It Is hardly surprising that the play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) by the young German author Rolf Hochhuth should have aroused controversy ever since its first performance in February, 1963, in Berlin. For it aims to depict not merely historical characters in a fictional drama, but historical characters in a historical setting of almost unprecedented significance and consequence. The use of the drama as a vehicle for political attack is nothing new; but it is rare for the author to append, in the published version of his text, a historical essay of forty pages, seeking to give the evidence upon which his drama is based. Nor is it surprising that so pejorative is the portrayal in the play of the late Pope Pius XII that many of those who served under him during the nineteen years of his pontificate, as well as many others who came in touch with him through his literally thousands of private or public audiences, have sought to come to his defense, in challenging the historical accuracy of Hochhuth's portrayal.

Although the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) did not officially abandon Marxism until the Bad Godesberg Parteitag in 1959, both intellectually and politically the party's ideology was revised under the leadership of Kurt Schumacher whose “passion, intellect, and will” dominated the SPD for seven years following World War II (1945–52). The final disintegration of German Marxism under Kurt Schumacher can be demonstrated by examining the three crucial elements of Marxist socialist ideology: (1) motivation for socialism, (2) theory of the socialist movement, and (3) relations between German nationalism and socialism.

THE last decade has seen the proliferation of organizations and institutions which have broadened the scope of social communication between African peoples. The sophistication of a broad African perspective, which tended to be a monopoly of top-level leadership, is now permeating the lower strata of African society. Previously, consciousness of a common African destiny had to be induced by the elite, but in recent times the masses have become sensitive enough to events in the continent to cause anxiety to leaders whose performances have to be constantly compared. This nascent psychological unity is standardizing expectations throughout the continent. Thus events in one part of the continent tend to echo in another. Following the alleged plot against Houphouet-Boigny's regime, the Ivory Coast National Assembly passed a law on January 17, 1963, authorizing the government to impress into public service anyone whose activities it considered detrimental to national security. Anticipating a similar plot the legislature of the Upper Volta passed a law on January 29 creating a High Court of State to deal with offenses against the state committed by deputies, ministers, and other officials and also empowered the government to impress any person into forced labor in the national interest. Colonel David Thompson, the leader of the abortive coup d'état in Liberia, was reported to have argued that there was no reason why 5,000 Liberian soldiers could not capture a government if 250 Togolese soldiers succeeded. The recent crop of mutinies in East Africa centered around the common theme of Africanization and the improvement of the service conditions of the army.

THANKS to Richard Ellmann's definitive biography of James Joyce we know quite a lot about the genesis and writing of ‘The Dead,’ the concluding story in Dubliners. Joyce wrote no other short stories after it, but in a letter (January 6, 1907) to his brother Stanislaus, from Rome, in which he first referred to ‘The Dead,’ he mentioned it as one of five stories “all of which … I could write if circumstances were favorable.” The others, which seem not to have been attempted were ‘The Last Supper,’ ‘The Street,’ ‘Vengeance,’ and ‘At Bay.’ It must have been immediately thereafter that ‘The Dead’ took precedence in his thought, for in a letter written only five days later he remarked that the news of the controversy in Dublin over The Playboy of the Western World had “put me off the story I ‘was going to write’ — to wit, The Dead.” Shortly afterwards he decided to give up his job as a bank cashier in Rome and return to Trieste, which on March 5, 1907, he did. Apparently he worked at the story intermittently in the ensuing months.