“It's an actor, boss. Unarmed”

Bertolt Brecht’s great anti-Fascist play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, was completed in 1941, in the last months of the playwright’s exile in Scandinavia and just before his move to the United States. This was a significant period in Brecht’s career. For many years he had been meditating upon the structure, staging techniques, and rhetoric of Elizabethan and Jacobean English theater, while at the same time developing a fascination, probably dating back to his New York visit of 1935, with the American gangster movies of Warner Brothers and First National. Indeed, as John Willet and Ralph Manheim have noted, Brecht had demonstrated an “obsession” with American settings for his poetry and plays as far back as the early 1920s, and was specifically drawn to the city of Chicago, the scene, together with neighboring “Cicero,” of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. ¹ With an eye, perhaps, on future American audiences, Brecht’s parable for the theater was developed from an earlier prose work set in classical Italy, a piece that Walter Benjamin described as a satire “on Hitler in the style of a Renaissance historian.” ² The new American setting provided a perfect structure of analogy for a play that traces the rise of a petty gangster, Arturo Ui, from street-corner bully to all-encompassing dictator. It is a fictional world of venal council members, dodgy businessmen, and a maleficent magistracy that managed to retain something of the Italian atmosphere of the original prose (since the gangsters are Italian Americans) while drawing upon the popular contemporary movie genre. The parallels are straightforward: Arturo Ui is Adolf Hitler, Chicago is Germany, Cicero is Austria, the “Cauliflower Trust” represents Junkers class of East Prussia, and the vegetable dealers are the petty bourgeoisie. Ui’s gang includes Giri (Göring), Roma (Röhm), and Giva (Goebbels). The play’s thematic and structural components are designed to reveal their derivative and intertextual bases. The gangster mob depends upon an audience’s recognition of the slang, dress, manners, and violence of Al Capone and other figures of contemporary legend, and the stylish cinematic interpretations that gave that legend a wide circulation in terms of popular culture.