Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 5

by Bertolt Brecht

  The Analysis

  Galileo’s great counterattack against the golden bridge opens with a scornful outburst that abandons all grandeur: ‘Welcome to my gutter, dear colleague in science and brother in treason! I sold out, you are a buyer.’ This is one of the few passages which gave L. trouble. He doubted whether the spectator would get the meaning of the words, apart from the fact that the words are not taken from Galileo’s usual, purely logical vocabulary. L. could not accept the playwright’s argument that there must be some gest simply showing how the opportunist damns himself by damning all who accept the rewards of opportunism; what he understood even less was that the playwright would be quite satisfied with the exhibition of a state of mind that defies rational analysis. The omission of a spiteful and strained grin at this point robbed the opening of the great instructional speech of its malice. It was not fully brought out that deriding the ignorant is the lowest form of instruction and that it is an ugly light that is shed solely for the purpose of letting one’s own light shine. Because the lowest starting point was missing some spectators were unable to gauge the full height which L. undoubtedly reached in the course of the great speech, nor was it entirely possible to see the collapse of Galileo’s vain and violently authoritarian attitude that coloured even his scientific statements. The theatrical content of the speech, in fact, is not directly concerned with the ruthless demonstration of bourgeois science’s fall from grace at the beginning of its rise – its surrender of scientific knowledge to the rulers who are authorised ‘to use it, not use it, abuse it, as it suits their ends’. The theatrical content derives from the whole course of the action, and the speech should show how well this perfect brain functions when it has to judge its owner. That man, the spectator should be able to conclude, is sitting in a hell more terrible than Dante’s, where the true function of intellect has been gambled away.

  Background of the Performance

  It is important to realise that our performance took place at the time and in the country of the atom bomb’s recent production and military application: a country where nuclear physics was then shrouded in deepest secrecy. The day the bomb was dropped will not easily be forgotten by anyone who spent it in the United States.

  The Japanese war had cost the United States real sacrifices. The troop ships left from the west coast, and the wounded and the victims of tropical diseases returned there. When the news reached Los Angeles it was at once clear that this was the end of the hateful war, that sons and brothers would soon come home. But the great city rose to an astonishing display of mourning. The playwright heard bus drivers and saleswomen in fruit markets express nothing but horror. It was victory, but it was the shame of defeat. Next came the suppression of the tremendous energy source by the military and politicians, and this upset the intellectuals. Freedom of investigation, the exchange of scientific discoveries, the international community of scholars: all were jettisoned by authorities that were strongly distrusted. Great physicists left the service of their bellicose government in headlong flight; one of the best known took an academic position where he was forced to waste his working time in teaching rudimentary essentials soley to escape working for the government. It had become ignominious to make new discoveries.

  [From Aufbau einer Rolle/Laughtons Galilei, East Berlin, Henschel, 1956.]

  Appendices to ‘Building up a part’

  Sense and sensuality

  The demonstrative style of acting, which depicts life in such a way that it is laid open to intervention by the human reason, and which strikes Germans as thoroughly doctrinaire, presented no special difficulty to the Englishman L. What makes the sense seem so striking and insistent once it is ‘lugged in’ is our particular lack of sensuality. To lack sensuality in art is certainly senseless, nor can any sense remain healthy if it is not sensual. Reason, for us, immediately implies something cold, arbitrary, mechanical, presenting us with such pairs of alternatives as ideas and life, passion and thinking, pleasure and utility. Hence when we stage a performance of our Faust – a regular occurrence for educational reasons – we strip it of all sensuality and thus transport the audience into an indefinite atmosphere where they feel themselves confronted with all sorts of thoughts, no single one of which they can grasp clearly. L. didn’t even need any kind of theoretical information about the required ‘style’. He had enough taste not to make any distinction between the supposedly lofty and the supposedly base, and he detested preaching. And so he was able to unfold the great physicist’s contradictory personality in a wholly corporeal form, without either suppressing his own thoughts about the subject or forcing them on us.

