “minor” (18), as well as plays written for young...

Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory David Jortner Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. By Christopher Bigsby. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; pp. vii + 407. $38.00 cloth. In the first chapter of his book Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust, Christopher Bigsby lays out his thesis: "This book . . . is a meditation on memory, on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. But it is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination" (4). While this gives the reader a good sense of the structure of the book, Bigsby's statement also underscores the difficulty in reviewing this text for Theatre Journal. As a work of scholarship on Holocaust, memory, and narrative, his work is exemplary; he profiles nine of the most prominent Holocaust writers, all linked through their use or exploration of memory, and examines the biographical and sociocultural connections in their work. From the point of view of theatre scholarship, however, the book is somewhat disappointing. While Bigsby includes several playwrights among his subjects (including Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, Arthur Miller, and Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who dramatized Anne Frank), he fails to develop fully the idea of theatre as a repository for memory and the challenges this presents. In order to do this book justice, therefore, I feel compelled to write this review in two parts, first from the standpoint of a scholar interested in memory theory and Holocaust studies, and second as a theatre historian. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust is an excellent work of scholarship in the field of Holocaust literature. Bigsby begins with a discussion about the simultaneous importance and unreliability of memory as a form of witness; this is a theme he will return to in examining respective authors' works throughout the book. He then includes chapters and analyses of major Holocaust writers who explore ideas of memory/testimony in their work; these include W. G. Sebald, Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski. He follows these sections with a fascinating chapter titled "Memory Theft," which examines the writings of several well-known Holocaust impersonators—authors who falsely claimed to have survived the Holocaust—and illustrates how their works were originally embraced. One of the strengths of the book is the number and variety of authors Bigsby chooses to study. He analyzes the use of memoir, documentary, and memory in works as diverse as Weiss's The Investigation, and Wiesel's Night, and the mnemonic stylization in the novels of Sebald. In addition, Bigsby's subjects span a range of nationalities and Holocaust voices, including those who had been interned in the camps, both Jews and non-Jews, as well as postwar German and American writers (again, some Jewish, some not) who felt compelled to address the issue. Bigsby's new-historicist approach accentuates the differing voices of each writer; it is fascinating to see how, for example, in the work of Sebald, a German gentile whose father served in the army under the Nazis, the desire for "restitution" surfaces in the actions and memories of fictional (yet autobiographical) characters. Bigsby also does the reader a tremendous service by demonstrating how these authors' texts and memories interact with one another. Undoubtedly, some of the controversies and dialogues will be well-known to Holocaust scholars and historians (such as Cynthia Ozick on the "ownership" of Anne Frank). However, presenting Sebald's comments on Weiss (much of the book uses Sebald's scholarship as a launching point) as well as the dialogue among the works of authors such as Levi, Améry, and Wiesel allows Bigsby to address the difficult nature of memory and history. As a scholar of Holocaust literature, I find Bigsby's book an invaluable resource. However, as a work of theatre scholarship, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust has a narrow appeal. As mentioned above, Bigsby does spend a significant amount of time on playwrights. The sections on Hochhuth and Weiss deal with the one...

Faust and Job in Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy

In Rolf Hochhuth's Holocaust-play The Deputy, a central character faces a devil tempting him with a pact, which calls to mind the traditional Faust-pattern. Parallels between The Deputy and Goethe's Faust consist in the bet between Faust and the devil as well as in a connection between Faust and the biblical Job. But how can Hochhuth merge Faust, who in the course of the twentieth century had come to symbolise Nazism, with Job, who had become the symbol for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust? In the vein of apologetic German Holocaust literature, Hochhuth presents his ‘Faust’ as a noble and even God-fearing character who, like Job, accepts suffering and attempts to maintain his belief in God, despite the satanic Evil he experiences in Auschwitz. Thus, Hochhuth also restored the theological aspect to the Faust topic and underscored the relevance of theodicy after Auschwitz.

