[The Deputy] manages to survive its own deficiencies and even its incorporeality, persisting in the memory as an instigation, a catalyst and an obduracy. The play as adapted and performed is very much less than the printed text, that text is in turn less than the truth of history, yet something remains that cannot be appeased, neutralized or overthrown. (p. 163)

[The] play sets going a moral energy outside the framework of history and independent of its details. This is the high, or soul-supporting, interpretation. On lower levels The Deputy is regarded as a strict historical assertion which can only be established or disproved, or alternatively, as a no less strictly intended work of art obliging us to canonize it or deflate its pretensions. But what is so significant about Hochhuth's work is that it cuts through categories, being neither art nor history nor pure moral gesture nor autonomous...