TEHRAN – Da Theater Hall in Tehran is hosting Bertolt Brecht's “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich” on its stage.

Directed by Alireza Akhavan, the one-hour play has Sanaz Aghaei, Bahador Bastanhagh, Saeed Parsa, Farshid Pourimani, Maral Jamalpanah, Mohammad Soltani, Nazanin Alimardani, Hamed Faal, Yasna Fallah, Hosna Fallah, Arman Karimkhani, Negar Niknami, and Saeed Yaghoubi in the cast.

Also known as “The Private Life of the Master Race,” it is one of Brecht's most famous plays and the first of his openly anti-Nazi works.

The play consists of a series of playlets, portraying National Socialist Germany of the 1930s as a land of poverty, violence, fear, and pretense. Nazi antisemitism is depicted in several of the sketches, including “The Physicist,” “Judicial Process,” and “The Jewish Wife”.

It was followed by many more plays that were openly anti-Nazi and attempted a Marxist analysis. They were written while Brecht was in exile in Denmark and were inspired by a visit to Moscow, where he experienced the growing significance of the anti-Nazi movement there.

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1898-1956), known as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theater practitioner, playwright, and poet, whose epic theater departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Brecht fled his home country, initially to Scandinavia. During World War II, he moved to Southern California, where he established himself as a screenwriter.

Brecht began writing “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich” in 1933, when he fled Germany for Denmark. Outraged by the rise of the Nazi dictatorship in his homeland and all too aware of the character of Hitler's regime, he set out to create a work that portrayed the fear, repression, and violence of life in Nazi Germany.

Consisting of 27 dramatic sketches (which Brecht believed could be performed individually or together), the work documents the lives of everyday men and women and the misery they experienced under the Third Reich.

Da Theater Hall will stage the play through August 15. It is located at No. 5, the first dead-end, Khark Street, Enqelab Street.

SS/SAB