The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Written by	Bertolt Brecht
Date premiered	Stuttgart, West Germany, 1958
Original language	German
Subject	Adolf Hitler's rise to power
Genre	allegory, satire
Setting	Chicago, 1930s

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (German: Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui), subtitled "A parable play", is a 1941 play by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. It chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition. The play is a satirical allegory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany prior to World War II.

Fearing persecution and blacklisted from publication and production, Brecht – who in his poetry referred to Adolf Hitler as der Anstreicher ("the housepainter") – left Germany in February 1933, shortly after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg on the instigation of former Chancellor Franz von Papen. After moving around – Prague, Zürich, Paris – Brecht ended up in Denmark for six years. While there, c. 1934, he worked on the antecedent to The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a satire on Hitler called Ui, written in the style of a Renaissance historian. The result was a story about "Giacomo Ui", a machine politician in Padua, a work which Brecht never completed. It was later published with his collected short stories.

Brecht left Denmark in 1939, moving first to , and then, the next year, to Helsinki, Finland. He wrote the current play there in only three weeks in 1941, during the time he was waiting for a visa to enter the United States. The play was not produced on the stage until 1958, and not until 1961 in English. In spite of this, Brecht did not originally envision a version of the play in Germany, intending it all along for the American stage.

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