Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  It can none the less be shown that, in this period when the bourgeoisie has gone completely to pieces, those pieces are still made of the same stuff as the original polished article.

  And so in the end the scientists get what they want: state resources, large-scale planning, authority over industry; their Golden Age has come. And their great production starts as the production of weapons of destruction; their planning leads to extreme anarchy, for they are arming the state against other states. As soon as he represents such a threat to the world, the people’s traditional contempt for the unworldly professor turns into naked fear. And just when he has wholly cut himself off from the people as the complete specialist, he is appalled to see himself once again as one of the people, because the threat applies to him too; he has reason to fear for his own life, and the best reason of anybody to know just how much. His protests, of which we have heard quite a number, refer not only to the attacks on his science, which is to be hampered, sterilised, and perverted, but also to the threat which his knowledge represents to the world, and also to the threat to himself.

  The Germans have just undergone one of those experiences that are so difficult to convert into usable conclusions. The leadership of the state had fallen to an ignorant person who associated himself with a gang of violent and ‘uneducated’ politicians to proclaim a vast war and utterly ruin the country. Shortly before the catastrophic end, and for some time after it, the blame was attributed to these people. They had conducted an almost total mobilisation of the intellectuals, providing every branch with trained manpower, and although they made a number of clumsy attempts to interfere, the catastrophe cannot be ascribed to clumsy interference alone. Not even the military and political strategy appears to have been all that wrong, while the courage of the army and of the civil population is beyond dispute. What won in the end was the enemy’s superiority in men and technology, something that had been brought into play by a series of almost unpredictable events.

  Many of those who see, or at any rate suspect, capitalism’s shortcomings are prepared to put up with them for the sake of the personal freedom which capitalism appears to guarantee. They believe in this freedom mainly because they scarcely ever make use of it. Under the scourge of Hitler they saw this freedom more or less abrogated; it was like a little nest-egg in the savings bank which could normally be drawn on at any time, though it was clearly more sensible not to touch it, but had now, as it were, been frozen – i.e., could not be drawn on, although it was still there. They regarded the Hitler period as abnormal; it was a matter of some warts on capitalism, or even of an anticapitalist movement. The latter was something that one could only believe if one accepted the Nazis’ own definition of capitalism, while as for the wart theory one was after all dealing with a system where warts flourished, and there was no question of the intellectuals being able to prevent them or make them go away. In either case freedom could only be restored by a catastrophe. And when the catastrophe came, not even that was able to restore freedom, not even that.

  Among the various descriptions of the poverty prevailing in denazified Germany was that of spiritual poverty. ‘What they want, what they’re waiting for, is a message,’ people said. ‘Didn’t they have one?’ I asked. ‘Look at the poverty,’ they said, ‘and at the lack of leadership.’ ‘Didn’t they have leadership enough?’ I asked, pointing to the poverty. ‘But they must have something to look forward to,’ they said. ‘Aren’t they tired of looking forward to such things?’ I asked. ‘I understand they lived quite a while on looking forward either to getting rid of their leader or to having him lay the world at their feet for them to pillage.’

  The hardest time to get along without knowledge is the time when knowledge is hardest to get. It is the condition of bottom-most poverty, where it seems possible to get along without knowledge. Nothing is calculable any longer, the measures went up in the fire, short-range objectives hide those in the distance, at that point chance decides.

  [From Werner Hecht (ed.), ibid., pp. 16 ff. These different items are given in the same order as there, though they appear to date from after the end of the Second World War and not, as there suggested, mainly from 1938–1939.]

  UNVARNISHED PICTURE OF A NEW AGE

  Preamble to the American Version

  When, during my first years in exile in Denmark, I wrote the play Life of Galileo, I was helped in the reconstruction of the Ptolemaic cosmology by assistants of Niels Bohr who were working on the problem of splitting the atom. My intention was, among others, to give an unvarnished picture of a new age – a strenuous undertaking since all those around me were convinced that our own era lacked every attribute of a new age. Nothing of this aspect had changed when, years later, I began together with Charles Laughton to prepare an American version of the play. The ‘atomic’ age made its debut at Hiroshima in the middle of our work. Overnight the biography of the founder of the new system of physics read differently. The infernal effect of the great bomb placed the conflict between Galileo and the authorities of his day in a new, sharper light. We had to make only a few alterations – not a single one to the structure of the play. Already in the original version the church was portrayed as a secular authority, its ideology as fundamentally interchangeable with many others. From the first, the keystone of the gigantic figure of Galileo was his conception of a science for the people. For hundreds of years and throughout the whole of Europe people had paid him the honour, in the Galileo legend, of not believing in his recantation, just as they had for long derided scientists as biased, unpractical and eunuch-like old fogeys. […]

  [Dated 1946. From Werner Hecht (ed.), ibid., pp. 10 ff. The rest of the note, here omitted, was incorporated in the Model Book.]

