‘The Deputy’

Extract

A few months after the beginning of the second World War, Father Max Metzger, founder of the Una Sancta Brotherhood, wrote a letter from his prison cell pleading with Pius XII for the convocation of a council of peace and of reunion. This letter—the full English text appears for the first time in the new American quarterly, Continuum, Summer, 1963—has a bearing not only on the prehistory of Vatican II, but even more significantly on a recent dramatic production, Der Stellvertreter (The Representative or The Deputy), by a young German publisher’s assistant, Rolf Hochhuth. In the play as in the letter, the Pope was requested to speak forthrightly in the name of justice; in the play the request is openly ignored, while the fate of Max Metzger’s letter remains unknown. In both instances the question that seems to rise spontaneously concerns the failure of the Pope to fulfil his role as servant of the servants of God.

The play has been recognized in the European and American press as perhaps the most controversial drama of the post-war era. An English translation is about to appear; it will be produced in Stockholm by Ingmar Bergman; Georges de Beauregard is filming it in France; and it will open next season in London and New York. While there is no doubt that some of this immediate fame is due to the dramatic merits of the piece, an even larger part is probably the result of the ‘scandal’ on which it is based, on the alleged failure of Pius XII to speak out on the persecution of the Jews. It may be observed in passing that, aside from the religious issue, much German acclaim for the work probably derives from the national need for a catharsis of the Nazi past, and, on the West-Berlin theatrical scene, from the desire to achieve a local work comparable to Brecht’s social dramas.