ROLF HOCHHUTH
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ments with counter-arguments. The drama cannot dispense with words.
In film, the narrative element may well be bound up much more with
the image that can be conjured up without words, if one only knows
how to command one's camera.
MARX:
Are you thinking of writing a film yourself?
HOCHHUTH:
Never. I lack the technical orientation and know-how. But
if something I have written lends itself to being adapted to the film,
all good and well as far as I'm concerned.
MARX:
What did you mean earlier, Mr. Hochhuth, when you referred to
history as fatality?
HOCHHUTH:
I'm influenced in this by various writers, like Theodor
Lessing, the author of
History as Rationale of the Irrational.
Theodor
Lessing's very life was depressing proof of the rightness of his thesis.
In 1933, he was shot to death by the Nazis as he sat in his study.
Even as a boy of thirteen I felt history in a very blunt, sub–
conscious, sub-intellectual way, as a fatality that has sway over us
and against which we can defend ourselves only very partially.
MARX:
To what degree is man responsible for his own fate or his own
actions, then?
HOCHHUTH:
I have just been involved in a heated debate with a German
periodical which accused me of being so very primitive in my think–
ing as still to maintain that it is great men who make history. And
that I have not been aware of the fact that this is not so. But the
periodical did not say who, then, does make history; and I am very
much of the opinion that the history of World War II would have
looked very different if Hitler and Churchill had never been born.
And indeed I would subscribe to the notion that it would
be
the end
of the drama if one were to take the position that man cannot
be
held responsible for his fate.
At the end of my "Historical Sidelights," I quote Melchinger.
"But if the individual can no longer be held responsible, either because
he is no longer in a position to decide or else does not understand
that he must decide, then we have an alibi for all guilt. And that would
mean the end of drama. For 'there can be no suspense without freedom
of decision in each given case.' "
MARX:
How can this be reconciled with the idea of history as fatality,
then?
HOCHHUTH:
This contradiction
is
the fatality. Man is meant to act, to
be responsible. He should
be
the master of his fate. He should
be
moral, and history continually brings him into conflict with powers
which condemn him to defeat, which are stronger than he and which
