Rolf Hochhuth: the man who anticipated cancel culture

Rolf Hochhuth, who has died aged 89, was a German playwright and provocateur who anticipated today’s iconoclastic view of history by more than half a century. Two plays in particular, The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter) of 1963 and Soldiers (Soldaten) of 1967, attempted to destroy the reputations of two recently deceased figures: respectively, Pope Pius XII and Sir Winston Churchill. In both cases, Hochhuth rewrote the history of the Second World War in a tendentious but dramatically effective way, causing deep offence and enduring controversy. When mud is thrown in the name of literature, some of it always sticks.  

What those who eagerly paid to see Hochhuth’s plays did not know was that his sources were, to say the least, questionable. In the case of Pius XII, Soviet intelligence had set out to denigrate the Catholic Church — a prime target of disinformation during the Cold War — by spreading the idea that the wartime Pope had collaborated with the Nazis to protect ecclesiastical business interests, rather than speaking out against the Holocaust. Hochhuth recycled this partial evidence against Pius, depicting him as a cold-blooded monster, a latter-day Pontius Pilate, who literally washes his hands of the Jews.

As for Churchill: Hochhuth relied on David Irving for his claim that the British Prime Minister not only deliberately targeted German civilians in area bombing by the RAF, but ordered the assassination of General Sikorski, the exiled Polish leader who died in a plane crash. The play peddled the canard that Churchill was prepared to go to any lengths to appease Stalin, even the elimination of the anti-Communist Sikorski.

At the time, Irving was not yet notorious as a Holocaust denier and apologist for Hitler, but he had published a dubious bestseller about the bombing of Dresden that repeated the Nazi propaganda death toll of 135,000. To the end of his life, Hochhuth always defended Irving, describing him in 2005 as a “fabulous pioneer of contemporary history”.

In both plays, Hochhuth deployed a simple dramatic device: he contrasted his villainous anti-heroes with virtuous interlocutors. In The Deputy, this was the fictional Father Riccardo Fontana, who ends by exchanging identity with a Jew and dying at Auschwitz. In Soldiers, the counterpart to Churchill is George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, who opposed the bombing of German cities during the war as incompatible with Christian ethics.

Both plays generated violent controversies at the time — indeed, with hindsight they should perhaps be seen as typical 1960s “happenings”. In Paris there were violent protests at The Deputy and in Rome the play was stopped by the police after one performance. In West Berlin, by contrast, the audience wept and applauded for 20 minutes.

In London, Soldiers was championed by an equally provocative figure, the critic Ken Tynan, who demanded that it be staged by the National Theatre. Just two years after Churchill’s death, Tynan ran into fierce opposition, but tried to stage the play himself. The Lord Chamberlain, in his role as stage censor, banned it because of its depiction of a living person, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. A year later censorship was abolished and the play went ahead, only to be sued for libel by another character who turned out to be alive: Sikorski’s pilot, Eduard Prchal. Rather than test the factual basis of Churchill’s character assassination before a British jury, Tynan settled with Prchal out of court. More stubborn, Hochhuth preferred to move to Switzerland rather than risk paying damages.

In Hochhuth’s defence, it is claimed that the Vatican began the process of opening its wartime archives partly in response to the furore generated by his play. That process was only completed this year and the debate over Pius XII, the Church and the Holocaust shows no sign of abating. Few scholars would now take seriously the caricature of the Pope presented in The Deputy, but the American historian Daniel Goldhagen is only the most prominent of those who argue that he was indeed culpable. On the other hand, his predicament now better understood, as is his role in saving thousands of Jews. The Church still defends Pius XII, but has also definitively repudiated anti-Semitism and asked for forgiveness. However, the redefinition of Catholic doctrine was already under way at the Second Vatican Council before Hochhuth’s play. His one-sided indictment of the recently deceased pontiff did nothing to promote a more nuanced view of a traumatic past.

Still less can this be said of Soldiers. In Germany, a debate about Allied bombing took another three decades to develop, led by writers such as W.G. Sebald and, more dubiously, Jörg Friedrich. It has had the somewhat questionable consequence of encouraging some Germans to relativise Nazi atrocities by depicting their own people as victims.

Here in Britain, we are more aware of attempts to demonise Churchill. These range from the familiar depiction of him as a war criminal to more recent accusations of racism which allegedly caused him to ignore the wartime Bengal famine. While Churchill must plead guilty to the charge that he was an imperialist, like most children of the Victorian era, he was a man of remarkable vision and magnanimity, far ahead of his time in many ways. Insofar as the campaign against Churchill began with Rolf Hochhuth, the only possible defence of the German dramatist is that he, too, was a man of his time. The Sixties was an age of iconoclasm, in many ways foreshadowing the cancel culture in which we now live. Hochhuth was no Shakespeare or Schiller, nor even a Brecht. One thing he did grasp, though: casting dead heroes with feet of clay is always good box office.