  Beard or no beard

  In the California production L. acted without a beard, in the New York with one. This order has no significance, nor were there any fundamental discussions about it. It is the sort of case where the desire for a change can be the deciding factor. At the same time it does of course lead to modifications in the character. People who had seen the New York production confirmed what can be seen from the pictures [in the Model Book], namely that L. acted rather differently. But everything essential was still there, and the experiment can be taken as evidence to show how much room is left for the ‘personal’ element.

  The leavetaking

  Certainly nothing could have been more horrible than the moment when L. has finished his big speech and hastens to the table saying ‘I must eat now’, as though in delivering his insights Galileo has done everything that can be expected of him. His leavetaking from Sarti is cold. Standing absorbed in the sight of the goose he is about to eat, he replies to Sarti’s repeated attempt to express his regard for him with a formal ‘Thank you, sir’. Then, relieved of all further responsibility, he sits down pleasurably to his food.

  Concluding remark

  Though it resulted from several years of preparation and was brought about by sacrifices on the part of all concerned, the production of Galileo was seen by a bare ten thousand people. It was put on in two small theatres, a dozen times in each: first in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and then with a completely new cast in New York. Though all the performances were sold out the notices in the main papers were bad. Against that could be set the favourable remarks of such people as Charles Chaplin and Erwin Piscator, as well as the interest of the public, which looked like being enough to fill the theatre for some considerable time. But the size of the cast meant that the potential earnings were low even if business was really good, and when an artistically interested producer made an offer it had to be rejected because L., having already turned down a number of film engagements and made considerable sacrifices, could not afford to turn down another. So the whole thing remained a private operation by a great artist who, while earning his keep outside the theatre, indulged himself by displaying a splendid piece of work to a (not very large) number of interested parties. Though this is something that needed to be said, it does not however convey the complete picture. Given the way the American theatre was organised in those years, it was impossible that such plays and such productions should reach their audience. Productions like this one, therefore, should be treated as examples of a kind of theatre that might become possible under other political and economic conditions. Their achievements, like their mistakes, make them object lessons for anyone who is looking for a theatre of great themes and rewarding acting.

  [From Werner Hecht (ed.), Materialien zu Brechts ‘Leben des Galilei, pp. 78–80. In the last of these notes Brecht is perhaps being undeservedly kind to Laughton, since the actor’s wariness of Communist associations, at a time when Brecht and Hanns Eisler were being heard by the Un-American Activities Committee, appears to have been another strong factor in deciding him to close the play.]

  NOTE OF TWO CONVERSATIONS WITH CASPAR NEHER ABOUT Life of Galileo

  After the Italian fashion, a lightly built stage that is recognisable as having been lightly built. Nothing stony, weighty, massive. No interior decoration.

  Colour to emerge from the costumes,
i.e. in movement.

  The stage shows Galileo’s background, making use of contemporary evidence (Leonardo’s technical drawings, Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf, a man of war from the Venice arsenal and so on).

  No projections, since this would prevent the full illumination of the stage. Giant photographs, maybe, nobly suspended. A flagged floor.

  [Dated October 3 and 5, 1955. From Werner Hecht (ed.), ibid., p. 88. The eventual stage set ror the Berliner Ensemble’s production, completed by Erich Engel after Brecht’s death and first performed on January 15, 1957, was somewhat different from this.]

  Editorial Notes

  Much of the information that follows, including some of the quotations from Brecht, is derived from Ernst Schumacher’s Drama und Geschichte. Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Leben des Galilei’ und andere Stücke, Henschel, East Berlin, 1965, whose usefulness is gratefully acknowledged.

