Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Deputy

From Wikipedia entry: The Deputy

The Deputy, a Christian tragedy (German: Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel), also known as The Representative, is a controversial 1963 drama by Rolf Hochhuth which indicts Pope Pius XII for his failure to take action or speak out against The Holocaust. It has been translated into more than twenty languages.

[In Act III, Father Riccardo Fontana, the priest protagonist] “first voices his idea to follow the example of Bernhard Lichtenberg and to follow the Jews to the death camps in the East, and possibly to share in their fate”. [In Act V] “he dons the yellow star and joins deportees to die at Auschwitz, where the rest of the act takes place”.

Bernhard Lichtenberg was a German Catholic priest who protested against the Nazis attitude towards Jews, and was considered by them as incorrigible - that’s why they sent him to the Dachau concentration camp.

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