After 1933, on a scale hitherto largely unreflected in literary research, German exiles engaged with the phenomenon of National Socialist anti-Semitism. This engagement ranged from the collection of documents to the 'dialectics of enlightenment'. The study reconstructs this historical discourse with special reference to the way it is reflected in the Zeitstück genre (topical dramas on pressing contemporary issues). In the process it inquires into the extent to which the dramatic genre imposes formal aesthetic constraints that involve a restriction of theoretical interest in anti-Semitism to a small number of constantly recurring motifs.