A liquidity crisis in the American financial sector. Stock-markets plunge. A bankrupt business consortium extorts a big dirty bailout from City Hall as ordinary people lose their jobs. Into this panicked democracy steps the gangster and demagogue Arturo Ui. Offering strong protection for a frightened city - with a reign of armed terror.
Bertolt Brecht's most detailed dramatic analysis of the economic and psychological roots of fascism and society's easy, although never inevitable, acquiescence to it.