“It was Adorno who, after the war, and that’s already over 60 years ago, rekindled in Germany the tradition of a critical evaluation of one’s environment, in the form of the Minima Moralia,” states Hochhuth. Hochhuth’s aphorisms, unlike Adorno’s, are not grounded in ethics. They are necessarily amoral because they examine the three arenas that together constitute each and every human life: the private, the political/historic and the artistic.
Over the course of his long and distinguished career as a playwright, poet and essayist, Hochhuth has time and again examined and reexamined these three arenas and their interrelationship. For example when examining the motives of the Pope during the Holocaust, or Churchill’s actions relating to the death of Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government in exile. His aphorisms are pointed and brilliantly succinct, yet they are also detailed discourses on human relationships, history and art; they are quintessential for his multi-faceted and engaging oeuvre.
