GALILEO: Scene Breakdown - Dassia N. Posner

GALILEO: Scene Breakdown
GALILEO: SCENE BREAKDOWN
SCENE 1: Galileo’s Study in Padua, 1609
SCENE 2: The Great Arsenal of Venice, August 24, 1609
SCENE 3: Galileo’s Study in Padua, January 10, 1610
SCENE 4: Florence, Nine Months Later
SCENE 5: Galileo Travels to Rome, 1616
SCENE 6: A Cardinal’s Palace, Rome, February 26, 1616
SCENE 7: Three Days Later, A Conversation
INTERMISSION
SCENE 8: Galileo’s Home in Florence, 1623
SCENE 9: A City in Northern Italy
SCENE 10: Palace of Cosimo de Medici in Florence, 1633
SCENE 11: The Vatican
SCENE 12: Florentine Ambassador’s home, Rome, June 22, 1633
SCENE 13: Galileo’s Villa near Florence, 1633 – 1642
SCENE 14: The Italian Border, 1637

Ottavio Leoni, Portrait of Galileo Galilei, 1624
PROLOGUE TO THE 1947 AMERICAN PRODUCTION OF GALILEO
Respected public of the way called Broad
Tonight we invite you to step on board
A world of curves and measurements, where you’ll descry
The newborn physics in their infancy.
Here you will see the life of the great Galileo Galilei
The law of falling bodies versus the GRATIAS DEI
Science’s fight versus the rulers, put on stage
At the beginning of the modern age.
Here you’ll see science in its blooming youth
Also its first compromises with the truth.
The Good, so far, has not been turned to goods
But already there’s something nasty in the woods
Which stops that truth from reaching the majority
And won’t relieve, but aggravate their poverty.
We think such sights are relevant today
The Modern age is quick to pass away
We hope you’ll lend a charitable ear
To what we say, since otherwise we fear
If you won’t learn from Galileo’s experience
The Bomb will put in a personal appearance.
(From Manheim and Willett, eds. Bertolt Brecht. Collected Plays. Vol. 5., p. 226)
In Desmond Vesey’s translation of The Stargazer, Galileo tells Andrea
Sarti the following “Mr. Keuner” story, later omitted in the Laughton
edition:
Into the home of the Cretan philosopher Keunos, who was beloved
among the Cretans for his love of liberty, came one day, during the
time of tyranny, a certain agent, who presented a pass that had been
issued by those who ruled the city. It said that any home he set foot in
belonged to him; likewise, any food he demanded; likewise, any man
should serve him that he set eyes on. The agent sat down, demanded
food, washed, lay down, and asked, with his face toward the wall,
before he fell asleep: “Will you serve me?” Keunos covered him with a
blanket, drove the flies away, watched over his sleep, and obeyed him
for seven years just as on this day. But whatever he did for him, he
certainly kept from doing one thing, and that was to utter a single word.
When the seven years were up, and the agent had grown fat from much
eating, sleeping, and commanding, the agent died. Keunos then
wrapped him in the beat-up old blanket, dragged him out of the house,
washed the bed, whitewashed the walls, took a deep breath and
answered:
“No.”
Galileo’s drawings of his lunar observations

GALILEO: DIRECTOR’S NOTES
Every day, images are created for our consumption from the
mythology of culture, history and politics. Often we are more comfortable
with these images than a more objective reality. Indeed, various power
structures’ ability to self-perpetuate control over so many aspects of society
depends on this dynamic: that many people prefer to believe an attractive
lie than face an ugly truth. Despite the noble and important work produced
by contemporary historians, many accept mythic versions of history and
rely on iconic images of historical figures to teach us who they were and
what they did. Ideology plays an important role in this process and fuels
the perpetuating myth, however based in historical events, to manipulate
our feelings in the present day. This process creates a disconnect between
our experience and the truth of our history and in many cases excuses the
circumstances we live under for the sake of this manufactured version of
history.
Bertolt Brecht believed that, as artists, we have a responsibility to
change society for the better by telling the truth, and if artists have that
responsibility, then certainly scientists share this same moral imperative.
