Alles nur Theater? Zur Rezeption von Rolf Hochhuths "Der Stellvertreter" in der Schweiz, 1963/1964 (review)

The wonderfully sober and balanced first book by the young Swiss historian Nadine Ritzer comes as a welcome relief in a field characterized by polemic and ideological battles. This readable account focuses on the reception of Hochhuth's play The Deputy in Switzerland in 1963 and 1964. It casts Hochhuth neither as a heroic crusader seeking to expose the truth about the Catholic past nor as a craven villain beholden to ideological interests. Instead, her book represents one of the first recent significant efforts to historicize the Hochhuth debates. In his play, Hochhuth alleged that Pope Pius XII maintained an icy silence in the wake of the Holocaust. Ritzer places these controversies within the larger contexts of discussions regarding Christian anti-Judaism and the confrontation of Catholics with the recent past during the years of National Socialist hegemony in Europe. Not least, she shows the uniquely Swiss aspects to these discussions, by reopening a darker chapter in Swiss history, the turning away of more than 4000 Jewish refugees between 1942 and 1943 under the pretext that "the boat is full."

To many North American readers unfamiliar with the history behind Hochhuth's production, it might seem rather unusual to devote an entire book to the reception of Hochhuth's play in Switzerland, a nation that has often lived in the shadow of its larger German-speaking neighbor to the north. Sundry books and articles have been devoted to the controversies that Hochhuth's play engendered in Germany, many penned in the immediate wake of these controversies between 1963 and 1965. But Ritzer provides compelling historical reasons to look at the response to The Deputy in Switzerland. Following its initial run in Berlin beginning in February 1963, The Deputy was next produced on the stage in Basel-long before performances in Paris, London, and New York or even in other German cities. It was also produced in the smaller locales of Zofingen, Olten, and Aarau. The militancy of the protests before and during some of the productions in Basel rivaled and even dwarfed those of Berlin. Young Catholics set off stink bombs during the productions and,waving inflammatory signs, picketed the theater. One Italian group even threatened to bomb the theater, the synagogue, and freemasons' center, claiming that all three groups stood behind the production in a perfidious conspiracy. As Hochhuth was to comment in February, 1964: "I experienced the largest and also the most angry demonstrations against the Deputy in Basel, but at the same time such kindness, so much heartfelt sympathy as at no other location."

Ritzer convincingly shows how the often bitter Catholic reaction to The Deputy reopened, at least temporarily, longstanding fissures in Swiss society. This play by a German Protestant reawakened Catholic anxieties regarding the Kulturkampf, which was waged not only in Germany but also in Switzerland, in which the Catholic minority in the second half of the nineteenth century had been subjected to repressive and illiberal measures by the liberal Protestant majority. The Deputy reactivated the Catholic milieu. Catholic leaders took pains to appear as a united, monolithic front, even if Catholic public opinion was not completely in accord on how to respond to this apparent danger to confessional peace in Switzerland. But she makes clear that this call to arms was little more than a convenient device with which to rally the faithful, since the specter of a renewed Kulturkampf bore little resemblance to the realities of Swiss society in the 1960s, an era in which religious subcultures were eroding.

Ritzer skillfully weaves the reception of The Deputy into discussions about the complicity of the Swiss government in the genocide. Hochhuth's work shifted public focus away from the perpetrators to the bystanders, and it was only logical that in Switzerland not only Pius XII but also the Swiss nation...