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During the first half of the 1960s, Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama The Representative – a play narrating the failure of Pope Pius XII to unequivocally condemn the Nazi programme for the extermination of European Jewry – was staged across Europe, surfacing a materiality associated with the darkest moments of the Old Continent. As the overwhelming resonance of pain and angst began to fade and living memories transfigured into latent recollections, Hochhuth's inflammatory drama restaged objects that the post-war ‘new world’ ached to relegate to the fiction of history. The Representative re-evoked tarnished symbols and vestiges connoted with ideologies and practices which, by the 1960s, were kept away from the public sphere, such as SS uniforms, Nazi medals and flags, swastikas and the yellow star of David. Reproducing Nazi materiality through theatrical costumes and props, Hochhuth's play resisted the post-war stowaway impulse; its staged materiality triggered suppressed memories.
Following its 1963 premiere in Berlin, directed by Erwin Piscator, The Representative was produced with the force of a rocket across the globe.1 Wherever it was staged, it created a local turmoil, stirring heated debates about the papacy's moral responsibilities during the war and individual accountability under historical circumstances. The 1964 Israeli performance of The Representative stands out in the production history of Hochhuth's drama. Translated by Yehuda Amichai – a German-born Israeli poet – and staged by Habima National Theatre under the direction of Avraham Ninio – the majority of the cast engaged in this production comprised European-born Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors. Interweaving fiction with documentary drama, and evoking emotionally charged symbols and objects, this play charts the course of a young priest named Riccardo Fontana, who is informed of the death camps by an SS officer. Riccardo confronts the Pope and challenges him to speak out and condemn the Nazi crimes against humanity. Far from being ignorant of the atrocities, Pius, nevertheless, is revealed as a cynical player in a tactical game between Hitler and Stalin whereby the Jews are the very scapegoat necessary to stem the tide of Bolshevism, thus safeguarding the Catholic Church, while maintaining Vatican–capitalist business investments in the production of war materials. Riccardo, in response, protests on grounds of his moral stance: he attaches a yellow star of David...