  SHOULD GALILEO BE LIKEABLE?

  I think you are right in saying that I should have defined Galileo’s progressiveness more closely. But he is not ‘for the peasants’ when he contradicts the physicist-monk and the landowner, he is against the subhuman conditions to which they are reduced. (In the last – I hope – version I have secured the end of the eighth scene against misinterpretations). Actually G does not simply advocate the free practice of his profession (which he recognises as a link in the ideological chain which holds down the peasants and the bourgeoisie, and which it is up to him to saw through). He saws rather cautiously. First, in Padua, he doesn’t so much as mention Copernicus; then he finds proofs and decides to make a career with them, goes to Florence, grovels before the prince and submits his proofs to the papal astronomer. His proofs are acknowledged but he is forbidden to draw inferences from them. For almost ten years he complies and is again silent. Then he relies on the liberal Pope (not on the people or the bourgeoisie) and when the Pope leaves him in the lurch he submits totally and publicly. While imprisoned, he collaborates shamelessly (in the play) and allows his main work to be stolen from him – meanwhile suffering violent stomach cramps. I really believe that the ‘attractive’ quality which irritates you is his vitality.

  [From Letter 528, to Stefan S. Brecht, translated by Ralph Manheim in Brecht: Letters 1913–1956 (Methuen, 1990). Brecht’s son had written to say that he found Galileo’s sympathy for the peasants historically improbable. He should not be presented as likeable. The letter dates from September or October 1946.]

  PRAISE OR CONDEMNATION OF GALILEO?

  It would be a great weakness in this work if those physicists were right who said to me – in a tone of approval – that Galileo’s recantation of his teachings was, despite one or two ‘waverings’, portrayed as being sensible, on the principle that this recantation enabled him to carry on with his scientific work and to hand it down to posterity. The fact is that Galileo enriched astronomy and physics by simultaneously robbing these sciences of a greater part of their social importance. By discrediting the Bible and the church, these sciences stood for a while at the barricades on behalf of all progress. It is true that a forward movement took place in the following centuries, and these sciences were involved in it, bu
t it was a slow movement, not a revolution; the scandal, so to speak, degenerated into a dispute between experts. The church, and with it all the forces of reaction, was able to bring off an organised retreat and more or less reassert its power. As far as these particular sciences were concerned, they never again regained their high position in society, neither did they ever again come into such close contact with the people.

  Galileo’s crime can be regarded as the ‘original sin’ of modern natural sciences. From the new astronomy, which deeply interested a new class – the bourgeoisie – since it gave an impetus to the revolutionary social current of the time, he made a sharply defined special science which – admittedly through its very ‘purity’, i.e., its indifference to modes of production – was able to develop comparatively undisturbed.

  The atom bomb is, both as a technical and as a social phenomenon, the classical end-product of his contribution to science and his failure to contribute to society.

  Thus the ‘hero’ of this work is not Galileo but the people, as Walter Benjamin has said. This seems to me to be rather too briefly expressed. I hope this work shows how society extorts from its individuals what it needs from them. The urge to research, a social phenomenon no less delightful or compulsive than the urge to reproduce, steers Galileo into that most dangerous territory, drives him into agonising conflict with his violent desires for other pleasures. He raises his telescope to the stars and delivers himself to the rack. In the end he indulges his science like a vice, secretly, and probably with pangs of conscience. Confronted with such a situation, one can scarcely wish only to praise or only to condemn Galileo.

  [Dated 1947. From Werner Hecht (ed.), ibid., pp. 12 f.]

  PROLOGUE TO THE AMERICAN PRODUCTION

  Respected public of the way called Broad-

  Tonight we invite you to step on board

  A world of curves and measurements, where you’ll descry

  The newborn physics in their infancy.

  Here you will see the life of the great Galileo Galilei,

  The law of falling bodies versus the GRATIAS DEI

  Science’s fight versus the rulers, which we stage

  At the beginning of a brand-new age.

  Here you’ll see science in its blooming youth

  Also its first compromises with the truth.

  It too must eat, and quickly gets prostrated

  Takes the wrong road, is violated –

  Once Nature’s master, now it is no more

  Than just another cheap commercial whore.

  The Good, so far, has not been turned to goods

  But already there’s something nasty in the woods

  Which cuts it off from reaching the majority

  So it won’t relieve, but aggravate their poverty.

  We think such sights are relevant today

  The new age is so quick to pass away.

  We hope you’ll lend a charitable ear

  To what we say, since otherwise we fear

  If you won’t learn from Galileo’s experience

  The Bomb might make a personal appearance.

  [From Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal, entry for 1 December 1945.]

