About the work
In the Jungle of Cities is an early play by Bertolt Brecht, premiered in Munich in 1923. It is among his most enigmatic and linguistically powerful works and is set in an expressionistically estranged, mythical Chicago.
Plot
In a feverishly imagined Chicago, the Malay timber dealer Shlink begins a mysterious, seemingly motiveless "fight" with the young lending-library clerk George Garga. With no discernible material motive, Shlink drives the conflict forward, ruining Garga and himself, and seeks in pure enmity a last form of human closeness and contact. The play refuses a clear narrative logic and circles loneliness, alienation, and the impossibility of genuine communication in the modern metropolis.
Cultural significance
In the Jungle of Cities is Brecht's darkest early work and is regarded as his "metaphysical" play about the existential isolation of the human being. The famous prefatory note urges the audience not to concern themselves with the motives of the fight but to judge the fight itself. The work fascinates through its powerful, Rimbaud-influenced language and is read as a precursor of the theatre of the absurd.