BRECHT'S JOURNAL FOR 12 February 1939, recording how productive he had recently been, ends with the words: “Viel Theorie in Dialogform Der Messingkauf” (GBA, 26:327). Weeks, even months earlier, most probably shortly after the completion of Leben des Galilei in November 1938, Brecht had sketched out a series of dialogue fragments. He would continue to return to the Messingkauf project for more than a decade and a half. In the early 1950s, a fresh burst of activity augured well after a series of stops and starts. Among the pre-published results were a number of significant pieces, including the “Übungsstücke für Schauspieler” in Versuche 11 (1951), a miscellany of “Reden” and poems for Theaterarbeit (1952), and a small collection of “Gedichte aus dem Messingkauf,” published in Versuche 14 (1955). As late as 1956, the year of his death, Brecht had not totally abandoned work on Der Messingkauf. The project of a civilized exchange of ideas about theater and society and different ways of depicting the world had been started in the dark days of the Soviet purges and the Moscow “Expressionismusdebatte” (conducted by Lukács, Gábor, and various other orthodox leftwing Kulturpolitiker on the editorial board of the journal Das Wort), which was hardly a debate at all as the one side subjected the other, in the person of Brecht himself, a fellow editor of Das Wort, to a campaign of personal vilification, but without ever mentioning him by name.