Brecht attempted to accomplish this by deconstructing mythic or iconic
images of historical figures and by interrogating the behavior of those
figures or historical events in general. To be sure, he does this by creating
a fiction of his own, but the playwright and poet has the license to create
fiction to discover truth, whereas the politician and the corporate power
broker create fiction to disguise the truth. By deconstructing popular
mythology, Brecht hopes to tear down our assumptions about our given
circumstances in today’s world and, through interrogating our past,
challenge those in power today about those given circumstances and our
future.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the current health care
debate, where, certainly, the health insurance industry views its primary
imperative as to protect and expand profits. To do this they are keen to
perpetuate the “goodness” of capitalism and private enterprise, and the
“badness” of government-run social programs, despite the success of many
such programs in the United States and Europe. Without a popular iconic
view of so-called “American Individualism” and a popular negative view of
poverty as the endgame of insufficient self-reliance, these messages,
including the recent comparison of a national health care program to the
death camps of Nazi Germany, would be impossible to sell to the voting
public.
In 1938, Bertolt Brecht was particularly concerned about how to
pursue and protect the truth in a tyrannical society, Nazi Germany in
particular. By 1945, however, with the
advent of the Atomic Bomb, he became
equally concerned with the social and moral
responsibility of all scientific activity as it
might be manipulated by either a totalitarian
regime, or within a liberal democracy.
Brecht became fascinated with Galileo as one
who had been lionized as the most important
scientist of his time, which indeed he was,
but who, upon closer inspection, might be
challenged for his decision to recant under
pressure by the Inquisition.
My production of this play,
translated by Charles Laughton and Bertolt
Brecht, in part deals with the evolution in
Brecht’s own view of Galileo, from the clever if sometimes dishonest rogue
fending off the authorities, to the self-serving glutton who, consuming
everything around him, helps the inquisition destroy intellectual progress,
blasting us, metaphorically, back to the middle ages, in the way an
unrestrained use of nuclear weapons would literally accomplish the same
task. Brecht asks us a simple question; Why should Galileo get a pass from
being courageous just because he was brilliant? Science, like all forms of
public activity, requires valor. Now while some may complain that in order
to do this Brecht had to invent the quality of cowardice in Galileo that is
inherent in this play, devotees shouldn’t be too concerned. Brecht’s main
purpose is to interrogate the historical icon in order for the rest of us to
challenge other icons in our midst. Almost by reflected light, Brecht seems
to view Galileo through the lens of Robert Oppenheimer, as he observed
Oppenheimer’s own journey from patriotic scientist to a discarded threat to
“national security.” On another level, Brecht saw in his investigation of
Galileo an uncanny resemblance to his own situation under the scrutiny of
HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
As only a dramatic fiction can produce, these images clash together
as Brecht and Oppenheimer both ponder – sometimes separately,
sometimes together as narrators – where we have come from and where we
are going.
-Gary M. English
Photo: Two of Galileo’s first telescopes; Institute and Museum of the
History of Science, Florence.

EVENTS THAT SHAPED GALILEO:
by Jamie Bertoluzzi and Dassia N. Posner
_________________________________________________________________
1609: Galileo first turns his telescope to the sky. The first telescope he creates is
three-powered and by the end of the year he has created and presented to the
Venetian Senate an eight-powered telescope. He observes the moon and,
early in 1610, discovers the moons of Jupiter.
1610: Galileo is appointed as Chief Mathematician of the University of Pisa and as
Philosopher and Mathematician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. This is a life
position. Galileo moves to Florence.
April 1611: Christopher Clavius and the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegium
Romanum certify Galileo’s findings.
February 1616: Pope Paul V orders Cardinal Bellarmine to warn Galileo not to
support or defend the Copernican Theory. Galileo is also forbidden to
discuss the theory.
1620: Cardinal Maffeo Barberini’s writes a poem, “Adulatio Perniciosa
(Dangerous Adulation),” in praise of Galileo.
1623: Cardinal Barberini is elected Pope Urban VIII.
1624: Pope Urban VIII gives Galileo permission to use the Copernican Theory in
his writings as long as he treats it as a hypothesis.
1630: Galileo finishes his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,
placing the scientific view of the new Pope in the mouth of a character
named Simplicio.
February 1632: After having passed the official censors, the Dialogue is printed.
By September, distribution of the Dialogue is prohibited by the Pope.
1633: Galileo is interrogated in April by the Inquisition. In June, Galileo
acknowledges that he may have argued the Copernican Theory too strongly.
