Rolf Hochhuth's "The Deputy"

...Moreover, the heroic action of the play is an action of protest, a protest against Rome on the part of a priest...

...Moreover, it is interesting without relying on lightness or humor...

...One authoritative source had it that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover placed an angry call to Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry demanding that this story be stopped...

...Most modern plays do have to have humor for us to sit through them, but this, I think, is because such plays are not about anything really important...

...That the question is raised, however, shows that this is a Protestant play...

...Was it right in this situation for the Pope to strike at Hitler with a denunciation of his racial policies...

...Also, the unmasking of the Pope is not historical...

...Would Pope John, to take Pacelli's extreme opposite, have reasoned differently had he been Pope at the time...

...Having seen The Deputy, I know this to be false...

...I would have preferred the play to be even more constantly grave than it is, nor would my interest have been diminished thereby...

...What was not known generally, and what is dealt with in the play, is the attitude the Vatican took to the Nazi extermination program...

...It has been, by broad consensus, a bad year for the FBI...

...Even within some quarters of the Justice Department itself, most notably the Civil Rights Division, the FBI has been taking lumps on its civil rights record...

...The main thing is, as Valery put it, in a beautiful phrase, that art should "give birth to what gave it birth...

...Skill and cleverness are important to art, but not all-important...

...Thus it was that during the scene when the priest is merely acting out his defiance before the Pope, his conviction seems more real than in the scene in which acting had to become action and his defiance meant pain to his flesh...

...Of course the play has faults and the production is not as skillful as it might have been...

...FBI spokesmen insisted that the Bureau had no part in the leaking of these classified materials to columnist Drew Pearson...

...Instead of talking about how serious and important the subject of this play is and yet how unskilled and crude the devices of its author, let us note that the unmasking of the man who was supposed to be Christ's direct representative on earth is an event of the highest interest, and that the author understood this, which shows him to have the instinct of a true dramatist...

...The ignominious and debased figures of Jews, the cruel and taunting figures of the Nazi guards and executioners are wholly out of place in a work whose main action is a spiritual one: the decision formed in the soul of the young Jesuit priest, Ricardo Fontana...

...The situation in Eastern Europe was as follows: the Russians, the victory of Stalingrad behind them, were advancing victoriously into the Catholic communities of Eastern Europe, taking over Church properties, and installing Communist bureaucrats in the positions of power once controlled by priests...

...The forming of an heroic decision—was not that Corneille's real subject, was not this the source of the sublimity with which he thrilled the French court...

...Some of the deep seriousness which inspired Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy will remain, I think, with those who see it...

...Then, too, the author can be criticized for not having restricted his play entirely to the struggle behind the scenes among Churchmen...

...And hold us it does, more and more powerfully until the tremendous climax of the penultimate scene...

...I would insist, too, that the importance of the work is due not merely to its subject—as many critics have said— for if the subject were not expressed in the play's action, how would its importance be felt, how could the play hold us...

...Corneille's exalted characters, his kings, his princesses, are not without the spirituality their high positions suggest them to have...

...This is a modern play, of course...

...Probably we talk too much about art and do not know enough about it...

...This question, raised by the play, is certainly not answered by it...

...the brutality of the Nazis goes very well with the sensationalism of film techniques...

...And the protest is more ringing and challenging when made to the Pope in person than when carried out in Auschwitz, before the Nazi executioners...

...Naturally, this was the interpretation that reached the public during the early, formative days of the assassination inquiry...

...What is stupendous in the play is its action, which consists in the forming of a truly heroic decision by a young Jesuit priest, a decision finally fixed by the unmasking of the moral emptiness of Pope Pius XII...

...Pope Pius XII is, as I have said, unmasked by the playwright, an act we must regard as great, both morally and as theatre...

...Yes, it was known that Pope Pius XII had done nothing, or very little, in behalf of the Jewish victims...

...Let me restate the argument as given by Pope Pius XII to Father Fontana for not denouncing Hitler and intervening for the Jews...

...Thinking of Corneille, one can see the immense distance between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries...

...Who but a Protestant would have made the Pope the chief target of a work dealing with the extermination of the Jews by the mainly Protestant Germans...

...There are some moments of humor, as a matter of fact, not many, and these I found rather obtrusive and irrelevant...

...but this is only the background of The Deputy...

...In their tightly secured precinct on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, FBI officialdom concedes that the Bureau's coveted public image has fallen a few notches...

...And it is a false thing to say too...

...It is remarked in the play by the Cardinal that there have been "warm" and "cold" Popes, and that since God is the one who determines who will be Pope, then God at that particular juncture of history must have wanted a cold Pope in the Vatican...

...what was not known, and can best be known through seeing Hochhuth's play, is the precise manner in which Pope Pius XII refused to condemn the Nazis or lift his voice in behalf of the victims...

...The heroism of the young priest's decision is, of course, not historically authentic: Father Fontana is an invention of the author...

...It has been said that if there is anything great about Hochhuth's work, it is the stupendousness of the historical event which inspired it...

...But was it because Pacelli was "cold" or because he was the Pope that he acted as he did...

...Sertorius, in Corneille's play, having turned against Rome, says proudly: Rome n'est plus dans Rome, elle est toute o-ic je suis...

