Bertolt Brecht wrote
Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui[
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui] in 1941 in the midst of the Second World War while in exile in Finland waiting for a visa to escape Europe.
Arturo Ui, like Brecht’s earlier plays,
In the Jungle of Cities(1923),
Happy End(1929), and
Saint Joan of the Stockyard(1929), is set in Chicago in the 1920s. The play tells the story of how Chicago mob boss Arturo Ui and his gang of vegetable traders from the Cauliflower Trust gain control of Chicago’s vegetable trade by means of bribery, threats, mayhem, and murder. While parodying Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by equating the National Socialists to gangsters, Brecht employs a Marxist interpretation of the economic factors leading to the Nazi domination of Germany in 1933.…
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Citation: Climenhaga, Lily, Piet Defraeye. "Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 February 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=19396, accessed 31 October 2024.]
