Theater: A German f accuse

The Deputy, by Rolf Hochhuth. The sound of police sirens and chanting pickets ("Ban the hate show") filtered in to the opening-night audience to provide tension not common on Broadway. Fittingly, the disturbance pre-echoed a scene in the play, also faint with street noises but ringing with inner turmoil, in which the Jews of Rome are rounded up, virtually under the windows of the Vatican, and shipped off in cattle cars to Hitler's extermination camps. And within the papal apartments, according to German Playwright Rolf Hochhuth, sat a man who by a word might have stayed that mass murder. The Deputy is a hammerblow "J'accuse" hurled at Pope Pius XII.

The question of conscience that The Deputy raises is bound to survive the play and to condition any future judgment of Pius XII: Is it morally defensible for the Vicar of Christ on earth to remain silent in the face of such monstrous evil? And must not every man of good will or religious conscience bear witness to what he believes before and sometimes against the world? But Hochhuth does not stick to this lofty issue. As a German, he lives guiltily with guilt, the knowledge that the Nazi leaders and the people who brought them to power must bear the prime responsibility for what happened to the Jews. He varies the scapegoat theory of history that the Nazis applied in exterminating the Jews and produces not a "hate show" but a "shift the blame show." He does not spare the Germans, but he magnifies what he regards as the complacency, indifference, pettiness, diplomatic maneuvering and overcautious silence of Pius and the church hierarchy until these lesser evils are made to seem greater guilts.

The hero of the play is a priest, a kind of angry young martyr of burning faith and compassion who deliberately pins the yellow Star of David to his cassock and eventually goes to his death in the gas chambers. Father Riccardo Fontana (Jeremy Brett) is a Jesuit serving with the papal nuncio in Berlin when a distracted SS lieutenant bursts into an afternoon tea and begins a semihysterical recital of the statistical horrors of the "factories of death for people" at Treblinka and Belzec. "I'm sorry . . . why must you come to me?" says the nuncio in visible dismay, advising the SS man to see Herr Hitler. But Father Riccardo is heartstricken and is positive that Pius will protest as soon as he knows.

The troubled young priest goes to Rome, where his aristocratic father and a cardinal friend are close advisers of the Pope. The cardinal (Fred Stewart) is a jovial, fleshy connoisseur of wine, rare flowers, and the chess game of international politics. "Trouble tempers dictators," he remarks after Hitler loses Stalingrad, and presses Father Riccardo to be a realist, since "the realist compromises." In his uncompromising way, the young priest finally sees Pius and begs him to damn Hitler openly. The Pope knows Hitler's wrongs, but he reminds Father Riccardo that "a diplomat must see with discretion."