Bertolt Brecht’s treatise Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth was published in April 1935 in the journal Unsere Zeit which appeared in Paris, Basel and Prague. One part of the edition was distributed in Germany as a covert text under the title Statute of the Reich Association of German Writers, the approved writers’ association in Germany.

Brecht’s text revisits the theme of his article Writers Should Write the Truth which appeared in the Pariser Tageblatt on 12 December 1934. It was his response to a survey in which the newspaper queried the contemporary mission of the writer. In January 1935 he sent an expanded manuscript to his colleague Johannes R. Becher, who encouraged the idea of a special edition. In listing the difficulties of knowing who to trust with illegal writings, Brecht referenced, at times verbatim, Georg Büchner’s Hessian Courier which was written exactly 100 years prior. It, too, had been illegally distributed. With the phoney title of the text Brecht appealed to the writers who had stayed in Germany but didn’t want to submit to Nazism. In the same vein, Practical Guide to First Aid was another title used.

Brecht met the photographer Ellen Auerbach in summer 1936 in England. Auerbach had just returned from her first place of exile, Palestine, and for a brief period she maintained a studio in London, before emigrating to the USA.