In the restaurant of a train station, somewhere in Europe during World War II, two political refugees, the proletarian Kalle and the bourgeois Tschiffel, meet almost by chance and discuss seemingly unrelated topics: Starting from the everyday reality of being a refugee, where beer is diluted, coffee is not really coffee, and tobacco is of poor quality, they end up analyzing important issues of politics and ethics, talking about passports, materialism, virtues, pornography, war, school, patriotism, and democracy.

In the Refugee Dialogues, Brecht uses personal experiences from his travels across Europe, where he found himself as a refugee fleeing from the Nazi regime, to expose the hypocrisy of the powerful towards the weak, employing satire in his militant anti-fascism.

The expanded themes of the Dialogues, as well as their approach from the perspective of two different worlds, the worker Kalle and the intellectual Tschiffel, form an inseparable whole, introducing Brecht to the reader as a thinker and a human being, revealing significant and largely unknown aspects of his life.