He publicly recants his view that the Sun is the center of the universe. In
December, he is allowed to return to his villa in Arcetri near Florence,
where he is under house arrest for the remainder of his life.
1636: Louis Elsevier, a Dutch publisher, visits Galileo and agrees to publish the
Discourse on Two New Sciences.
1638: Galileo’s Discourse on Two New Sciences is published in the Netherlands.
1642: Galileo dies on January 8th at his villa in Arcetri.
_________________________________________________________________
1933: Hitler comes to power. Bertolt Brecht and his Jewish wife Helene Weigel
leave Germany and flee to Denmark.
1933-1945: The Holocaust
1936-1938: Stalin conducts his “Show Trials,” forcing through torture public
confessions of supposed attempts by leading figures to subvert Socialism.
1938-1939: Brecht writes the first version of Galileo, The Earth Moves, translated
into English in 1940 by Desmond Vesey as The Stargazer.
1939: World War II begins. Neils Bohr announces the discovery of nuclear fission.
1941: Pearl Harbor. As Hitler advances across Europe, Brecht flees to Santa
Monica, California.
1942-1945: Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Scientific Director of the Manhattan
Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, begins developing an atomic bomb.
The first bomb is tested on July 16, 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
May 7, 1945: The Nazis surrender to the Allies.
August 6, 1945: The atomic bomb is detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, and, a few
days later, over Nagasaki. By the end of the year, there are c. 140,000
bomb-related deaths in Japan. Japan surrenders the following month.
1946: Oppenheimer receives the Presidential Medal of Merit for his work on the
Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.
1945-1947: Brecht collaborates in California with actor Charles Laughton to create
an English version of Galileo that responds to the tumultuous times. Galileo
opens in Hollywood in July 1947.
1947: Oppenheimer becomes the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton University.
October 30, 1947: Brecht appears before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities and testifies that he is not a member of the Communist Party. He
leaves the U.S. permanently the next day. Galileo runs briefly on Broadway
in December.
1949: Brecht and Weigel found their theatre, the Berliner Ensemble. The Soviet
Union tests its first atomic bomb on August 29.
1950: President Truman announces that he intends to pursue development of the
hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer is opposed to this. The Korean War begins.
1952: The U.S. detonates the first hydrogen bomb in a test at Eniwetok in the
Pacific.
1953: Stalin dies. Oppenheimer calls for greater openness in the escalating atomic
arms race. A few months later, Oppenheimer is charged with being a Soviet
spy.
April 12, 1954: The nearly month-long hearings against Oppenheimer begin.
June 28, 1954: The Atomic Energy Commission votes to revoke Oppenheimer’s
security clearance permanently, despite lack of evidence that the scientist
shared any secrets.
1957: A third version of The Life of Galileo premieres in both West and East
Germany several months after Brecht’s death.
_________________________________________________________________
1992: Pope John Paul II states that the Catholic Church made a mistake in
condemning Galileo’s teachings.
2008: The Vatican announces plans to erect a statue of Galileo within the Vatican
walls.
2009: The International Year of Astronomy and the Year of Science.

BRECHT AND OPPENHEIMER:
The FBI watched Brecht for much of his time in the U.S., recording nearly
400 pages of documents on him. Brecht was subpoenaed to appear before
the House Committee on Un-American Activities on October 30, 1947. The
following is an excerpt from a statement he was not permitted to read:
Being called before the Un-American Activities Committee… I
feel free for the first time to say a word or two about American
matters…. [T]he great American people would lose much and risk
much if they allowed anyone to restrict the free competition of
ideas in cultural fields, or to interfere with art, which must be free
in order to be art. We live in a dangerous world…. [M]ankind is
capable of becoming enormously wealthy but, as a whole, is still
poverty-stricken. Great wars have been suffered; we are told
greater ones are imminent. One of them might well wipe out
mankind… Now do you not think that, in such a predicament,
every new idea should be examined carefully and freely? Art can
present such ideas clearly and even ennoble them. [Reproduced from
Brecht before the Committee on Un-American Activities: A Historical Encounter.
Presented by Eric Bentley/ Folkway Records, ©1967.]
