The play lingered in the drawer until 1953, after Brecht had founded the Berliner Ensemble, and had produced there his major works. He showed the play around to a larger circle of people than had seen it previously, and this eventually led to the Berliner Ensemble's production – except that Brecht insisted that scenes from his "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich", a series of realistic short pieces about life in the Third Reich that was written around 1935 – needed to be produced first. His fear was that the German audience was still too close to their previous psychic connection to Hitler.