  EPILOGUE OF THE SCIENTISTS

  And the lamp his work ignited

  We have tried to keep alight

  Stooping low, and yet high-minded

  Unrestrained, yet laced up tight.

  Making moon and stars obey us

  Grovelling at our rulers’ feet

  We sell our brains for what they’ll pay us

  To satisfy our bodies’ need.

  So, despised by those above us

  Ridiculed by those below

  We have found out the laws that move us

  Keep this planet on the go.

  Knowledge grows too large for nitwits

  Servitude expands as well

  Truth becomes so many titbits

  Liberators give us hell.

  Riding in new railway coaches

  To the new ships on the waves

  Who is it that now approaches?

  Only slave-owners and slaves.

  Only slaves and slave-owners

  Leave the trains

  Taking new aeroplanes

  Through the heaven’s age-old blueness.

  Till the last device arrives

  Astronomic

  White, atomic

  Obliterating all our lives.

  [From Werner Hecht (ed.), ibid., pp. 38 f.]

  NOTES ON INDIVIDUAL SCENES

  [Scene 11]

  Could Galileo have acted any differently?

  This scene gives ample reasons for Galileo’s hesitation about escaping from Florence and seeking asylum in the North Italian cities. None the less the audience can imagine him putting himself in the hands of Matti the ironfounder, and discover various tendencies in his character and situation which would support this.

  The actor Laughton showed Galileo in a state of great inner agitation during his talk with the ironfounder. He played it as a moment of decision – the wrong one. (Connoisseurs of dialectics will find Galileo’s possibilities further clarified in the ensuing scene ‘The Pope’, where the inquisitor insists that Galileo must be forced to recant his theory because the Italian maritime cities need his star charts, which derive from it and of which it would not be possible to deprive them.)

  An objectivist approach is not permissible here.*

  [Scene 14]

  Galileo after his recantation

  His crime has made a criminal of him. When he reflects on the scale of his crime he is pleased with himself. He defends himself against the outside world’s impertinent expectations of its geniuses. What has Andrea done to oppose the Inquisition? Galileo applies his intellect to solving the problems of the clergy, which these blockheads have overlooked. His mind functions automatically, like a motor in neutral. His appetite for knowledge feels to him like the impetus that makes him twitch. Scholarly activity, for him, is a sin: mortally dangerous, but impossible to do without. He has a fanatical hatred for humanity. Andrea’s readiness to revise his damning verdict as soon as he sees the book means that he has been corrupted. As to a lame and starving wolf, Galileo tosses him a crust, the logical scientific analysis of the Galileo phenomenon. Behind this lies his rejection of the moral demands of a humanity which does nothing to relieve the deadliness of that morality and those demands.

  […]

  Once Galileo knows that his book has set out on its journey towards publication he changes his attitude again. He proposes that the book should be prefaced by an introduction sharply condemning the author’s treachery. Andrea passionately refuses to pass on such a request, pointing out that everything is different now; that Galileo’s recantation gave him the chance to finish this immensely significant work. What needs to be altered is the popular concept of heroism, ethical precepts and so on. The one thing that counts is one’s contribution to science, and so forth.

  At first Galileo listens in silence to Andrea’s speech, which builds a golden bridge for his return to the esteem of his fellow scientists, then contemptuously and cuttingly contradicts him, accusing Andrea of squalidly recanting every principle of science. Starting with a denunciation of ‘bad thinking’ which seems designed as a brilliant demonstration of how the trained scientist ought to analyse a case like his own, he proves to Andrea that no achievement is valuable enough to make up for the damage caused by a betrayal of mankind.

  Galileo’s portrayal in scene 14

  The fact that the author is known to all and sundry as an opponent of the church might lead a theatre to give the play’s performance a primarily anticlerical slant. The church, however, is mainly being treated here as a secular establishment. Its specific ideology is being looked at in the light of its function as a prop to practical rule. The old cardinal (in scene 6) can be turned into a Tory or a Louisiana Democrat without much adjustment. Galileo’s illusions concerning a ‘scientist in the chair of St. Peter’ have more than one para
llel in contemporary history, and these are scarcely related to the church. In scene 13 Galileo is not returning ‘to the bosom of the church’; as we know, he never left it. He is simply trying to make his peace with those in power. One can judge his demoralisation by his social attitude; he buys his comfort (even his scientific activity having degenerated to the status of a comfort) by means of hackwork, unashamedly prostituting his intellect. (His use of clerical quotations is thus sheer blasphemy.) On no account should the actor make use of his self-analysis to endear the hero to the audience by his self-reproaches. All it does is to show that his brain is unimpaired, never mind what area he directs it to. Andrea Sarti’s final remark in no sense represents the playwright’s own view of Galileo, merely his opinion of Andrea Sarti. The playwright was not out to have the last word.