Word: hochhuth
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...before the film opened in Berlin this week, it had sparked a huge debate in the German commentariat. Critics attacked it for making light of Germany's past. They questioned the idea of humanizing Hitler, even as a pathetic loser, and of treating the Holocaust in a comedy. Rolf Hochhuth, 75, the prominent German dramatist who , coincidentally, is now staging his own play about Hitler, condemned the movie for "tampering with history." Even the film's lead actor, the popular comedian Helge Schneider, admitted he now regrets doing the film. Adjustments in the editing suite focused the film too much...
...taking a slightly less tortured view of their past. Downfall, a serious treatment of Hitler's last days, appeared in cinemas in 2004. And this month, the stage play Heil Hitler! , "a grotesque, ironical and humorous attempt to come to terms with history," according to its playwright Rolf Hochhuth, opens in Berlin. Interestingly, the company hired to put up the Heil Hitler! publicity posters in Berlin refused at first; an executive said he found the play's title too "hard to stomach...
...impediment to emotion and subtlety the last refuge of an artistic quisling. His hurtling, bullying camera captures characters in heat or dancing on the barricades taunting their Soviet godfathers. But it takes a strong subject not to be overwhelmed by Wajda's scenery-chewing style. Rolf Hochhuth's novel Eine Liebe in Deutschland offered that subject: the purging delirium of love set against the corruptive madness of Nazism...
...Mengele has found his way into contemporary literature. In Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, he was the model for The Doctor who taunted God to punish him for his killings at Auschwitz. He is the inspiration for the drill-wielding Nazi named Szell in William Goldman's Marathon Man, and the mad doctor who sought to re-create a batch of little Hitlers in Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil...
Ever since Rolf Hochhuth's bitter drama The Deputy first appeared on the stage in 1963, there has been a nonstop debate over the explosive question raised by the German playwright: Could Pope Pius XII have done more to save six million European Jews from extermination during World War II? Six books have explored the thesis that by remaining silent he became an accomplice to genocide. The issue was even aired for almost two years in a Rome civil court, when American Author Robert Katz was accused of defaming the Pontiffs memory in Massacre in Rome, a 1973 film...