Bertolt Brecht
Collected Plays: Five
Life of Galileo
Mother Courage and her Children
The fifth volume in the Collected Plays series contains two of Brecht’s best-known plays, Life of Galileo and Mother Courage and her Children. Life of Galileo examines the problems that face not only the scientist but the whole spirit of free inquiry when brought into conflict with the requirements of government or official ideology. Written in exile in 1937–9 it was first staged in English in 1947 in a version jointly prepared by Brecht and Charles Laughton, who played the title role. A complete translation by John Willett is printed here and the much shorter Laughton version is included in full as an appendix.
Along with Galileo, the character of Mother Courage is one of Brecht’s great creations: she follows the armies back and forth across Europe in this ‘chronicle play of the Thirty Years War’, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon. One by one she loses her children to the war but will not part from her livelihood – the wagon.
Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, the volume includes Brecht’s own notes and relevant texts as well as an extensive introduction and commentary.
Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg on 10 February 1898 and died in Berlin on 14 August 1956. He grew to maturity as a playwright in the frenetic years of the twenties and early thirties, with such plays as Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera and The Mother. He left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, eventually reaching the United States in 1941, where he remained until 1947. It was during this period of exile that such masterpieces as Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle were written. Shortly after his return to Europe in 1947 he founded the Berliner Ensemble, and from then until his death was mainly occupied in producing his own plays.
Other Bertolt Brecht publications by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
Brecht Collected Plays: One
(Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of
England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog,
Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch)
Brecht Collected Plays: Two
(Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera,
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)
Brecht Collected Plays: Three
(Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said
Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and
the Rule, The Horations and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards)
Brecht Collected Plays: Four
(Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,
Señora Carrar’s Rifl es, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?,
The Trial of Lucullus)
Brecht Collected Plays: Five
(Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)
Brecht Collected Plays: Six
(The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,
Mr Puntila and His Man Matti)
Brecht Collected Plays: Seven
(The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War,
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi )
Brecht Collected Plays: Eight
(The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles,
Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress)
Berliner Ensemble Adaptations – publishing 2014
(The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen 1431,
Don Juan, Trumpets and Drums)
Brecht on Art and Politics (edited by Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles)
Brecht on Film and Radio (edited by Marc Silberman)
Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks – publishing 2014 (edited by
Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman)
Brecht on Theatre – publishing 2014 (edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn)
Brecht in Practice – publishing 2014 (David Barnett)
The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre (Ekkehard Schall)
Brecht, Music and Culture – publishing 2014 (Hans Bunge, translated by Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements)
Brecht in Context (John Willett)
The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (John Willett)
Brecht: A Choice of Evils (Martin Esslin)
Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life – publishing 2014 (Stephen Parker)
A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht (Stephen Unwin)
Bertolt Brecht
Collected Plays: Five
Life of Galileo
translated by John Willett
Original work enititled:
Leben des Galilei
Mother Courage and her Children
translated by John Willett
Original work enititled:
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
Edited and introduced by
John Willett and Ralph Manheim
Contents
Introduction
Life of Galileo
Mother Courage and her Children
Chronology
THE PLAYS
LIFE OF GALILEO
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
NOTES AND VARIANTS
LIFE OF GALILEO
Texts by Brecht
Foreword
The Life of Galileo is not a tragedy
Portrayal of the Church
Three notes on the character of Galileo
Entries from Brecht’s Journal 1944–5
Drafts for a foreword to Life of Galileo
Unvarnished picture of a new age
Should Galileo be likeable?
Praise or condemnation of Galileo?
Prologue to the American production
Epilogue of the scientists
Notes on individual scenes
Building up a part: Laughton’s Galileo
Note of two conversations with Caspar Neher about Life of Galileo
Editorial Notes
1. General
2. The first version, 1938–1943
3. The American version, 1944–1947
4. The Berlin version, 1953–1956
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
Texts by Brecht
Note
The Story
Three diary notes
The Mother Courage model
Two ways of playing Mother Courage
Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher
Editorial Note
Appendix
Galileo by Bertolt Brecht translated by Charles Laughton
Introduction
LIFE OF GALILEO
In all Brecht’s work there is no more substantial and significant landmark than the first version of Galileo, which he wrote in three weeks of November 1938, not long after the Munich agreement had opened the door of Eastern Europe to Hitler. As is well known, it inaugurated the series of major plays whose writing occupied him until his return to Germany some ten years later: from Mother Courage to The Days of the Commune, those great works of his forties on which his reputation largely rests. At the same time it marks the virtual end of his efforts to write plays and poems of instant political relevance, such as the Spanish Civil War one-acter Señora Carrar’s Rifles or the loose sequence of anti-Nazi scenes known variously as 99%, The Private Life of the Master Race and Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. Short satirical poems designed for the exiles’ cabarets or for broadcasting (notably by the Communist-run German Freedom Radio) now give way to something at once more personal and more pessimi
stic. The Lenin Cantata set by Eisler for the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution is followed during 1938 by ‘To Those Born Later’ and the great Lao-Tse poem. All along the line Brecht appears to be backing away from the kind of close political engagement which had occupied him since the crisis years of 1929, as also from the didactic and agitational forms to which this gave rise. Walter Benjamin, who visited him in his Danish cottage that June and stayed till after Munich, found him at once more isolated and more mellow than he had been four years earlier. ‘It’s a good thing’, he notes Brecht as saying, ‘when someone who has taken up an extreme position then goes into a period of reaction. That way he arrives at a half-way house.’