What Brecht actually said when asked directly if he was a member of the
Communist Party:
Mr. Chairman I have heard uh
my colleagues uh, uhh, and
they consider this question not
as proper, but, I am a guest in
this country and do not want to
enter in any legal argument, so
I will answer your question
fully, as well I can. I was not a
member, or am not a member,
of any Communist party.
Technically he did not lie; he was
never a card-carrying member of the
Communist Party of any country, but
he deliberately underplayed the Marxist themes in many of his plays and
poems.
Photos: Brecht and his signature cigar before HUAC.
Photo Life Magazine; J. Robert Oppenheimer.
In 1942, Dr. J. Robert
Oppenheimer became Scientific
Director of the Manhattan Project
in Los Alamos, New Mexico and
was instructed to develop the
world’s first atomic bomb. The
FBI watched him closely,
suspecting he had Communist
sympathies. He and his team were
successful in their quest, and in
July 1945 detonated the first test
bomb. Oppenheimer later said of
this test in a television interview:
We knew the world would
not be the same. A few people
laughed, a few people cried. Most
people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture,
the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he
should do his duty, and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed
form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The bomb’s role in World War II made Oppenheimer a national hero.
Although he had moral trepidations about the bomb, in 1949, he still
believed that science must ultimately be free:
There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place
for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask
any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to
correct any errors.
In 1950, however, Oppenheimer opposed Truman’s decision to pursue
development of the hydrogen bomb and spoke out against the escalating
arms race. His loyalty was questioned, the FBI documents on him
surfaced, and he was subjected in 1954 to nearly a month of hearings
resulting in the revocation of his security clearance, despite the
committee’s inability to determine concrete wrongdoing. Brecht wrote
about Oppenheimer in his journal in July 1954:
he had moral objections to the hydrogen bomb and now he has
been packed off to the wilderness. his document reads as if it was
by a man who stands accused by a tribe of cannibals of having
refused to go for the meat. and then claims by way of excuse that
during the manhunt he was only collecting firewood for the
cauldron. what darkness (Bertolt Brecht Journals. Trans. Hugh
Rorrison; ed. John Willett. New York: Routledge, 1993, 458-459).

GALILEO: THE UNMAKING OF HEROES
by Dassia N. Posner, CRT Dramaturg
Galileo’s daughter never had a fiancé; she was a nun. Andrea Sarti
did not smuggle the Discorsi out of Italy. Galileo’s contemporaries were
not even especially concerned that humankind would suddenly be removed
from the center of the universe. Brecht’s play is full of dates and citations
from historical documents that give the air of accuracy, while much of its
content is a selectively fictionalized account of Galileo’s life. Why, then, is
this play called Galileo?
While some historians and scientists remain outraged by Brecht’s
seemingly insolent distortion of the facts of Galileo’s life, the playwright
viewed the life of such a hero as rich fodder for the kind of altering we all
engage in when we recount mythology. Would viewers be as upset if we
told the story of the three little wolves and the big bad pig, or of Medea and
Jason calmly resolving their issues in therapy? Treating the history of a
universal hero as mythology made it possible for Brecht to comment on his
own times. The Life of Galileo, for Brecht, thus had little to do with the life
of Galileo. It had much more to do with the life and times of Bertolt
Brecht.
Even more enlightening is the manner in which Brecht consistently
subverts the traditional notion of the hero in Galileo. His Galileo is a
complex, conflicted individual who is both pragmatic and aware of his
betrayal of the people whom science is supposed to benefit. This Galileo
finds himself placed by Brecht at the center of an argument over the
responsibility of the scientist not only to seek truth, but also to use that truth
for the benefit of humanity. It is no accident that most of the people
Galileo surrounds himself with in this version come from humble origins.
This Galileo is not a feeble victim of those who would repress truth, but is
much worse: he is one who knows the truth and still does not speak it.
Galileo has been called the most Aristotelian of Brecht’s plays.
Once again, however, Brecht uses the classical structure of tragedy
specifically in order to subvert it. Galileo would seem to be a tragic hero,
but beginning in the very first scene, there is nothing noble in his
opportunism. The play has a reversal, but it takes place with Galileo
offstage, while we see only Galileo’s followers waiting with agonizing
hope. Even when Andrea Sarti comes to see Galileo at the end of the play,
desperately seeking to forgive Galileo once he learns of his new book, the
scientist refuses to allow Sarti to go out into the world with continued
illusions that there was
anything heroic in his
recantation. According to
Brecht, the fact that our
heroes have flaws is not the
problem; it is that we put
them on a pedestal to begin
with.
