Word: hochhuth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Germany's Rolf Hochhuth is a demon researcher, an addicted player of the blame game, and a member of the lapel-grabbing school of play writing. In The Deputy, he buttonholed playgoers to blame Pope Pius XII for not having protested the murder of 6,000,000 Jews. In Soldiers, he is again peremptorily grabbing the audience's lapels to argue that Churchill connived at the murder of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, head of the Polish government in exile, in order to placate Stalin...
Another charge made by Hochhuth is that through certain insinuative speeches, Churchill manipulated Hitler into initiating a few scattered bombing raids on British towns. Churchill thus could feel free to launch massive retaliatory fire-storm raids on the hapless civilians of Hamburg and Dresden. Since it was Hitler's Luftwaffe that began indiscriminate mass bombing in an attempt to break British morale, this charge is patently false. In the matter of General Sikorski's plane-crash death, no convincing proof is proffered that Churchill had a hand in it. It is a tenuous personal speculation indicative only...
...Hochhuth portrayed Pius XII as a Machiavellian "inverted mystic" who hoped to use Hitler to save Europe from Communism. The Churchill of Soldiers seems to be an equally callous caricature. According to the play, Britain's wartime Prime Minister (played by Otto Hasse) was a tragic figure who authorized immoral acts in hopes of saving his nation. Among them was the murder of Sikorski, a stiff-necked patriot who infuriated Stalin first by demanding the postwar return of Polish territories annexed by Russia, then by calling for an investigation of the Katyn massacre of 4,253 Polish military prisoners...
Although a number of World War II historians have been suspicious of Sikorski's death,* Hochhuth could only claim that the bulk of the "evidence" is on file in a Swiss bank vault and cannot be revealed for 50 years. But what disappointed the opening-night audience in Berlin was a lack not of historical evidence but of dramatic talent. Soldiers came across as a static bore, filled with ponderous moralisms and unwitty aphorisms ("Marriage," says Churchill, "is love without longing") and totally lacking in tension...
...Hochhuth's latest libel seems likely to get as much circulation as his first. Kenneth Tynan and Sir Laurence Olivier, who were prevented by England's Lord Chamberlain from giving the world premiere at their National Theater in London, plan to offer the play at a censorship-free private theater club. Productions are also scheduled for five other European capitals...