Dr. Barbara Waldinger will lead discussion and analysis of two plays. The first two sessions of the class will focus on Bertoit Brecht's "The Private Life of the Master Race," the first of Brecht's anti-Nazi works. It premiered in Paris in 1938, during Brecht's exile from Germany. We will be reading several of the short plays contained within this depiction of life in 1930s Germany under National Socialism.
In the second half of the course, we will read and discuss Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen," which premiered in London in 1998, on Broadway in 2000, and became a BBC film in 2002. Based on a 1941 meeting in Copenhagen between the Nobel Prize - winning physicists Niels Bohr (a danish Jew) and Werner Heisenberg (a German), this play takes place after their deaths as their spirits (and that of Bohrs wife, Margrethe) come to grips with what happened at that meeting and its influence on the development of the atom bomb.
(Copies of both plays will be provided.)
Cost is $40 for members (all 4 sessions); $45 for not-yet-members (all 4 sessions); or $15 per session