Lastly, there are
deliberate religious parallels
between Galileo and his
followers and Jesus and his
disciples. In fact, the
primary function of Virginia
Galilei’s religious devotion
is to play counterpoint to
Andrea Sarti’s similar
worship of Galileo.
Nowhere is this more clear
than in Scene Twelve, the
recantation scene, during
which Sarti’s scientific
catechism is recited over
Virginia’s Hail Marys. This
scene also has unmistakable echoes of the three Marys going to the tomb of
Christ, only to be informed by an angel that he has risen from the dead.
Galileo’s three followers wait for a similar resurrection, hoping that Galileo
will save science through his martyrdom, but Brecht’s Galileo is no such
Messiah. The only voice akin to an angel’s is that of the town crier,
proclaiming the text of Galileo’s recantation.
This year marks the 400 th anniversary of the astronomical
discoveries Galileo made with his telescope. It also marks the bicentennial
of both Abraham Lincoln’s and Charles Darwin’s births and 150 years
since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. During this
year, when we ponder the contributions to society of so many great heroes,
it could be that debunking them gives us precisely the perspective we need
in order to travel forward, regardless of how and when we have to travel
with “the truth under our coat.”
Photo: Frontispiece for Galileo’s Dialogo

THE LIFE OF GALILEO
by Friedeman Weidauer
In a series of loosely
connected scenes
spanning the years
1609-1642, Bertolt
Brecht’s The Life of
Galileo (Leben des
Galilei) depicts the
17 th -century
astronomer at work,
at home with family
and friends, and also
in conversation and
confrontation with
representatives of Italy’s ruling elite. Brecht completed his first version of
the play, titled The Earth Moves/ Life of Galileo… in exile in Denmark in
1939. In 1945-1946 he collaborated with the actor Charles Laughton
(1899-1962) on an English-language version, Galileo. The final version,
for his East Berlin theater company, the Berliner Ensemble, was completed
in 1956 and is a German translation of the English-language version
bearing the title Leben des Galilei. After the dropping of the first nuclear
bomb, Brecht made changes to his initial version, placing greater emphasis
on the central theme of the play. Historically, both feudalism and
capitalism have not granted science the freedom to be practiced for the
well-being of all members of society, since the respective governmental
rulers, church leaders, and business interests have frequently dictated which
projects could be pursued in order to further their own power or material
gain. Advocating a science free of such constraints, Brecht’s play
foreshadows a society in which science facilitates the liberation of all
classes from material need.
The play is chiefly about the role of science and teaching in future
social formations. As we have seen in the course of the 20 th century,
socialist societies have never been able to deal with the social leverage that
scientists hold through their control of intellectual property. Hence these
societies have to offer them positions of privilege to keep them from going
elsewhere. The scientists, in turn, were always easily tempted by the riches
society could offer them, even if it meant pursuing science harmful to
humanity as a whole. While agricultural and industrial property can be
socialized– by choice or by force– and transferred to the possession of the
state, intellectual property, in contrast, typically cannot. In this play Brecht
works to find a way out of this impasse. Science has to come up with a
method that takes it out of the hands of the few and puts it into the hands of
the masses. As we witness the maturation of the naïve Andrea Sarti, the
lower-class boy who has become Galileo’s student and subsequent heir to
his method of research and teaching, we also witness the emergence of a
new type of scientist, one who enables the masses to advance the progress
of science rather than excluding them from the process. This is one of the
main lessons Sarti learns from his teacher Galileo.
The other is Galileo’s method of doing research, which in Brecht’s
view represents a universal method for all sciences, as well as for the arts. It
is a way of looking at natural, social, and aesthetic processes as if for the
first time, by adopting a point of view in which nothing seems “natural.”
Galileo’s research and teaching method not only constitutes a new,
socialized way of doing science, but also embodies Brecht’s own theory
and practice of the theater, a theater committed to teaching the spectator
how to analyze processes and discover the forces behind them.
The play is also about how science continues to decenter the human
being. Just as Galileo’s teachings took the planet inhabited by humans out
of the center of the universe, so Charles Darwin (1809), Karl Marx (1818-
1883), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) decentered what had previously
been thought of as the autonomous, self-determined individual at the center
of human actions. This decentering, Brecht thought, would also pave the
way for the development of the human species into a truly social one, thus
dissolving the contours of the bourgeois individual.
