Obituary for Rolf Hochhuth – He cited the historical villains in front of the world court, Rolf Hochhuth was the wirkmächtigste playwright of the German speaking theatre after 1945. He accused Pope Pius XII and rushed to the baden-württemberg Minister-President. Now he died 89 years of age.Martin Halter5 Kommentare5Für him the Theater was a moral institution, which made him the dinosaur in the dedicated literature: Rolf Hochhuth (1931-2020). Photo: Herbert Knosowski (Keystone)

in Order to make his theater pieces was Rolf Hochhuth almost any means. So he engaged for a new production of his “island Comedy,” from 1974 to the more than hundred-year-old Johannes Heesters as an aged king, to the Greek host from the TV series “Lindenstrasse” and Caroline Beil from the RTL jungle camp as Lysistrata.

Hochhuth himself was something like the old king of the jungle, the I-am-a-celebrity-get-me-here-out-bitch of the German post-war theatre. Anyway, he knew that anger and proud loneliness keep you young. If he held on a book fair, one of his incendiary speeches (“As a Poet, you’re also arsonist”), hung the jacket, making it look like a Royal ermine mantle about the shoulders.

In his German Fatherland, the Prophet was at the end of the game. His new songs were possibly played in his own theatre he was heir to the property of the Berliner ensemble in the summer break. His Clinch with the Director made for years for headlines: Insulted Hochhuth Claus Peymann as “dirty creatures”, paid him the poisoned compliments home: “You have to love him, even if you put up with him.”

Hochhuth’s “the representative” made in Switzerland for violent clashes. 24. September 1963, demonstrated to a crowd of people for the removal of the piece. In front of the Theater, it came to clashes with counter-demonstrators calling for the freedom of art. Photo: Keystone

Hochhuth’s dramas only ethos were often proficient editorial, put it together out of grim wrath, Kitsch and Sensationalism; but in spite of or because of his bold judgments he became the most influential German dramatists after 1945. In “The Deputy” (1963) he complained to Pope Pius XII as an accomplice in the Holocaust. In “soldiers,” he went with Winston Churchill and the bombing campaign of the allies to the court.

With his story “A love in Germany,” he crashed in 1978, Hans Filbinger, Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg and used to be a “terrible judge” of the Nazi Reich. Shortly after the re-unification of his “Wessis in Weimar”, and “McKinsey comes”, once again, for theatre Commotion.

For German Chancellor Erhard, he was a “Pinscher”

The Finger always on the pulse of the time, quoted by Hochhuth, the historical villains in front of the world court and support as a classical kohlhaas of “Wutbürger” neither himself nor his contemporaries. Theatre is a moral institution, the Poet, was for him the Conscience of his era; the political revolutionary to the dinosaurs of the dedicated literature.

Elfriede Jelinek mounted together your pieces of quotes, but it is a post-modern radical feminist and friend of the theatre. Hochhuth was, however, his docu-dramas reluctant from the Hand and believed to the last that the great men who make history.

Hochhuth was one of the writers, the German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in 1965, exposed as the “Pinscher”, which is a epitome of critical Intellectuals; later on, rather then your Don Quixote. The son of a Shoe merchant from Eschwege, who lived for many years in Basel, in order to maintain distance, to Germany, was as individual fighters really in his Element when he found himself surrounded by enemies, opportunists, and cowards, and insidious silence felt.

Pushy opinionated as usual, only Günter Grass, pounded it on his “historical Mission” and its historical pessimism, and when he the art of morality, the success made the commitment to victims: Even worse for a time, the Avengers had disinherited and Forgotten as in the engraving. After all: None of them, boasted to him of the unequal quieter, demütigere colleague, Siegfried Lenz, have moved “so much and so much has changed”. On Wednesday, Rolf Hochhuth, 89, passed away at the age of in Berlin.

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