Of the twelve passages they omitted, all but two run to less than one-and-a-half pages. The first exception is a period fantasy about a diplomat arriving in Prague to deliver a petition for peace and being forced to return with the message that it is to be war. The second is a draft treatment for a film (aborted before it could enter production) about a man who makes a pact with a "harlequin". Half Faust, half Graham Greene's "The Bomb Party", it charts a slide into tyranny and terror.

The German dramatist is the model of an engaged artist, as Frisch notes in Genoa in October 1946:

"A letter from a friend raises the question once again of whether it is the duty of any artistic enterprise to engage with the demands of the time. There is little doubt that it is our duty as citizens and human beings. But art, he writes, ought to rise above this. He may be right; but his decisively negative response to his own question is no less dangerous than a positive one. Bert Brecht gave the best answer I have so far heard to this nagging question:
‘What kind of times are they, when a talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors?!’"

When Frisch accuses German poetry of being antiquated, who is the exception?

"One of the very few people whose poems stand up to this scrutiny is Brecht. If this poem is to touch me, I must be neither ecstatic nor tired, which is what so many people regard as interiority. It remains a poem even if I read it aloud in the kitchen: with no candles, without a string quartet and oleander. It concerns me. And above all: I don’t need to forget something to take it seriously. It doesn’t require a particular mood; nor must it fear a different mood."

Brecht knows how to deliver his poetry too – matter-of-factly, as part of the real world.

"The way Brecht read this poem to us: timidly but naturally [...] showing the words as you show pebbles, fabric or other things that must speak for themselves; the behaviour of a man obliged to read out a text, while smoking his cigar, simply because not everyone has a copy; more or less as you would read out a letter: to inform people."

In 1948/9, when Brecht spends a year in Herrliberg, on Lake Zurich, between returning from exile in the United States and founding the Berliner Ensemble, Frisch sees him regularly. He feels a little intimidated by Brecht's intellect and preaching style. Yet unlike other interlocutors in whom Brecht seems disappointed, Frisch's architectural practice always gives him something concrete to fall back on. He provides the facts, Brecht the interpretations.

We also get to see Brecht in non-political, non-professional settings:

"Yesterday we went swimming together, the first time I’ve seen Brecht in natural surroundings, that is in an environment that cannot be changed and therefore interests him little. (‘And nature I looked at without patience. So passed my time which had been given to me on earth.’ ) So much needs to be changed that he has no time to praise the natural world. Like so much else about Brecht, this is a typical gesture, second nature of course, when he says nothing about nature. His only concern is whether we’re going to be caught in the looming thunderstorm or not. The lake is green, churned up by the wind, the sky purple and sulphur-yellow. Brecht, sporting his grey peaked cap as usual, leans against the slightly rotten wooden banister, smoking a cigar; it is the rottenness he notes: he cracks a joke about capitalism. Only when I’m already swimming does he go into the shed. There are flashes of lightning over the city, slanting plumes of rain drift in front of the distant hills, the birds dart around, the leaves of the tall beeches rustle, and dust is swirling on the road. A while later, I see Brecht get into the water, swim a few strokes and soon vanish back into the shed. His wife and I swim for a little longer in the urgent, splashing waves. By the time I step back onto land, Brecht is standing there in his grey jacket and grey cap again, praising the refreshment as he lights his next cigar.
‘You know,’ he says in a tone of voice that suggests we’ve interrupted our conversation barely long enough to catch our breath, ‘I think that’s absolutely right. The actor who plays Puntila must in no circumstances give the impression—’"

When Brecht visits the building site of the Letzigraben open-air swimming pool complex that the architect-playwright has designed in northern Zurich, Frisch notes:

"Brecht has an incredible eye, his intelligence a magnet for problems, teasing them out even from behind existing solutions. Explaining to him how, for instance, a diving platform came about, how the architectural form grew out of the structural engineering requirements; but not only grows: how it is incumbent on form not only to meet those requirements but also to present them to the eye—explaining this becomes an absolute pleasure, a shared pleasure. We tramp around for over two hours, up and down, in and out, round about; in addition, there is what inevitably separates the creator from the connoisseur—the fraternal aspect, the living consciousness born of experience: in the beginning there was nothing! . . . For example, when they see a drawing, connoisseurs hark back to Dürer or Rembrandt or Picasso; creators, whatever their field, are conscious of the blank sheet of paper."

There are also, as you hear in the streets, foreigners from all over the world. It is no accident that Zurich's coat of arms is blue and white; in the stark light of its föhn-fueled blue, which, adorned with the white of the gulls, is said to cause even the locals frequent headaches, this Zurich really does have a magic of its own, a "cachet" that is to be sought more in the air than anywhere else, simply a sparkle in the atmosphere, which stands in sharp contrast to the moping nature of the local physiognomy, and something out-and-out festive, something sonorous, something neat and tidy like its coat of arms, something blue and white with no conspicuous characteristics. It is, you might say, a town which derives its charm largely from the scenery, and at any rate you can understand the foreigners who get out on the embankment and take some pictures before they travel on to Italy, and you can understand the locals, who are proud when lots of pictures are taken. Its narrow lake, roughly the width of the Mississippi, curves glinting like a crooked scythe cutting through the green, undulating landscape. Even on weekdays, it is teeming with little sailing boats. Amid all the bustle, there is something spa-like about this Zurich, a traders' meeting place. The Alps are not as close as they are on the postcards, luckily; at a seemly distance they cap the swell of the foothills, a crowning surf of permanent white snow and bluish cloud."