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How to Survive. Galileo (1938) is in some respects a companion piece to Mother Courage. Brecht made the astronomer into an opportunist and, scanting history, into a sensualist. His Galileo loves to eat (Brecht reputedly picked Charles Laughton to play the part in New York in 1947 because he liked the way the actor tore a chicken apart in the movie Henry VIII). He is not a man of scrupulous scientific integrity, but he does have a passion for knowledge, and he "cannot say no to an old wine or a new thought." He infects his student-disciples with the pure love of science, and they in turn assume that their master has a matching purity of character. When Galileo recants his heretical theories before the threat of torture by the Inquisition, it is not he but his disciples who are disillusioned. Says Galileo matter-of-factly: "I cannot afford to be smoked on a wood fire like a ham." This echoes a deep-lying sentiment of Brecht's. He was once asked what the purpose of drama was. Brecht answered: "To teach us how to survive." Peculiarly enough, Brecht goes on to argue that Galileo paid too high a price for survival and makes the absurd charge that his recantation aborted an age of reason. To an audience, however, the treason of the intellectual is less perceptible than the moving spectacle of an old man's humiliation. To spectators in East Germany, moreover, Galileo has a special double meaning; many see in the protagonist Playwright Brecht himself, disillusioned (as some suspect) with Communism but bowing—and surviving.
The Fingers of Guilt. Brecht's long battle of survival was lyrically introduced by Brecht himself in a poem about his origins :
I, Bertolt Brecht, am from the black
forests.
My mother carried me, as in her womb
I lay,
Into the cities. And the chill of the
forests
Will stay within me to my dying day.
Born in 1898 in the Bavarian town of Augsburg, son of the well-to-do manager of a paper mill, Brecht served as a medical orderly in World War I, an experience that made him ferociously pacifist and antimilitarist.* Later he became a professional bohemian, twanging a guitar and shrilling out his Legend of a Dead Soldier.
Success changed him little. When Hitler came to power, Brecht was 35, and in the next 15 years the melancholy refugee round took him to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the U.S. and finally East Germany. Despite the bizarre American settings he used in his plays (most of which he wrote before he had ever seen the U.S.), Brecht had no interest in the actual U.S. During the seven years he lived here, he holed up in Hollywood with his German fellow refugees.
After a 1947 date with the Un-American Activities Committee, he quit the country and took a highly circumspect approach to East Germany, slyly acquiring Austrian citizenship and a West German publisher. For the Reds he was a prickly celebrity who spurned the drama of social realism and was accused of "formalism." Posthumous poems show that after the East Berlin riots of 1953, Brecht was like a man living in a bad dream:
Last night I dreamed I saw fingers
pointing at me
As at a leper. They were work-gnarled
and
They were broken.
"You don't know!" I cried
Guiltily.