  1. GENERAL

  Judging by the proportion of Brecht’s papers devoted to it in the Brecht Archive in Berlin, Galileo is much the most heavily worked-over of all his plays. None of the others went through such stages, for not only did Galileo occupy him during the last nineteen years of his life, but its linguistic, theatrical, and thematic bases all changed drastically during that period, as did the dramatist’s own circumstances. Thus it was written in German, then entirely rewritten in English (with Brecht himself contributing in a mixture of English and German), then rewritten in German once more largely on the basis of the English-language version. Again, it was first written with no clear prospect of production, then rewritten for a specific actor, Laughton, and a specific production before an American audience, then rewritten once more for Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble to play in East Berlin. During Brecht’s work on the first version, it became known that Niels Bohr had split the uranium atom; then while he and Laughton were preparing the second, the first atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. Finally, Brecht himself was at first living as an exile, close to Germany, on the eve of an impending war; he rewrote the play once in the aura of Hollywood, when an allied victory was at last certain, then the second time after his own successful reestablishment in his country, within a bitterly divided world.

  There are thus three principal versions of the play whose differences will be described in what follows. The first is the German version whose earliest typescript was entitled The Earth Moves and which was originally written in November 1938. What appear to be early sketches lay down a structure as follows:

  Life of Galileo

  1. PADUA/Welcoming the new age/Copernicus’s hypothesis/authoritarian economy in Italy.

  2. SIGNORIA/Landscape.

  3. RESEARCH/Danger of the truth/speech about reason and its seductions.

  4. DEMONSTRATIONS/The addicts of authority exhorted to see.

  5. PLAGUE.

  6. COLLEGIUM ROMANUM/The Copernican system ridiculed.

  7. THE DECREE/On the church’s responsibilities/the ch. system too all-embracing.

  7a. CONVERSATION/The monk’s parents/Horace.

  8. THE SUNSPOTS/On science/Keunos.

  9. The new age without fear/strict research/hope in working people.

  9a. BALLAD

  10. THE INQUISITION’S SUMMONS.

  11. INQUISITION/Condemnation of doubt.

  12. RECANTATION/Praise of steadfastness.

  13. THE PRISONER/Passage from the Discorsi/On the scientist’s duty/On expropriation/The new age, a harridan.

  14. SMUGGLING.

  It did not take long to complete. On November 17 his secretary-collaborator Margarete Steffin wrote to Walter Benjamin:

  Ten days ago Brecht began getting Galileo down in dramatic form, after it had been plaguing his mind for some while. He has already finished nine of the fourteen scenes, and very fine they are.

  A mere six days after that, according to his diary, he had completed it, commenting that

  The only scene to present difficulties was the last one. As in St. Joan [of the Stockyards] I needed some sort of twist at the end to make absolutely certain of the necessary detachment on the part of the audience. At any rate, now even a man subject to unthinking empathy must experience the A-effect in the course of identifying himself with Galileo. A legitimate degree of empathy occurs, given strictly epic presentation.

  On January 6, 1939, the Berlingske Tidende published an interview in which he said that the play was ‘really written for New York’; this referred no doubt to his discussions with Ferdinand Reyher. A few weeks later he carefully revised it under the title Life of Galileo and had a number of duplicated copies run off, of which Walter Benjamin and Fritz Sternberg each appear to have been given one. This was also to all intents and purposes the version sent to Zurich and staged there on 9 September 1943.

  But already Brecht was dissatisfied with it:

  Technically, Life of Galileo is a great step backwards, far too opportunistic, like Señora Carrar’s Rifles. The play would need to be completely rewritten to convey that ‘breath of wind that cometh from new shores’, that rosy dawn of science. It would all have to be more direct, without the interiors, the atmospherics, the empathy. And all switched to planetary demonstration. The division into scenes can be kept, Galileo’s characterisation likewise, but work, the pleasures of work, would need to be realised in practical form, through contact with a theatre. The first thing would be to study the Fatzer and Breadsbop fragments [two unfinished plays dating from before 1933]. Technically those represent the highest standard.