The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII (review)

Reviewed by: The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII Mark Edward Ruff The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. Edited by Joseph Bottum and David G. Dalin. (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. 2004. Pp. vi, 282. $29.95.) Beginning in the late 1990's, a veritable torrent of works appeared that examined the relationship between Pius XII, institutional Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. Mostly written by staunch critics including Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Susan Zuccotti, Garry Wills, and James Carroll, among others, these works revived debates that had broken out in the mid-1960's with the staging of Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, in Berlin in 1963. These works became media sensations in Western Europe and the United States, but also generated a backlash from those outraged either at their poor scholarship and sensational claims or from those resolved to rescue the reputation of the beleaguered pontiff and, more generally, the Roman Catholic Church. This latest book marks one of the most determined efforts to counter allegations made by critics and brings together more than ten trenchant and even acerbic reviews that appeared between 1998 and 2002 from scholars, lawyers, and journalists including John Conway, John Jay Hughes, Kevin Doyle, Robert Louis Wilken, Justus George Lawler, Rainer Decker, Russell Hittinger, Michael Novak, and even David Dalin, a historian and rabbi. Significant portions of the introduction also appeared in Richard John Neuhaus' journal, First Things, in 2004. Undergirding this work is the premise that the critical reviewers have won all of the battles but lost the larger war. Though some of the reviews are written more moderately, much of this collection is characterized by a strident, even militant tone, one which offers no apologies and few concessions to the critics of Pius XII. Referring to recent works of the American scholar José Sanchez and the Swiss priest Martin Rhonheimer respectively, Joseph Bottum reproaches "the relatively mild efforts to praise the pope" and "relatively mild efforts to disparage him" as "clueless about the situation in which they appear as the proverbial visitors from Mars. Indeed, there is something willful and maddening in their would-be tone of Olympian detachment." His antidote? "In a world of imbalance, what but pressure on the other side can restore the balance that a true [End Page 847] scholar is supposed to love? I am convinced that will we [sic] not achieve anything resembling historical accuracy until the presently existing views are cleared away—and thus, that the job for every honest writer who takes up the topic now is to correct the overblown hatred of Pius XII." At times, the no-holds-barred approach becomes hyperbolic. Bottum neglects, for instance, to point out that Martin Rhonheimer, the scion of a family that was three-quarters Jewish, is also a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross and a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature—certainly no bastions of liberalism or anticlericalism! More importantly, such tactics undermine the efforts of those seeking to rehabilitate the reputation of Pius XII by subsuming the search for historical truth to exhortations to political activism. But yet this collection is to be strongly recommended both to specialists in the field and a lay audience, even if many readers new to the subject find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of names and works of scholarship mentioned. William Doino's masterful annotated bibliography of works on Pius XII, World War II, and the Holocaust spans more than 180 pages, includes more than 80,000 words and will become the defining bibliography on this topic. Supporters of Pius XII will find a resounding affirmation of their suspicions and positions in this annotated bibliography; critics of Pius will profit tremendously by reading it against the grain. The only substantial omission is an index, which would have made the task of locating individual authors within this bibliography considerably easier. In his introduction, Bottum speculates why the Pius wars have resurfaced during the last seven years. Phillip Jenkins, he notes, sees it as an updated form of anti-Catholicism, while others point to changing understanding of authority, battles over the future of the...

Zeitgeschichtliche Katholizismusforschung: Tatsachen, Deutungen, Fragen: Eine Zwischenbilanz (review)

