[Among Hochhuth's artistic forebears, two great German historical dramatists figure] prominently: Kleist and Hebbel. It is Kleist's Romantic passion that largely informs The Deputy; its idealistic young Jesuit hero owes something to the Prince of Homburg and even to Michael Kohlhaas, figures whose noble passion makes them politically or socially culpable, but who are more troubled and complex than, say, the hero of Schiller's The Robbers. And it is Hebbel's notion of historical drama, based on Hegel rather than Kant, in which protagonists become symbols of their society, their age and the workings of history, that importantly affects Hochhuths's dramaturgy. (pp. 167-68)

[Historic] drama can emphasize either half of its name: it can make history subserve the ideas and effects of drama, or it can use the drama as a vehicle for momentous historical truths. Though either approach is valid, the former is more likely to produce a work of art, the latter a tract in dramatic form. (p. 168)

[A] major stumbling block is the question of contemporaneity. It is all right to be fiercely critical or freely inventive, or both, where a figure of the distant past is concerned—where our own world and memories are not incriminated and the plea of insufficient evidence can be advanced. Thus Becket may grossly caricature a twelfth-century pope and elicit no more than the arching of an isolated eyebrow, whereas The Deputy may make a twentieth-century pope less unsympathetic than its author personally considers him and yet provoke outcries of "Caricature!" from critics all over, regardless of race, creed or competence.

Let us consider the main artistic charges (as opposed to political ones) that have been leveled against Hochhuth's Piux XII. We are told that this Pius is not a worthy antagonist for the idealistic hero—in other words, the "caricature" argument in more sophisticated form; and that The Deputy, asserting as it does its historical authenticity, has no business imputing motives of a damaging yet unprovable sort to the Pope. Now, if you believe in a categorical imperative to do right, as Hochhuth does, Pius can no longer be an equally convincing defender of an antithetical position, as Kleist's Elector or Antony in Julius Caesar can be. Absolute morality compels a pope to speak up in behalf of six million human beings, dead, dying or yet to die—even if the consequences, to himself and all Catholics, were more manifestly dangerous than they may have appeared to be. By keeping the Pope as close to absolute silence as dramatically feasible, Hochhuth is actually lending the greatest possible dignity to a position he considers untenable. (pp. 168-69)

Hochhuth has indeed put forward all conceivable reasons for the Pope's silence: the safety of Catholics, business and financial considerations, ecclesiastical politics (danger of schism), European politics (Hitler as bulwark against Stalin and Communism), a kind of aristocratic hauteur and lack of human warmth, failure of nerve. Hochhuth does not insist on the equal relevance of all—indeed, he allows directors, actors, audiences and readers to consider some of them irrelevant. If, however, it is objected that the particular juxtapositions are misleading, I reply that the need for compression makes them inevitable. (p. 169)

If Hochhuth had written a play about Pius XII and only about him, it is entirely probable that the play would have been, by accepted standards, more dense although not necessarily more substantial: much polemical material that is relegated to the "Historical Sidelights" of the play's appendix could have been set forth in greater detail in the play itself. Hochhuth, however—and here lies what is both the glory and the foredoom of his undertaking—is after something bigger: a historical fresco of the entire complex of events that begat and tolerated Auschwitz. No matter how important the Pope may be to the play, other elements are of equal importance: the Germans, the Nazi Party, big business and science gone mad, the Catholic Church, other churches, individuals everywhere, and the metaphysics of evil as embodied in the play's one predominantly mythical character, the Doctor. What ultimately drags the play down to some extent is the very opposite of insufficient historical data: the excess of usable, and used, documentation.

We should note, then, that the Catholic Church, for example, is seen in the play not only as the Pope, but also as the Apostolic Nuncio to Berlin (who is a historic figure), the Cardinal (who, I suspect, also has a historic basis), the Abbot, three quite different monks, an important lay adviser to the Holy See, and above all, as the young Jesuit, Riccardo Fontana, who stands for not only the two priests to whom the play is dedicated, but also, in Hochhuth's words, "for those priests, mostly nameless, who instantly set love for their neighbor above all utilitarian considerations—ultimately at the price of their lives." It is thus that the entire spectrum of clerical reaction to the plight of the Jews is represented.

So the deputy—or vicar, or representative—of the title is not the Pope, who shirks his duty, but Riccardo, who takes on the Pope's burden and dies for it. Riccardo is a profoundly religious figure, and it is largely because of him that the play can justly call itself "a Christian tragedy." Indeed, it is the only major religious play written since the last war that I know of, and it is perhaps a fitting piece of worldly irony which would brand this one, of all plays, as irreligious. What makes Riccardo into a Christian tragic hero is not only the fact that he assumes the guilt of his Church and unsolicitedly becomes the vicar's vicar. It is also the fact that Riccardo's magnanimous desperation forces him toward two of the gravest sins a priest can commit: insubordination to his spiritual superiors, climaxing in the contemplated political assassination of the Pope; and an attempt to murder the villainous Doctor of Auschwitz. (pp. 169-70)

Riccardo's counterpart is Gerstein, who represents the secular hero and the lay sacrifice: the man of moral action who must, in a time of assassins, besmirch himself by ostensibly joining with evil in order to undermine it, and who presumably dies a death which is as anonymous as, but less expiatory than, the priest's. As opposed to these two, there are the two poles of culpability: the scientist whose evil knows no bounds, and the Pontiff whose goodness, unfortunately, does; or to put it more abstractly, the sado-satanist doctor whom metaphysical silence drives to unconscionable crimes, and the high-minded trimmer whom unconscionable crimes leave physically silent….

But if The Deputy is too multifariously ambitious to be a complete success, it does not flinch from attempting to pursue a theme into most of its terrible ramifications. In fact, the construction of the play is by no means unskillful in the way it manipulates characters through various scenes—dropping them and picking them up again—toward a final, perhaps somewhat disappointing showdown. The suspense leading up to the Pope scene is ably handled, and there is also an effective contrapuntal construction: scenes involving individuals alternate with scenes involving larger groups or their typical representatives. (p. 171)

What makes The Deputy … important, however, is not so much the political revelation it may have made. Nor technical devices such as having the same actors enact several contradictory parts, to convey that in our age it is merely a matter of "military conscription … whether one stands on the side of the victims or the executioners." Nor the elaborate stage directions which bitterly project certain characters into the future—describing, for example, such and such a Nazi as a solid citizen of postwar Germany. What is momentous is that in an age that has progressively convinced itself that its significant dramatic form is dark comedy—that, to quote Dürrenmatt, "our world has led to the Grotesque as to the atom bomb, just as the apocalyptic pictures of Hieronymus Bosch are grotesque, too"—that in this era when "the death of tragedy" has become a literary commonplace, The Deputy stands as a valid tragedy: not great, but good, and anything but commonplace. (p. 175)