Word: hochhuth
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...title that has been translated as The Representative or The Deputy, hut is perhaps best rendered as The Vicar-in echo of the title Vicar of Christ on Earth, which is one of the official designations of Roman Catholic Popes. The first play of Germany's Rolf Hochhuth, 32, it ran for five months last season in West Berlin's Free People's Theater, is now showing in Stockholm, Basel and at London's Royal Shakespeare Theater...
Everywhere, Der Stellvertreter has caused a storm of comment and quarrel. For in it, Hochhuth argues that Pope Pius XII refused to condemn openly the Nazi murder of European Jews because he saw Hitler as a necessary barrier between Soviet Communism and the Christian West, and hoped to negotiate a cease-fire between Germany and the Western Allies. Hochhuth believes that the Pope, as the Supreme Pontiff of the world's most powerful Christian church, was the only man whose formal protest might have deterred Hitler. But the Pope was silent, and in a 45-page historical appendix...
This proposition has won praise from Albert Schweitzer and Evangelical Pastor Martin Niemoller, and bitter attacks from Pope Paul VI and Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius. Police had to break up a fist-swinging riot at the Basel premiere. Hochhuth, a Protestant who once belonged to Hitler's youth corps, has been denounced as a pro-Communist and an anti-Semite. U.S. Catholic journals-including the respected Jesuit weekly America-have editorially attacked the play, apparently in hopes of forestalling a Broadway production planned for next February by Producer Herman F. Shumlin, whose last play, Inherit the Wind, was about...