The writer Bertolt Brecht wrote the poem Thoughts About the Duration of Exile in 1937 in the Danish town of Svendborg. Brecht by no means chose this place of exile by chance. He wanted to be close to Germany so that he could return immediately if the political climate changed. However, the fast return he desired was not to be. That is why, after four years in exile, Brecht increasingly had to consider the question of whether such hopes had any real basis. The constant waiting to move again was not a state that could be tenable for very long.

In Thoughts About the Duration of Exile, the narrator in the poem holds a kind of conversation with himself about the contradiction between the desire for the state of exile to end soon and the need to start to feel more at home in his current place of exile. In the first part of the poem, the narrator asks himself, why even bother to hit a nail into the wall, when he will be heading home soon anyway. In the second part, he admits that he ultimately has ended up hammering a nail into the wall.

Brecht dealt with the theme of exile in several poems. In 1937, he wrote in The Emigrants: “We sit there uneasily, as near the border as possible / Waiting for the day of return, watching the smallest change / Across the border [...].