Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (33 page)

It staggers to its feet again.

It is well known how beneficially people can be influenced by the conviction that they are poised on the threshold of a new age. At such a moment their environment appears to be still entirely unfinished, capable of the happiest improvements, full of dreamt-of and undreamt-of possibilities, like malleable raw material in their hands. They themselves feel as if they have awakened to a new day, rested, strong, resourceful. Old beliefs are dismissed as superstitions, what yesterday seemed a matter of course is today subject to fresh examination. We have been ruled, says mankind, but now we shall be the rulers.

Around the turn of this century no other line from a song so powerfully inspired the workers as the line: ‘Now a new age is dawning’; old and young marched to it, the poorest, the down-and-outs and those who had already won something of civilisation for themselves – all felt young. Under a house painter the unprecedented seductive power of these selfsame words was also tried and proved; for he too promised a new age. Here the words revealed their emptiness and vagueness. Their strength lay in their very indefiniteness, which was now being exploited in demoralising the masses. The new age – that was something and is something that affects everything, leaves nothing unchanged, but is also still only unfolding its character gradually; something in which all imagination has scope to flower, and which is only restricted by too precise description. Glorious is the feeling of beginning, of pioneering; the fact of being a beginner inspires enthusiasm. Glorious is the feeling of happiness in those who oil a new machine before it is to display its strength, in those who fill in a blank space on an old map, in those who dig the foundation of a new house, their house.

This feeling comes to the researcher who makes a discovery that will change everything, to the orator who prepares a speech that will create an entirely new situation. Terrible is the disappointment when men
discover, or think they discover, that they have fallen victims to an illusion, that the old is stronger than the new, that the ‘facts’ are against them and not for them, that their age – the new age – has not yet arrived. Then things are not merely as bad as before, but much worse because people have made immense sacrifices for their schemes and have lost everything; they have ventured and are now defeated; the old is taking its revenge on them. The researcher or the discoverer – an unknown but also unpersecuted man before he has published his discovery – when once his discovery has been disproved or discredited is a swindler and a charlatan, and all too well known; the victim of oppression and exploitation, when once his insurrection has been crushed, is a rebel who is subject to special repression and punishment. Exertion is followed by exhaustion, possibly exaggerated hope by possibly exaggerated hopelessness. Those who do not relapse into indifference and apathy fall into worse; those who have not sacrificed their energies for their ideals now turn those selfsame energies against those very ideals. There is no more remorseless reactionary than a frustrated innovator, no crueller enemy of the wild elephant than the tame elephant.

And yet these disappointed men may still go on existing in a new age, an age of great upheaval. Only, they know nothing of new ages.

In these days the conception of the new is itself falsified. The Old and the Very Old, now re-entering the arena, proclaim themselves as new, or else it is held to be new when the Old or the Very Old are put over in a new way. But the really New, having been deposed today, is declared old-fashioned, degraded to being a transitory phase whose day is done. ‘New’ for example is the system of waging wars, whereas ‘old’, so they say, is a system of economy, proposed but never put into practice, which makes wars superfluous. In the new system, society is being entrenched in classes; while old, so they say, is the desire to abolish classes. The hopes of mankind do not so much become discouraged in these times; rather, they become diverted. Men had hoped that one day there would be bread to eat. Now they may hope that one day there will be stones.

Amid the darkness gathering fast over a fevered world, a world surrounded by bloody deeds and no less bloody thoughts, by increasing barbarism which seems to be leading irresistibly to perhaps the greatest and most terrible war of all time, it is difficult to adopt an attitude appropriate to people on the threshold of a new and happier age. Does not everything point to night’s arrival and nothing to the
dawning of a new age? So shouldn’t one, therefore, assume an attitude appropriate to people heading towards the night?

What is this talk of a ‘new age’? Is not this expression itself obsolete? When it is shouted at us, it is bellowed from hoarse throats. Now indeed, it is mere barbarism which impersonates the new age. It says of itself that it hopes it will last a thousand years.

So should one hold fast to the old times? Should one discuss sunken Atlantis?

Am I already lying down for the night and thinking, when I think of the morning, of the one that has passed, in order to avoid thinking of the one to come? Is that why I occupy myself with that epoch of the flowering of the arts and sciences three hundred years ago? I hope not.

These images of the morning and the night are misleading. Happy times do not come in the same way as a morning follows a night’s sleep.

[Dated 1939; not revised by Brecht. From Werner Hecht (ed.):
Materialien zu Brecbts ‘Leben des Galilei
’, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1968, pp. 7 ff.]

So, from the point of view of the theatre, the question will arise whether the
Life of Galileo
is to be presented as a tragedy or as an optimistic play. Is the keynote to be found in Galileo’s ‘Salutation to the New Age’ in scene 1 or in certain parts of scene 14? According to the prevailing rules of play construction, the end of a drama must carry the greater weight. But this play is not constructed according to these rules. The play shows the dawn of a new age and tries to correct some of the prejudices about the dawn of a new age.

[Dated 1939. From Werner Hecht (ed.),
ibid
., p. 13.]

PORTRAYAL OF THE CHURCH

For the theatre it is important to understand that this play must lose a great part of its effect if its performance is directed chiefly against the Roman Catholic Church.

Of the dramatis personae, many wear the church’s garb. Actors who, because of that, try to portray these characters as odious would be doing wrong. But neither, on the other hand, has the church the right to have the human weaknesses of its members glossed over. It has
all too often encouraged these weaknesses and suppressed their exposure. But in this play there is also no question of the church being admonished: ‘Hands off science!’ Modern science is a legitimate daughter of the church, a daughter who has emancipated herself and turned against the mother.

