Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (34 page)

in between times i am making a
COPY OF MACBETH
for a film with lorre and reyher. the great Shakespearian motif, the fallibility of instinct (the lack of clarity in the inner voice) cannot be renewed, from it i take the little people’s defencelessness against the ruling moral code, which limits the criminal potential of their contribution.

driven on by his theatrical instinct,
LAUGHTON
plugs away relentlessly at the political elements in
GALILEI
too. at his behest i have worked in the new ‘ludovico-line’, and the same goes for the reordering of the last galileo scene (handing over the book first, then the lesson that the book must in no way alter the social condemnation of the author), laughton is fully prepared to throw his character to the wolves, he has a kind of lucifer in mind, in whom self-contempt has turned into a kind of hollow pride – pride in the
magnitude
of his crime etc. he insists on a full presentation of the degradation that results from the crime which has unleashed all g[alileo]’s negative features, all that is left is the excellent brain, functioning in the void independently of the control of its owner who is happy to let himself sink.

he brings this conception out most clearly one evening when they had shouted ‘
scab
’ at him as he went through a picket line in front of the studio, this wounded him deeply – no applause for him here.

[From the Methuen edition of the
Journals
, translated by Ralph Manheim and edited by John Willett, 1993. The first of these refers to the prewar version of the play, which had had its premiere seven months previously in Zurich (where Wilder had seen it). ‘I am given to understand’ – presumably by the accounts of that production. The collaboration with Laughton began at the end of 1944. The atom bombs were dropped on Japan on
6
and 9 August; the war ended five days later.]

The
Life of Galileo
was written in those last dark months of 1938, when many people felt fascism’s advance to be irresistible and the final collapse of Western civilisation to have arrived. And indeed we were approaching the end of that great age to which the world owes the development of the natural sciences, together with such new arts as music and the theatre. There was a more or less general expectation of a barbaric age ‘outside history’. Only a minority saw the evolution of new forces and sensed the vitality of the new ideas. Even the significance of expressions like ‘old’ and ‘new’ had been obscured. The doctrines of the socialist classics had lost the appeal of novelty, and seemed to belong to a vanished day.

The bourgeois single out science from the scientist’s consciousness, setting it up as an island of independence so as to be able in practice to interweave it with
their
politics,
their
economics,
their
ideology. The research scientist’s object is ‘pure’ research; the product of that research is not so pure. The formula
E = mc
²
is conceived of as eternal, not tied to anything. Hence other people can do the tying: suddenly the city of Hiroshima became very short-lived. The scientists are claiming the irresponsibility of machines.

Let us think back to the founding father of experimental science, Francis Bacon, whose phrase that one must obey nature in order to command her was not written in vain. His contemporaries obeyed his nature by bribing him with money, and so thoroughly commanded him when he was Lord Chief Justice that in the end Parliament had to lock him up. Macaulay, the puritan, drew a distinction between Bacon the scientist, whom he admired, and Bacon the politician, of whom he disapproved. Should we be doing the same thing with the German doctors of Nazi times?

Among other things, war promotes the sciences. What an opportunity! It creates discoverers as well as thieves. A higher responsibility (that of the higher ranks) replaces the lower (that for the lowly). Obedience is the midwife of arbitrariness. Disorder is perfectly in order. Those doctors who combatted yellow fever had to use themselves as guinea pigs; the fascist doctors had material supplied them. Justice played a part too; they had to freeze only ‘criminals’, in other words those who did not share their opinions. For their experiments in using ‘animal warmth’ as a means of thawing they were given prostitutes, women who had transgressed the rule of chastity. They
had served sin; now they were being allowed to serve science. It incidentally emerged that hot water restores life better than a woman’s body; in its small way it can do more for the fatherland. (Ethics must never be overlooked in war.) Progress all round. At the beginning of this century politicians of the lower classes were forced to treat the prisons as their universities. Now the prisons became universities for the warders (and doctors). Their experiments would of course have been perfectly in order – ‘from a scientific point of view’, that is – even if the state had been forced to exceed the ethical bounds. None the less the bourgeois world still has a certain right to be outraged. Even if it is only a matter of degrees it is a matter of degrees. When Generals von Mackensen and Maltzer were being tried in Rome for shooting hostages, the English prosecutor, a certain Colonel Halse, admitted that ‘reprisal killings’ in war were not illegal so long as the victims were taken from the scene of the incident in question, some attempt was made to find the persons responsible for it, and there were not too many executions. The German generals however had gone too far. They took ten Italians for every German soldier killed (not twenty, though, as demanded by Hitler), and dispatched the whole lot too quickly, within some twenty-four hours. The Italian police, by an oversight, handed over several Italians too many, and by another oversight the Germans shot them too, out of a misplaced reliance on the Italians. But here again they had ransacked the prisons for hostages, taking criminals or suspects awaiting trial, and filling the gaps with Jews. So a certain humanity asserted itself, and not merely in the errors of arithmetic. All the same, bounds were exceeded in this case, and something had to be done to punish the excess.

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.]

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.]

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.]

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, but 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.