Reviewed by: Zeitgeschichtliche Katholizismusforschung: Tatsachen, Deutungen, Fragen. Eine Zwischenbilanz Mark Edward Ruff Zeitgeschichtliche Katholizismusforschung: Tatsachen, Deutungen, Fragen. Eine Zwischenbilanz. Edited by Karl-Joseph Hummel. [Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 100.] (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh. 2004. Pp. 273. €24.90.) This commemorative volume appropriately serves as the hundredth addition in a well-known series from the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, a German and Catholic historical association founded in 1962 with the express goal of researching the recent Catholic past. To scholars of German Catholicism, this association will be instantly familiar as the home of the so-called "Blaue Reihe," a standard and invaluable series on German and Catholic history, not just for the twentieth century but for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. This particular volume emerged out of a conference held at the Katholische Akademie in Bavaria in May, 2003, in part, to commemorate the seventy-fifth birthday of Rudolf Morsey and the eightieth birthday of Konrad Repgen, two of the most prominent and founding members of this renowned historical association. Like a similar conference held in 1987, this conference was intended to take stock of the existing state of research on Catholicism. This state of the field, so to speak, thus features more than one dozen contributions from leading researchers, junior and senior, in the areas of German Catholicism, European Catholicism, and in one case, German Protestantism. This distinguished list includes Urs Altermatt, Wolfgang Altgeld, Magnus Brechtken, Wilhelm Damberg, Michael Ebertz, Martin Greschat, Michael Hochgeschwender, Hans Günter Hockerts, Ulrich von Hehl, Karl-Joseph Hummel, Christoph Kösters, Antonius Liedhegener, and Wolfgang Tischner. The close of the volume provides a highly useful compendium of scholars in the field, including their institutional affiliations and year of birth. True to the aim of the conference, some chapters dish out commentaries on recent historical controversies. Michael Hochgeschwender's somewhat abstruse chapter on Catholicism and anti-Semitism nonetheless provides a compelling overview of the recent debates that prominently featured Olaf Blaschke and Urs Altermatt. Thomas Brechenmacher's plea for a broader perspective on the question of Pius XII and World War II summarizes the state of the source material, secondary literature, and avenues for future research, and concludes by denouncing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's recent work as libelous. Wilhelm Damberg discusses the research examining the relationship between Catholicism and the pluralized society and politics of the Federal Republic. Other contributions provide a brief historical sketch of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Although it was most concerned in its early years with sketching the relationship between Roman Catholicism and the fate of the Weimar republic, the impulses for this historical association actually predated Rolf Hochhuth's incendiary play, "The Deputy," and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenforde's provocative article about German Catholicism in 1933 from the liberal Catholic journal Hochland in 1960/61. Instead, even in the 1950's, some voices were calling for [End Page 851] a scholarly examination of the recent past, including most notably, the young Rudolf Morsey. Though the Kommission dealt almost exclusively with the years of National Socialism in the 1960's and 1970's, by the 1980's and 1990's scholars of German Catholicism began to turn their attention to approaches pioneered in social history and to analyze the so-called "Catholic milieu" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The field of inquiry has since broadened to examine the history of the Federal Republic, and after 1989/90, the role of Catholicism in the former DDR. Not all of the contributors and panelists in the conference were in complete agreement on the state of the profession. For Wolfgang Tischner, Catholic research stood in danger of being limited by insularity, by the relatively small number of mostly Catholic practitioners. For Urs Altermatt, in contrast, Catholic research, especially in other nations such as France, found easy connections to "profane" history, in part because Catholic religiosity itself was transformed in an increasingly pluralistic world. Still, one receives the impression that the Kommission has maintained a certain distance and reserve toward the newer approaches that have gained favor in the secular historical world—cultural history, gender history, the history of memory, to name but...

'Wende' und 'Einheit' im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur: Ein Handbuch by Frank Thomas Grub (review)