  So he noted on February 25. On the 27th he heard a Danish radio interview with three of Niels Bohr’s assistants, one of whom, Professor C. Møller, knew Brecht and later recalled discussing Galileo and the Discorsi with him early the previous year. This interview described the splitting of the uranium atom, which (so Ernst Schumacher suggests) may have prompted the passage in the revised text about ‘the greatest discoveries … being made at one or two places’. The revision, however, certainly did nothing to change the play ‘technically’. Though an early but undated note speaks of a Life of Galileo version for workers, there appears to be no indication that a start was ever made on this.

  The second or American version dates from April 1944, when Brecht took up the play again as a result of a meeting with Jed Harris, the producer of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. A translation of the first version had already been made by Desmond Vesey; in addition Brecht now got a rough interlinear translation made by one of his own collaborators, followed by a new acting version by two of Orson Welles’s associates, Brainerd Duffield and Emerson Crocker. The two last-named had been recommended to him by Charles Laughton, who seems to have become interested in the play some time that autumn and to have used their version for his own work with Brecht on the adaptation. ‘Now working systematically with Laughton on the translation and stage version of The Life of the Physicist Galileo’ said a diary note of December 10. In the course of this activity, which lasted off and on until December 1945, Brecht redrafted many passages in a remarkable mixture of German and English; thus his sketch for the beginning of scene 4 runs:

  Rede des Mathematikers

  Das Universum des göttlichen Aristoteles mit seinen

  mystisch musizierenden Sphären und Kristallnen Gewöl-

  circles heavenly bodies

  ben sowie den Kreisläufen seiner Himmelskörper,

  obliquity of the eclyptic

  seinem Schiefenwinkel der Sonnenbahn/den Geheimnissen

  Sternen

  der Table of Cords, dem/Reichtum des Catalogue

  inspirierten

  for the southern hemisphere/der/construction of a

  celestial globe is ein Gebäude von grosser Ordnung

  und Schönheit.

  The Universe of divine Classics.

  For the New York production, which took place after Brecht’s return to Europe, there were, according to its director Joseph Losey, ‘Different words, thanks in part to the collaboration of George Tabori in rewriting with Laugh
ton and me from notes left behind in New York by Brecht.’

  The text as we reproduce it in the appendix (p. 333 ff.) was published by Indiana University Press in 1953 in From the Modern Repertoire, Series Two, edited by Eric Bentley, then in Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, Grove Press, New York, 1961, and separately by Grove Press again in 1966. The play still struck Brecht himself as formally conventional, to judge from a note of January 1945 which found that

  with its interiors and atmospheric effects the construction of the scenes, derived from the epic theatre, makes a singularly theatrical impact.

  He also told an interviewer somewhat apologetically that summer that ‘Galileo is anyway interesting as a contrast to my parables. Where they embody ideas, it extracts ideas from a subject’. And on July 30 he noted that ‘I wouldn’t go to the stake for the formal aspects of this play’.

  In 1953, he got Elisabeth Hauptmann and Benno Besson of the Berliner Ensemble, with some advice from Ruth Berlau to draft a third version in German, using the best parts of the previous texts. This he himself revised to form the play which was given its German première at Cologne in April 1955, published as Ver suche 14 and subsequently rehearsed by him for some three months with his own company. With minor amendments it is the text of the Gesammelte Werke on which our edition is based. It differs substantially from the second version, not least by being very much longer.

  2. THE FIRST VERSION, 1938–1943

  From Brecht’s first completed typescript, dating presumably from 23 November 1938, to the text used for the Zurich production of 1943, the play remained essentially the same, the only changes of real substance being those in the last scene but one, which define the nature of Galileo’s crime. The general structure of this first version was already very similar to that of the text which we have followed, and certain scenes, or large parts of them, were taken into the latter without drastic rewriting, for instance the first half of scene 1, scene 3, the start of scene 4, scene 5b (Plague), scene 6 (Collegium Romanum), much of scene 8, scene 11 (The Pope) and the last (Smuggling) scene. Even the carnival scene (10) had the same place, gist and purpose, though the ballad round which it centres was later rewritten. There were, however, some striking differences among the characters. To sum these up briefly: