Bertolt Brecht wrote this parable about Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists coming to power while in exile in Finland in 1941. "Arturo Ui" became one of the most famous and biting satires about a political tyrant.
How do we grasp the almost incomprehensible: the contradiction of a mass-supported rise of monstrous-looking perpetrators? Artists such as Brecht, Tabori, Chaplin and Lubitsch have struggled with this depiction. Perpetrators as strategists in a complicated matrix of power? Demagogues or ultimately just crude clowns with a talent for inspiring the masses? Brecht set his parable in the US gangster milieu, an "attempt to explain the rise of Hitler to the capitalist world by placing him in a milieu familiar to it".
The city of Chicago after the stock market crash: one crisis follows the next, and where do you save first when inflation hits? Vegetables. Even the usually popular cauliflower is no longer available. Chicago's greengrocers are in despair. Yesterday they were famous and firmly convinced that they were one of the world's leading cauliflower traders, today they are already bankrupt.
One man's sorrow is another man's joy - that's what Chicago gangster boss Arturo Ui senses. He knows that even people's greatest misery can be capitalized on and offers to boost the vegetable trade by threatening the population with violence. Instead of going along with Arturo's rotten deal, the fine gentlemen of the cauliflower forge their own political intrigue.
Premiere October 13, 2023
Further performances: October 20, November 4, December 3 and 27, 2023, February 9, March 14 and 28, April 18 and May 3, 2024