Finally, one can speculate that the play is also about the Moscow
trials (1936-1938) that were occurring as the first version of the play was
taking place…. If Galileo’s fat in the face of the Inquisition did not remind
Brecht of the dangers some of his own friends were facing in a Soviet
Union dominated by the paranoid Joseph Stalin (187901953), then we are
left to think that the view of things Brecht intended to teach others
sometimes failed the playwright himself.
Friedemann Weidauer is editor of The Brecht Yearbook, Associate Professor
of German, and Chair, German Section at UConn. This piece was originally
published in The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007 and is reprinted by permission of the author.
Photo: Bertolt Brecht and Charles Laughton

CAN BRECHT STILL ROCK OUR (POST MODERN) WORLD?
by Andrew Periale
Verfremdungseffekt: a long word for a fairly simple (though much
misunderstood) concept. While translated as the “alienation effect,” this
needs a big asterisk; “alienation” here is not the dark, existential malaise
that sends one sprinting for the Prozac, rather it should engender the feeling
of being “from somewhere else.” It’s like traveling in a foreign country for
the first time. Yes, travel (and I mean real vagabonding, not those prepaid
vacation packages) is often uncomfortable and always at least a little bit
dangerous. But everything appears new and strange—every street sign,
food vender, beggar, bus stop—and the effect this has on our senses is to
make us feel astonished by a life we’d become inured to. We feel born
again. And that (I believe) is what Brecht wanted—for audiences to feel
that his theatre was something foreign and exciting, that they were
“strangers in a strange land” and could no longer sit back in their plush
seats and be lulled by a staged version of a life with which they had become
all too familiar.
Accomplishing this held different challenges for Brecht than it does
for us. He had merely to violate the conventions of Naturalism using a
medium that is inherently (and gloriously) unnatural. In Brecht’s theatre,
the very act of exposing the theatre’s lighting instruments to public view
was shocking; How do we shock a Post-Modern audience? WWBD!?
Happily, there are still artists who grab us by the throat and turn our
perceptions inside out. The techniques for making us feel like aliens in a
new country continue to be reinvented, and the proof of Brecht’s greatness
is not the “epic” or “alienating” hocus pocus he devised, but that we
continue to use his scripts to throw new light on our contemporary lives.
Galileo may be the best example—Brecht rewrote the script several times
in response to changing conditions. At the time of his death, he was
working on a third version of the play. Were he alive today he would
perhaps be adapting the material to expose the dark underbelly of Financial
Institutions “too big to fail.”
How will Galileo grab us now? That is the art of this company
tonight.
Andrew Periale is a playwright, poet, puppeteer and polyglot. Last spring
he worked as a dramaturg on Underground Railway Theatre’s production
of Galileo in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
EPILOGUE
Five years before Galileo built his first telescope and turned it to the
heavens, a new star appeared in the sky. This new star, or “supernova,”
provoked tremendous controversy, as the heavens were thought to be
immutable and only the earthly world changeable. The Collins English
Dictionary defines a supernova as “A star that explodes catastrophically…
becoming for a few days up to one hundred million times brighter than the
sun. The expanding shell of debris … creates a nebula that radiates radio
waves, X-rays, and light, for hundreds or thousands of years.” A
photograph in the lobby exhibit by Robert Gendler, “Thor’s Helmet,”
contains a star thought to be on the verge of going supernova.
As we have seen, Brecht’s new era was provoked by explosions of
a different sort; the atomic bomb “derives its destructive power from the
sudden release of a large amount of energy by fission of heavy atomic
nuclei, causing damage through heat, blast, and radioactivity” (OED). In an
unused epilogue to Galileo, Brecht described it differently:
Riding in the new railway coaches
To the new ships in the waves
Who is it that now approaches?
Only slave-owners and slaves.
Only slaves and slave-owners
Leave the trains
Taking the new aeroplanes
Through the heaven’s age-old blueness.
Till the latest one arrives
Astronomic
White, atomic
Obliterating all our lives.
(Reproduced from Manheim and Willett, eds. Bertolt Brecht. Collected Plays.
Vol. 5., p. 226-7)