Science and its Place Amongst the Shadows of Politics:

- Mahatma Gandhi

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

- Martin Luther King Jr., “Strength to Love”

For thousands of years, nations and their people have questioned scientific discoveries as well as their place in the midst of politics, humanity and other social institutions such as the church, who, up until the early 18th Century, controlled the institutes of higher learning where men of deep religious faith studied the sciences. Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo Galilei, a great Renaissance scientist, was one of these men, whose ideas were constantly controlled and scrutinized by Church officials if they questioned the bible’s traditional ways of thought. Although he himself was a Catholic, in the 1600’s, Galileo finds himself in conflict with the Catholic Church and other scientists for h

is discoveries which contradict the Aristotelian astronomy they had for so long believed. Because of this, after being taken into custody by the Inquisition, Galileo spends his life striving to justify science and its place in the midst of all the controversy. Brecht too, in the 20th Century challenges the position of science amongst politics and authority. Having seen the horrors of Nazi Germany, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and Stalin’s Communism, Brecht begins to incorporate political questions regarding science and its advancements into each of his writings. The Life of Galileo is one of such writings, which was revised three times by Brecht due to these major events that impacted his life and caused him to reconsider his political and scientific beliefs. The play questions the place of science in the midst of politics and authority, but can it really provide the answers we need even today?

The final version of the play also places a stronger emphasis on the cowardly side of Galileo, whose character gradually weakens as the play progresses. He, just like the society of Brecht’s time, faces many obstacles that eventually he succumbs to. Although he never stops believing in the Copernican system, Galileo recants in the system after “they [the Church officials] showed me [Galileo] the instruments” (107) of torture and he became frightened of the physical pain they may object him to. Those under the control of Stalin at the time also feared this same pain as much as they feared losing their lives. Stalin was a powerful man, whose dictatorship continued in the Soviet Union because no one with enough power would dare to oppose him. This is why Andrea insults Galileo for recanting when faced by the Church, whose opposition to Galileo is the strongest in his version of the play. Indirectly, Brecht is illustrating to his readers that they, as well as any scientist who believe they can help humanity, must speak out in times of despair or they may become weak like Galileo and give into something they may not believe in.

For most of his life, Brecht was yearningly inspired by politics, incorporating themes of political aggression and harmony into many of his works. He was titled a Communist, but at heart, he was really a Marxist. Having received inspiration from well-known Communist leader Karl Marx, Brecht refused to adopt Nazi beliefs in Germany in the 1930’s when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were in control of the country. As a result, Brecht and his family exiled themselves from the country and took up residence in Denmark, where the first version of the Life of Galileo, then called The Earth Moves, was written, not because Brecht had interest in the man or his research, but because the conflicts Galileo encountered in his lifetime could create a parallel to Brecht’s modern world, which was highly influenced and controlled by the Nazis in the late 1930’s.

Brecht once again addresses a different perspective on science and politics in the final version of the Life of Galileo as a result of his changing political perspectives on Communism in the 1950’s. For several decades, Joseph Stalin, a great political leader of the 20th century, controlled the Soviet Union; developing a form of Communism that Brecht thought focused on totalitarian aesthetics, not the equalitarian aesthetics that usually constitute Communist politics. According to Esslin, “the aesthetics developed by Stalinism in the Soviet Union were diametrically opposed to Brecht’s ideas about art and drama and corresponded, in fact, very closely to those of Hitler” (2107), another political leader that Brecht disapproved of. The horrors of Stalinism showed this inhuman face of Communism to Brecht, and in 1953, he integrates these ideas into the final version of Galileo, where, because of Stalinism’s connection to Nazism, he reincorporates many of the deleted scenes from the first version. This time the negative aspects of Galil

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