Brecht left Germany in February 1933, shortly after Hitler became Chancellor and right around the time of the Reichstag fire decree. He traveled extensively, staying with friends in Denmark, Sweden and Finland for long stretches. It was during this period that he wrote some of his most widely performed plays: Life of Galileo, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Person of Schezwan, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
Brecht wrote Arturo Ui in three weeks in 1941, with Germany quickly expanding across Europe and coming ever closer to Scandinavia. At the time, he was waiting for a visa to live in the United States. (Before the end of that year, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S.) |
Some notable gangster movies of the period came from Warner Brothers, such as Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Bullets or Ballots (1936), and The Roaring Twenties (1939), which all star Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney. These movies in particular have roughly the trajectory Brecht aims for: the meteoric rise of a gangster and his subsequent fall. Of course, in 1941 Hitler’s fall was nowhere in sight — and note that the play’s last event, the annexation of Cicero, corresponds to the 1938 annexation of Austria three years before Brecht’s writing. The protagonists of each of these films starts out new to Chicago and the world of crime ("Chicago, I’ll lick you yet!"), and they rise quickly and alarmingly while a best friend character and a cursory blonde love interest look on. To satisfy the moral sensibilities of pre-Code censors, these gangsters experienced some anti-hero angst before finally dying at the end as a sort of cautionary tale.
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The similarities between this kind of terror and plain gangsterism are too obvious to be pointed out. This does not mean that Nazism was gangsterism, as has sometimes been concluded, but only that the Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity.
"Ui is a parable play, written with the aim of destroying the dangerous respect commonly felt for great killers. The circle described has been deliberately restricted; it is confined to the plane of state, industrialists, Junkers and petty bourgeois. This is enough to achieve the desired objective. The play does not pretend to give a complete account of the historical situation in the 1930s."
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Here's a 7th & Jordan blog post of even more recommendations, compiled by our own Ernie Roma (1st year MFA Ellise Chase)!
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