...But is it only Pope Pius XII, the particular individual, Pacelli, who happened to be Pope at the time of the play's action, who is unmasked by the author...

...No one can say, of course, and anyone has a right to believe he would have thought differently...

...This may well be the case...

...Howard Taubman, writing in the March 7 Sunday Times, claims to have found fault in The Deputy: the Pope, Mr...

...I think he gave the Pope only those arguments the Pope actually used...

...Throughout its investigation into the President's assassination and the subsequent murder of Oswald, the FBI leaked its version of the events to newsmen on a not-for-attribution basis...

...Joan...

...But Hochhuth was not interested in making Pope Pius XII amusing...

...Was Hitler then the Church's main enemy...

...There were persistent reports that FBI agents had interrogated the suspected Presidential assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, within the week prior to that fateful November 22...

...Moreover, I think Hollywood has presented Nazis better, and in fact there is a certain affinity between typical Nazi methods and typical Hollywood films...

...So I will not accept the disjunction other critics find tolerable, that this is a poor play with a great subject...

...It is not a nineteenth century play in any sense, and while there is some resemblance in it to certain plays of Schiller, it made me think even more strongly of Corneille...

...I submit that I have yet to sit through a modern work, written, say, in the last twenty years, as continuously interesting as The Deputy...

...But the public is entitled to a full disclosure of the facts, perhaps through the vehicle of the current Senate investigation...

...It is simpler than our aestheticians think...

...I have heard a director say that no modern audience can sit through a play unless there is humor in it...

...Pope Pius XII, in Hochhuth's play, is without the human grandeur required by his office...

...Now the Presidential Commission, headed by Chief Justice Warren, is testing that version against its own reconstruction of the tragedy in Dallas...

...But in this play there should not have been a single brute...

...Now this is a poor thing to say about a work like The Deputy...

...Was it not to be hoped, rather, that the war might end with Hitler still in power and with Catholic properties and the Catholic faithful of Eastern Europe still beyond Stalin's reach...

...And a deep seriousness goes a long way toward solving problems too complicated for the unstirred intelligence...

...Did not the Church have something to gain if his armies held their ground...

...To be sure, it was known that the Nazis exterminated six million Jews...

...When in the following scene he goes voluntarily to his death with the Jews, he does not tower over his destiny but seems shrunken beneath its weight...

...The scenes dealing with the rounding up of Jews and their dispatch to death camps and those in which the Nazi officials express their disgust for the Jews in their power are quite unnecessary and distracting...

...Nor should there have been a single unwilling victim...

...Hochhuth's priest, having defied the Pope and placed on his cassock the yellow star Jews were forced to wear, seems overwhelmed by his own action, and is unable afterwards to express any powerful conviction of the rightness of what he did...

...No play as important, as interesting as Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy has been shown for a very long time—and no play as interesting in an important way...

...One has the painful impression that in modern times institutional power deprives the individual of spirit, while the defiance of such power by the individual shrinks rather than swells his soul...

...But the effect at which Hochhuth was aiming in his play would not have been served by Shavian methods, even assuming the playwright capable of using them...

...This, too, is something quite modern, not conceivable in any seventeenth-century work...

...What is really serious is truly interesting...

...It is precisely the play which has made people realize its subject is great—something nobody knew until Hochhuth had written The Deputy...

...Finally, in the Bobby Baker case, the FBI faced its most serious crisis of public confidence when the White House was accused of using classified reports to impugn a witness in the investigation...

...These reports were fed by Dallas police officials themselves...

...he was never unmasked so dramatically, except in Hochhuth's imagination...

...Against the Russian advance there stood only the armies of Hitler...

...I can praise only three of the actors: Fred Stewart as the Cardinal, James Brett as the young Jesuit priest, and Emlyn Williams, who is magnificent as the Pope...

...Mr...

...and it is very amusing to hear an immoral decision justified by brilliant reasoning...

...Then, after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Bureau again became the center of new swarms of suspicions...

...But if I have any fault to find with his presentation of the Pope and the Pope's arguments for not intervening on behalf of the Jews, it was rather that the playwright did not show the Pope rendered silent, finally unable even to argue against the crushing force of the young Jesuit's moral appeal...

...Taubman writes, is not permitted by the playwright to justify himself with the brilliance a playwright such as Shaw, for instance, allowed to his priests in St...

...This is certainly true, and Hochhuth is no Shaw...

...And Corneille's proud and heroic individuals who set their own moral wills above superior power and station, are further ennobled by the grandeur of their adversaries...

...The question in my mind, though, as I heard this argument put by Emlyn Williams with all the persuasiveness he could give it, was whether it would not have been put by any Pope, and not just the Pacelli of Hochhuth's play...

...Certainly, he did not try to improve on them...

...Shaw aimed at amusing...

...Now the argument, simply as a political argument, is not a poor one, and it was one that any Pope would have been bound to take seriously into account...

...First there were the criticisms of the FBI's role in the Birmingham bombings and ensuing complaints that it was reluctant to investigate civil rights violations with the vigor that it employs in pursuing, say, kidnappers and bank robbers...

...But it is one thing to call a play imperfect—most great plays are— and another to call it poor...