Though such a change might seem compatible with the new aesthetic traditionalism being preached from Moscow after the Writers’ Congress of 1934 – with Galileo itself as part of the same historicising trend as led to Heinrich Mann’s Henri IV novels and Friedrich Wolf’s play Beaumarchais – it primarily relates to something very different: to Brecht’s shuddering consciousness of what he called ‘the dark times’. The phrase was first used by him in a poem of 1937 and from then on it overshadows much of his writing right up to the crucial German defeats at Stalingrad and El Alamein in the autumn of 1942. For it was a desperate period, and the despair could be felt on at least three different levels. First of all there was the relentless progress of Fascism (intervention in Spain, Japanese invasion of China, the Austrian Anschluss, the annexation of the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia) aided by British appeasement and the fall of the French Popular Front. Overlapping these events, and in many ways closer to Brecht personally, was the great Soviet purge which by the time of Benjamin’s visit had already carried away such friends of theirs as Tretiakoff, Ottwalt, Carola Neher and the Reichs, as well as Brecht’s two Comintern contacts Béla Kun and Vilis Knorin, to as yet unclear fates. Linked with the new Russian spy mania, itself shot through with xenophobia, was the increasingly strict imposition of the Socialist Realist aesthetic whose German-language spokesmen were Alfred Kurella and Georg Lukács. With Meyerhold deprived of his allegedly ‘alien’ theatre in January 1938, Brecht that summer wrote a number of ripostes to Lukács which he seemingly thought wiser not to publish, even in the Moscow magazine Das Wort of which he was a nominal editor. ‘They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over the other people’, he told Benjamin. ‘Every one of their criticisms contains a threat.’
In the Journals (Arbeitsjournal) which he now began keeping, the place of Galileo is very clear. In October a short entry reflects on the unwillingness of any of the major powers, including Russia, to risk war for Czechoslovakia. In January 1939 another reports the arrest in Moscow of Das Worfs sponsor Mikhail Koltsov – ‘my last link with that place’ – and concludes that the right Marxist attitude to Stalinism was that of Marx himself to German social-democracy: ‘constructively critical’. Between these two pages comes the entry of 23 November, recording that this hitherto unmentioned play has taken three weeks to write. Before and after come biting comments on Lukács and the ‘Realism controversy’. It must already have been in Brecht’s mind (’for some while’, so his collaborator Margarete Steffin wrote to Benjamin in the letter cited on p. 235); and certainly he had done a good deal of preliminary reading: of the standard German biography by Emil Wohlwill, for instance, as well as of nineteenth-century translations of the Discorsi and Bacon’s Novum Organum (from which a number of key ideas were derived) and works by modern physicists such as Eddington and Jeans. But an important contributing factor was his decision, evidently taken around this time, to follow Hanns Eisler’s example and apply for a quota visa to the United States, where he hoped that a work about the great physicist would make him some money. This idea crystallised just after Munich as a result of a visit by his American friend Ferdinand Reyher, a Hollywood script writer whom he had first met in Berlin at the time of The Threepenny Opera. Arriving in Copenhagen on 28 October, Reyher suggested that Brecht should start by writing Galileo as a film story which he, Reyher, could market for him. Though Brecht in the event found himself writing the play instead (see Letter 373 of 2 December), and never even embarked on the film project, he said from the outset that it was ‘really intended for New York’.
This original Galileo, revised with some minor changes in the first few weeks of 1939, was initially called The Earth Moves. Its full German text was first published under its subsequent title Leben des Galilei by Suhrkamp in 1988. In February Reyher wrote from Hollywood to say that while he would discuss its screen possibilities with the director William Dieterle – himself an old acquaintance of Brecht’s from the early 1920s – he felt some measure of adaptation was needed to fit it for the American stage. With Brecht’s permission, accordingly, he proposed not just to do a straight translation but to introduce a little more speed’:
a sharpened drive, because our mode of thinking and our interests are gaited to a more nervous tempo, and what induces us to think in this country is not ideas, but action.