57? Reviews work, which occupies a space that combines fiction, non-fiction, and police report. She notes that this specific consideration highlights how 'the sheer magnitude of Stasi material, the intensity with which the Stasi planned and carried out its activities, the very real goals ofZersetzung and kaputmachen [...] constitute a reality that many West German readers finddifficultto comprehend, but one that East Germans experienced as an everyday reality' (p. 224). In this regard her essay makes an interesting study of the impact of surveillance material on life and literature in the GDR. One contribution that stands out is Paul Cooke's essay on Wolfgang Hilbig's Ich. Cooke raises questions about the limits on resisting the world-view offered by the state, and about the extent to which the 'unofficial informants' might also be de? scribed as victims. He draws out the relationship of this issue to Foucault's ideas, and presents a provocation that could have been productively pursued at other points in the book. The GDR, as it is depicted here, seems to have been something ofa laboratoryforexperimenting with policing its subjects. It was farless veiled in its application of power than the West and for this reason its mechanisms run parallel to those de? scribed not only by Foucault, but also by Althusser and Zizek. Some of the essays would have benefited by more directly pursuing these social and historical concerns. Undeniably, some readers will find that the volume's essays stay too close to indi? vidual texts rather than returning to the broader issues outlined in the introduction. However, the book contains many well-considered and thoughtful readings, and its close textual analyses will well serve those who would want to use the book to struc? ture courses on the GDR, or to reflecton the question of what it means for literature to be written beneath the watchful eye of a police state. University of Missouri, Columbia Brad Prager 'Wende'und 'Einheit'im Spiegel der deutschsprachigenLiteratur: Ein Handbuch. Vol. i: Untersuchungen; vol. ii: Bibliographie. By Frank Thomas Grub. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. 2003. Vol. 1: x + 689 pp.; vol. 11:x + 349 pp. ?148; $178 (the set). ISBN 3-11-017775-7. Literary production in the years immediately following the 'Wende' was accompanied by complaints from literary critics such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki that few ofthe works being published sought to address the events of 1989 and 1990, or the implica? tions of these events fora reassessment of German and not least East German history. Gunter Grass's novel Ein weites Feld (1995) seemed to provide an answer to calls for a 'Wenderoman', and Rolf Hochhuth's Wessis in Weimar (1993) could certainly claim to be a significant 'Wendedrama'. But these works did not satisfy the critics; their aesthetic quality was disputed, and, perhaps more importantly,they had been written by West Germans sympathetic to East Germany, whereas the expectations of many West German literary critics had been that East Germans would write literary works critical ofthe GDR. What constitutes a 'Wenderoman' is, then, a matter of perspec? tive; this, surely, is the underlying satirical point of Jens Sparschuh's novel Eins zu Eins (2003), which sets the history of the 'Wenden' in relation to the 'Wende' and its aftermath. Any chosen perspective is of course itself informed by a set of political, historiographical, and ethical expectations that often have little to do with aesthetics. Some ofthe participants in the 'Literaturstreit' of 1990-92 sought to sever what was perceived as the Gordian knot connecting German literature with didactic, politicizing agendas. Politics, the argument ran, was bad for aesthetics. That Gunter Grass's Ein weites Feld and Hochhuth's Wessisin Weimar were pilloried by many literary cri? tics is evidence that the real goal ofthe 'Literaturstreit' had been to replace left-wing agendas with right-wing ones. The hoped-for totalitarianist deconstructions of the MLRy 100.2, 2005 571 GDR in literary form were clearly not regarded as bad for aesthetics?one reason, no doubt, for the overestimation in some sections of the German press of Monika Maron's 'family history' Pawels Briefe (1999), which spans the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic...

Between Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism, Pius XI's Response to the Nazi Persecution of the Jews: Precursor to Pius XII's "Silence"?

The appearance of Rolf Hochhuth's Deputy in 1963, which focused on the silence of Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) during the Holocaust, has led some to ponder the responsibility of his predecessor Pius XI (Achille Ratti) in shaping this stance. The two have been associated because the pontificate of one followed the other,1 and together fashioned concordats to secure the insti tutional church.2 Furthermore, the Germanophile Pacelli, nuncio to Munich and Berlin, served as Ratti's secretary of state (1930-1939). Continuity also flows from the fact that the Nazi persecution of the Jews occurred in two stages: commencing in the pontificate of Pius XI from 1933 tol939, and cul minating in the Holocaust, from 1941 to 1945, during the reign of Pius XII. Some have concluded that Pius XI set the tone toward the Third Reich, that Pius XII followed.3 Paradoxically, both defenders and denigrators of these popes have found their positions were more or less identical.4 Few have

Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany by Andrew Zimmerman (review)

