Interesting short plays, would love to see this in action. It feels as if I am watching actions unfold ( )

Nelle ventitre scene drammatiche di questa pièce del 1938, Brecht si limita a registrare episodi “tipici del terrore e della miseria del terzo Reich”. Anche dalle più viete parole quotidiane si sprigiona una feroce condanna o un senso di sconfinata desolazione. “Dal fondo dell’abisso sale un monito di fermezza; – come nota Emilio Castellani – ma è una voce isolata. Le scene non sono che documenti di disfatta. Alcune – le più – a carattere di flash, di rapidi scorci con effetti luministici di varia intensità (feroci, agghiaccianti, squallidi); altre più diffuse e discorsive, a volte persino verbose, come si conviene alla borghesia medio-piccola nelle sue varie sfaccettature sociologiche, che è lo strato sociale predominante. Intellettuali, scienziati, medici, giudici come operai qualificati, bottegai, domestici, soldati: la paura contagia tutti, colpisce ovunque”. (fonte: Einaudi)

More a series of vignettes than an actual play with a beginning, middle, and end. Characters appear, and disappear again after sometimes as little as a half page of dialogue. Brecht was cataloging history as it happened; he was dramatizing what he was seeing as the world rushed into World War II, and Germany reeled under a tyrannical government, where parents were scared their own children would turn them in if they so much as grumbled about high food prices. Not as powerful from a storytelling standpoint as much of Brecht's work, but the reality grounded behind this one gives it oomph. The play stops with the invasion of Vienna, and so never deals with what most people think about when they think about World War II - the Final Solution and the Holocaust. Still, it does deal at least somewhat with the hatred of Jews, though the spectre of communism, and the hatred of the National Socialists for communists, was the biggest thread. An interesting bit of historical drama, with the strength of anger and pain driving the narrative. ( )

A true masterpiece of German literature. ( )