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PATRICIA MARX
HOCHHUTH:
That is a question of who is doing the criticizing. The
historians, with few exceptions, find it interesting as literature--and
the
literati
find it historically interesting. I cannot defend myself
against this, and can only hope that time will sort it all out-and, in
any case, I will not allow myself to be deterred from writing about what
I find interesting, even if my next play should again be a historical one.
I think that literary criticism, in some measure, was thrown into
mild consternation by the fact that someone had, again, written
historical drama. None had been written-not for decades, I mean.
Brecht's
Calileo
isn't, in the sense I mean, a historical play. But the
simple fact that the writing of historical plays is no longer practiced
does not mean that one shouldn't try one's hand at it all the same.
It is scarcely conceivable why, for example, a marital drama
should be more interesting than a play which deals with, let us say,
the extermination of the Albigentians. With this prerequisite, however:
a historic drama today, I believe, is legitimate only when the author
makes use of history merely as a blueprint from which to construct
the behavior of man in our time. When he is, in other words, not
merely giving a picture of the times, a giant fresco of the past, but
is concerned with something indicative, with characters who behave
in a way significant of our actions and feelings. The condescension
with which a few-and it was only a few-men of letters tried to
dismiss me as a mere historiographer, especially funny because it is
particularly in the realm of literature that I conquered new ground,
at least in Germany, by writing the first verse play we have these days.
I am highly sceptical of the fuss which is made about novels,
novels that have no bearing on reality and that are each time cele–
brated as a great event for some four weeks by twenty-two people.
I must tell you that when I recently saw Ingmar Bergman's
The Silence,
I left that Hamburg movie house with the question,
"What is there left for the novelist today?" Think of what Bergman
can do with a single shot of his camera, up a street, down a corridor,
into a woman's armpit. Of all he can say without saying a single
word. The entire film consists perhaps of three pages of typescript.
What then can a novelist offer of comparable interest with mere words?
MARX:
Mr. Hochhuth, how does this relate to the drama? Is it the same
thing to some degree?
HOCHHUTH:
I don't think that the drama faces the same problem. Film
has this more pronouncedly epic, narrative character, whereas drama
is tied to theses, to the conflict of ideas. These are things that a film
cannot tackle in its non-verbal way, such as the confronting of argu-