250 Reviews though destabilized by his struggle with memory, accepts his bourgeois self along with its enhancement by the internalized other, Velten Andres. Thus the relationship of the two novels is chiastic: failed or successful narrator vs. successful or failed alternative self. Naturally there would be much to debate in this rich, observant study. The charts and tables calculating numerical values for character features suggest a questionable drift into a sociological content analysis that Plett (p. 13) professes to avoid. Antibourgeois conventions result, ironically, in overestimating Velten Andres's heroic stature in Die Akten. But Plett achieves an important result that should be inscribed into literary history: the best of German realism, especially of Spielhagen, Raabe, or Fontane, does not mirror the dominant order but constitutes a counter-culture within the ominously evolving Wilhelmine environment (both Spielhagen and Raabe have passages that appear sorrowfully to foresee the Great War). An awareness of this critical dissidence might help restore the comparative standing of German realism. New Haven Jeffrey L. Sammons Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. By Andrew Zimmerman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2002. ix +296 pp. ?16; $25. ISBN 0-226-98342-0 (pbk). At the end of Wilhelm Raabe's chilling reckoning with German Biirgerlichkeit, his latest completed contemporary novel Die Akten des Vogelsangs (1896), a member of a travelling curiosity show is mentioned: 'Herr German Fell, von der Anthropologie genannt "das gefundene Mittelglied", der unubertrefflichste Affendarsteller beider Hemispharen' (Braunschweiger Ausgabe, xix, 376). In Rolf Hochhuth's Der Stellvertreter (1963) a certain Professor Hirt from the Reichsuniversitat StraBburg provides the image of the Nazi scientist who commissions skulls from the soldiers at the Eastern front in his quest to prove 'scientifically' the superiority of the Aryan race through craniometric measurements. The study under review is not about such literary expressions either of the new 'anthropological' problems and methods pro? duced by the nineteenth century, or of the perversions of such approaches in the service of an evil regime and ideology. But by focusing on the development, policies, interests, and methods of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, particularly its Berlin branch (founded 1869) and its main public showcase, the Berlin Museum of Ethnology (founded 1886), from their beginnings to roughly the end ofthe Wilhelmine Empire, it helps us considerably to understand the origins of such notions and their literary representations as quoted from Raabe and Hochhuth. Indeed, the protagonists of the Gesellschaft attended 'freak shows' and displays of 'exotic' peoples in their quest for 'scientific' evidence on their sub? ject, they also commissioned skulls from all kinds of agents (military, administrative, commercial) from German colonies in Africa and the Pacific region, and they refined and standardized the methodology of craniometric surveying and recording. Zimmermann's accounts of such activities?the anthropologists' attempts to teach the 'exotic' performers 'original' dances, their correspondences on how to scavenge colonial battlefields for 'native' skulls and how to ship the booty to Berlin?make for thoroughly interesting and sometimes uncannily amusing reading in their own right; the illustrations contained in the book are truly remarkable. The scope and interest of the book do not end there. Zimmerman also outlines how the new discipline of anthropology tried to define itself as scientific in demarcation from the traditional historical and humanist school of thought, by constructing a category of 'natural' peoples (Naturvblker) in distinction from the 'cultural' peoples MLRy 99.1, 2004 251 (Kulturvolker) studied by the traditional humanities; he illustrates how this mode of thinking reached wider constituencies through the network of associations of this amateur discipline and through some activities of the society such as a racial survey among schoolchildren (the so-called Schulstatistik) in the 1870s; he thus contributes to an understanding of racism not as an error in general scientific development but its pinnacle, pursued by earnest scholars whose liberal, non-anti-Semitic credentials are beyond doubt. His interests also stretch to mechanisms of association, the male bonding and involvement of amateur fieldworkers at home and in the colonies. All this has interest far beyond the confines of Wissenschaftsgeschichteof one particular discipline. It goes to the core of our understanding of the ideological, social, political, ideological, cultural...

Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (review)

The first criticism of the silence of Pope Pius XII when confronted by the atrocities of the Holocaust was contained in the 1963 German stage production of Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy. Since that date, critics and defenders of Pius XII have debated the explanation of his behavior, and this debate has recently been given new life by the 1999 publication of Hitler's Pope by the British author, John Cornwell. The present study by José M. Sánchez is an examination of the historical writing on Pius XII and the Holocaust, and, as such, it deconstructs and evaluates the arguments of the pope's critics and defenders.