The Papacy: Pius XII & The Jews

THE PAPACY

The drama is called Der Stellvertreter, a 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 to the text of his play, Hochhuth charges: "Never perhaps in the whole of history have so many paid with their lives for the passive attitude of one politician."

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 the trial of a freethinker.

Two Martyrs. The hero of what Hochhuth calls "a Christian tragedy" is a saintly, selfless Jesuit, Father Riccardo Fontana—a fictional character modeled on the two Catholic priests martyred by the Nazis to whom Hochhuth dedicated his play. Fontana, who comes from an aristocratic Roman family with impeccable Vatican connections, is assigned to the office of the papal nuncio in Berlin. There, in a scene derived from an actual incident of 1943, a secretly anti-Nazi storm trooper named Rudolf Gerstein breaks in to tell the nuncio that Jews are being systematically exterminated at death camps in Eastern Europe. The horrified nuncio refuses to take any action because the Vatican has a concordat with Germany—which Pius XII, then Vatican Secretary of State, negotiated in 1933. Riccardo, however, promises Gerstein that Pius will speak out when he hears of the atrocities, and undertakes a personal mission to Rome.