Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) Read Online Free Page A

have discussed a Berlin production outside the programme of that company, with Kortner or Steckel in the title part. Then in 1953 he set his collaborators (Hauptmann, Besson, Berlau) to work translating and expanding the ‘American’ version so as to include certain elements of that of 1938, notably the plague scenes and the great introductory speech about the ‘new time’ in scene 1. He then went over the results himself, also adding German versions of the ballad, the poems and the inter-scene verses. In 1955 all this but for the verses was given its premiere in Cologne in West Germany, after which he at last – in the final year of his life – began preparing to stage the play with the Berliner Ensemble.
    In ten years a lot had changed. The text had grown longer by half, the production envisaged (with Neher as designer) was more lavish, there was no actor of Laughton’s calibre available. Brecht himself was to direct it, but he could only conduct rehearsals from mid-December up to the end of March 1956 when he became too ill to go on. As Galileo he cast his old Communist friend Ernst Busch, who had been in
The Mother, Kuhle Wampe
and the
Threepenny Opera
film before 1933, had sung Brecht—Eisler songs to the troops in Spain, been interned by the French, then handed over to the Gestapo and wounded in the bombing of Berlin. Since returning to the German stage Busch had tended to specialise in cunning or lovable rogues: Mephisto and lago for the Deutsches Theater, Azdak and the Cook (in
Mother Courage
) for Brecht. A much less intellectual actor than Laughton, he found it even more difficult to alienate the audience’s sympathies at the end of the play; and when Erich Engel took over the production after Brecht’s death he was allowed to present the handing-over ofthe
Discorsi
as a piece of justified foxiness which made his recantation ultimately forgiveable. Brecht himself had underlined two points in connection with this production: the first, his view that the recantation was an absolute crime (see p. 205), the second, that Galileo’s line in scene 9 ‘My object is not to establish that I was right but to find out if I am’ is the most important sentence in the play. Others have stressed that the new version followed the manufacture and testing of the hydrogen bomb, so that the social responsibility of the scientist became a particularly topical theme. It is difficult however to see this play as a member of an East European audience without feeling that it is above all about scientific enquiry and the human reason. For the parallels are too clear: the Catholic Church is the Communist Party, Aristotle is Marxism—Leninism with its incontrovertible scriptures, the late ‘reactionary’ pope is Joseph Stalin, the Inquisition the KGB. Obviously Brecht did not write it to mean this, and if he had seen how the local context prompted this interpretation he might have been less keen for the production to go on. But as things turned out it proved to be among the most successful of all his plays in the Communist world.
    * * *
    In our view
Galileo
is Brecht’s greatest play, and it is worth tracing its long and involved history in order to understand why. Not just one, but three crucial moments of our recent history helped to give it its multiple relevance to our time: Hitler’s triumphs in 1938, the dropping of the first nuclear bomb in 1945, the death of Stalin in 1953. Each found Brecht writing or rewriting his play. And on each occasion the conditions of work were different: thus it was first written in his measured, stylish yet utterly down-to-earth German, then re-thought in English for Anglo-Saxon tongues and ears, then put back into German so as to combine the strengths of both. At none of these three stages was its form in any way mannered or gimmicky: sprawl as it might, particularly in the two German versions, it was outwardly a straightforward chronicle of seventeenth-century intellectual history, sticking