WRITING IN MARCH 1938 to Wieland Herzfelde of the Malik-Verlag, an influential left-wing German publisher by then in exile in Prague, Bertolt Brecht made the first of a series of pleas for expediting the publication of his Gedichte im Exil (Poems Written in Exile) and a new play with the working-title Deutschland — Ein Greuelmärchen (Germany — an Atrocity Story). It was not by chance that one of these two literary exposés of the ugly reality of Hitler's Third Reich was a cycle of mainly satirical poems and the other a series of dramatized illustrations of life during the first five years of National Socialist rule. Satirical poetry and political drama were by this time the two genres Brecht tended to favor for his orchestrated campaign of attacks on the ruthless dictatorial regime that had driven numerous German writers and intellectuals into exile and was now threatening many of the country's European neighbors. What made Brecht's new antifascist play exceptional was the fact that the method of attack had now changed. Deutschland — Ein Greuelmärchen (later to bear the title Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches) was neither an austerely didactic play (Lehrstäck) in the manner of Brecht's early political theater nor was it a piece of Epic Theater making its propaganda points via a series of often contrived “anti-illusionistic” illustrations. In generic terms, it occupied a unique position among Brecht's antifascist works by virtue of its subtle combination of documented source material, a series of fictive, yet plausibly realistic, incidents, and a framework designed to embrace both Epic and Aristotelian elements.