In the present play the church functions, even when it opposes free investigation, simply as authority.

Since science was a branch of theology, the church is the intellectual authority, the ultimate scientific court of appeal. The play shows the temporary victory of authority, not the victory of the priesthood. It corresponds to the historical truth in that the Galileo of the play never turns directly against the church. There is not a sentence uttered by Galileo in that sense. If there had been, such a thorough commission of investigation as the Inquisition would undoubtedly have brought it to light. And it equally corresponds to the historical truth that the greatest astronomer of the Papal Roman College, Christopher Clavius, confirmed Galileo’s discoveries (scene 6). It is also true that clerics were among his pupils (scenes 8, 9 and 13).

To take satirical aim at the worldly interests of high dignitaries seems to me cheap (it would be in scene 7). But the casual way in which these high officials treat the physicist is only meant to show that, by reason of their past experiences, they think they can count on ready complaisance from Galileo. They are not mistaken.

When one looks at our bourgeois politicians, one cannot but extol the spiritual (and scientific) interests of those politicians of old.

The play, therefore, ignores the falsifications made to the protocol of 1616 by the Inquisition of 1633, falsifications established by recent historical studies under the direction of the German scholar Emil Wohlwill. Doubtless the judgment and sentence of 1633 were thereby made juridically possible. Anybody who understands the point of view outlined above will appreciate that the author was not concerned with this legal side of the trial.

There is no doubt that Urban VIII was personally incensed at Galileo and, in the most detestable manner, played a personal part in the proceedings against him. The play passes this over.

Anyone who understands the standpoint of the author will realise that this attitude implies no reverence for the church of the seventeenth, let alone of the twentieth century.

Casting the church as the embodiment of authority in this theatrical trial of the persecutors of the champions of free research certainly does not help to get the church acquitted. But it would be highly dangerous, particularly nowadays, to treat a matter like Galileo’s fight for
freedom of research as a religious one; for thereby attention would be most unhappily deflected from present-day reactionary authorities of a totally unecclesiastical kind.

[Dated 1939. From Werner Hecht (ed.),
ibid
., pp. 14 f.]

[…] It’s important that you shouldn’t idealise Galileo: You know the kind of thing – the stargazer, the pallid intellectualised idealist. I know you wouldn’t if left to yourself, but the pictures you’ll see in the books are already idealised. My Galileo is a powerful physicist with a tummy on him, a face like Socrates, a vociferous, full-blooded man with a sense of humour, the new type of physicist, earthly, a great teacher. Favourite attitude: stomach thrust forward, both hands on the buttocks, head back, using one meaty hand all the time to gesticulate with, but with precision; comfortable trousers for working in, shirtsleeves or (particularly at the end) a long whitish-yellow robe with broad sleeves, tied with a cord round his stomach. You get the idea – preferably an etching of this figure or some kind of steel engraving or wood engraving to maintain its historical flavour: in other words, realistic. Or for that matter one could have pen drawings standing freely on the page. Don’t be scared of a bit of humour. History without humour is a ghastly thing …

N.B
. As far as I know, Galileo’s telescope was about two and a half feet long and the thickness of a man’s arm. You can stand it on an ordinary tripod. The model of the Ptolemaic system (in scene 1) is of wood, some twenty inches in diameter. You could probably get a rough idea from the keeper of the planetarium.

Galileo of course is not a Falstaff: He insists on his physical pleasures because of his materialist convictions. He wouldn’t, for instance, drink at his work; the point is that he
works
in a sensual way. He gets pleasure from handling his instruments with elegance. A great part of his sensuality is of an intellectual kind: for instance, the ‘beauty’ of an experiment, the little theatrical performance with which he gives shape to each of his lessons, the often abrupt way in which he will confront somebody with the truth, not to mention those passages
in his speeches (in 1, 7, 13) where he picks good words and tests them like a spice. (This has nothing to do with that bel canto of the actor who may produce his arias as if he enjoyed them, but fails to show the enjoyment of the character he is playing.)

What gives this new historical character his quality of strangeness, novelty, strikingness, is the fact that he, Galileo, looks at the world of 1600 around him as if he himself were a stranger. He studies this world and finds it remarkable, outdated, in need of explanation. He studies:

in scene 1, Ludovico Marsili and Priuli

in scene 2, the way in which the senators look though the telescope (When am I going to be able to buy one of these things?)

in scene 3, Sagredo (the prince being a child of nine)

in scene 4, the court scholars

in scene 5, the monks

in scene 7, the young monk

in scene 8, Federzoni and Ludovico

in scene [11], (for just one second) Virginia

in scene [13], his pupils

in scene [14], Andrea and Virginia.

[From Werner Hecht (ed.),
ibid
. pp. 27 f. The first section comes from a letter from Brecht to the painter Hans Tombrock in March 1941, and refers to the first version of the play, which Tombrock illustrated for a proposed publication in the USSR which never materialised. The second and third are undated, but appear to refer to the second, American version.]

the atom bomb, in which atomic energy makes a timely first appearance, strikes ‘normal folk’ as simply awful, to those impatiently awaiting their sons and husbands, the victory in japan seems to have a bitter taste, this superfart is louder than all the victory bells.

(for a moment
LAUGHTON
fears quite naively that science might be
so utterly discredited by it, that the birth of science – in
GALILEO
– could lose all sympathy, ‘
the wrong kind of publicity, old man.’)

most of the time we are still working on
GALILEO
, which laughton’s audience in the military hospital listen to with quite extraordinary interest, the atom bomb has, in fact, made the relationship between society and science into a life-and-death-problem.