Brecht never seems to have agreed to this; nor do we know how Dieterle reacted to the film idea. Meantime, however, copies of the script were going to a number of other recipients: among them Piscator, Hanns Eisler and Fritz Lang in the United States, Brecht’s publisher Wieland Herzfelde in Prague, his translator Desmond Vesey in London, the main German-language theatres in Basle and Zurich, and Pierre Abraham and Walter Benjamin in Paris. Not long before leaving Denmark that spring he began writing his Messingkauf Dialogues on the model of Galileo’s Discorsi dialogues. Characteristically, he had already become dissatisfied with the play, which he saw as ‘far too opportunist’ and conventionally atmospheric, like the deliberately Aristotelian ‘empathy drama’ Señora Carrafs Rifles, for which he was still praised by the Party aestheticians. He even thought of remodelling the whole thing in a more didactic form, based on the example of the big unfinished Fatzer and Breadshop schemes of the late 1920s. However, there is no evidence that he did this except a rough outline for a ‘version for workers’; and instead the project slumbered while he wrote the next four of the major plays. Only in Moscow was there a review of the play in Sovietski Isskusstvo (18 August 1939) and some suggestion of an illustrated edition for which his new friend Hans Tombrock was to make the etchings. This too never materialised, though it prompted the vivid description of Galileo’s appearance which we cite on p. 193.
* * *
The Brechts eventually moved to the United States in the summer of 1941, leaving via Moscow and Vladivostock a matter of days before the German invasion of the USSR. By then France, Poland, Yugoslavia and Greece had all fallen to Hitler; Benjamin had committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish frontier; Margarete Steffin was left in Moscow to die of tuberculosis. Settling in California in the hope of finding work in the film industry, Brecht was soon seeing both Dieterle and Reyher, who had by now evidently completed a straight translation of the play. The idea of a film version seems not to have been resumed. That autumn he discussed the script with the physicist Hans Reichenbach, a pupil of Einstein’s then teaching in Los Angeles at the University of California, who congratulated him on the accuracy of its scientific and historical aspects. Then at the end of the year he tried to interest his old friend Oskar Homolka, and for a time Homolka toyed with the idea of playing the part: something that made Brecht feel
as if I were recalling a strange sunken theatre of a bygone age on continents that had been submerged.
A similar sense of unreality must have seized him in September 1943, when the Zurich Schauspielhaus finally gave the play its world premiere some two and a half years after that of Mother Courage. How he reacted to the news of the production – or when, indeed, he heard it – remains unclear; he never even alludes to it in his diary. Soberly interpreted by Leonard Steckel, who not only played Galileo but was also the director, it was greatly applauded despite its lack of dramatic effects: ‘a Lehrstück or a play for reading’, one critic called it. What was not clear, howe
ver, in a generally clear performance, was whether Galileo recanted out of cowardice or as part of a deliberate plan to complete his life’s work on behalf of human reason and smuggle it out to the free world. This ambiguity (which led so experienced a critic as Bernhard Diebold to favour the second, more topically anti-Nazi interpretation) is of course built into the first version of the play, where Galileo has already been conspiring with the stove-fitter (symbol of the workers) to send his manuscript abroad in the penultimate scene even before Andrea appears. (In Zurich this was in fact the last scene, that at the frontier being, as usual, cut.)
It was only in the spring of 1944 that the play seems once more to have become a reality to Brecht. Wintering in New York, he had discussed the possibility of a production with Jed Harris, the backer of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and on getting back to Santa Monica he looked at Galileo with a fresh eye, re-checking its moral content, so he noted in his journal,
since it had always worried me. just because i was trying to follow the historical story, without being morally concerned, a moral content emerged and i’m not happy about it. g. can no more resist stating the truth than eating an appetising dish; to him it’s a matter of sensual enjoyment, and he constructs his own personality as wisely and passionately as he does his image of the world, actually he falls twice, the first time is when he suppresses or recants the truth because he is in mortal danger, the second when despite the mortal danger he once again seeks out the truth and disseminates it. he is destroyed by his own productivity, and it upsets me to be told that i approve of his publicly recanting so as to be able to carry on his work in secret, that’s too banal and too cheap, g., after all, destroyed not only himself as a person but also the most valuable part of his scientific work, the church (i.e. the authorities) defended the teachings of the bible purely as a way of defending itself, its authority and its power of oppression and exploitation, the sole reason why the people became interested in g.’s ideas about the planets was that they were chafing under church domination, g. threw all real progress to the wolves when he recanted, he abandoned the people, and astronomy once again became an affair for specialists, the exclusive concern of scholars, unpolitical, cut off. the church made a distinction between these celestial ‘problems’ and those of the earth, consolidated its rule and then cheerfully went on to acknowledge the new solutions.