Patricia Marx
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROLF HOCHHUTH
MAroC
Mr. Hochhuth,
The Deputy
is your first play to be published.
Had you been thinking of writing a drama before you became interested
in this subject?
HOCHHUTH:
No, I had not started a play before
The Deputy;
and,
before that, I wrote non-dramatic prose.
MARX:
Why did you decide to treat such a vast historical subject in the
form of a play?
HOCHHUTH:
Because I believe that this subject is, in itself, such that a
play is the appropriate form, especially when you consider that the
argument of the play hardly had to be invented by me, but could
be
taken directly from actual events-I mean, Gerstein bursting in upon
the Papal Nuncio. I believe that in a play historical events can be
marshalled toward the dramatic climax, and different points of view
can be made to clash more sharply, and forcefully, than in a work of
fiction.
Also, I felt challenged by the notion of writing a play in free
verse-something that had been ignored in German literature for some
forty years; to be precise, since
Der Rosenkavalier
and other works by
Hofmannsthal. Whereas,
in
England and America, it was common
practice ; Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot are instances. And I was
particularly influenced by Auden's
The Age of Anxiety.
MARX:
Why did you use free verse rather than prose?
HOCHHUTH:
That, too, hinges on the choice of the dramatic form.
Free verse carries its speaker along much more readily than prose,
especially when it concerns a subject which is so closely involved with
contemporary events and depends so extensively on historical docu–
ments.· Then, things must be transposed, heightened by language.
Otherwise it would often sound as
if
one were merely quoting from the
documents.
