“I have sold, and you are a buyer.”
Reading Bertolt Brecht amid our academic freedom crises
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt (Ghent University)
“I have sold out, and you are a buyer,” says Galileo Galilei to his former pupil and friend Andrea Sarti in Scene Thirteen of Bertolt Brecht’s play about the scientist’s life. The segment is set after Galileo publicly revoked his heliocentrism in favour of the Catholic Church, and the audience finds the scholar taken prisoner in scarcely furnished quarters, with an Inquisition official sitting guard in the anteroom. Reflecting on Galileo’s life’s work, Andrea flowers his former teacher with compliments. What cunning Galileo has shown the scientific community! What a life he has lived! “Science has only one commandment,” Andrea says, “contribution. And you have contributed.” Galileo, however, responds with surprisingly sombre self-criticism. According to his own standards, the Italian scholar has failed: “I was never in real danger; for some years I was as strong as the authorities, and I surrendered my knowledge to the powers that be, to use it, no, to abuse it, as it suits their ends. I have betrayed my profession. Any man who does what I have done must not be tolerated in the ranks of science.”
Scene Thirteen is the second-to-last in Bertolt Brecht’s Leben des Galileis [The Life of Galileo], and it is probably one of the most important ones in the entire drama.1 It takes up the typical Brechtian themes of morality and compromise and connects them with thorny questions about the scholarly vocation. Reading it for the first time during the Easter holidays, anticipating a meeting of the CAT Project Freedom to Research at the Zukunftskolleg in Konstanz, I found its force and contemporary relevance striking. In the play, Brecht uses Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei (1564-1642) as the stand-in for a Great Scholar, a figure caught between humanity’s flaws and the ideals science strives toward. While Andrea sees in his teacher an example, Galileo rejects that thesis: he has failed to commit, fully, to his truth. He has “sold out”. And so, Brecht lets the audience ponder… Should the Italian physicist, instrument-maker, mathematician and astronomer—so often praised for his courage and resistance—have acted differently? Did he make a capital mistake, when he abjured his own theories and accepted the Church’s dogma? Or did he do the Right thing after all, showing cunning and ingenuity by smuggling out his work and playing the cards he had, while saving his own life?
Ekkehard Schall, Wolfgang Heinz, and Dieter Knaup as two Cardinals and Galilei (middle) in the play Leben des Galileo Galilei (1971, Berlin), Bundesarchiv [German Federal Archive], Image 183-K1005-0020.
new inquisitions
These are difficult questions, which have lost none of their difficulty in 2026. In the USA, a new Inquisition has emerged in the form of Trump’s Department of Education. American state censors proclaim to liberate universities from the “yoke of woke”, while the scholars whose concepts are forbidden are seeing their right to free speech under threat. How much are they supposed to risk? For what goal? Meanwhile, in European liberal democracies, other kinds of pressures worry academics and students. University managers committed to their brand of objectivity subtly punish those who speak their truths too courageously. At Stockholm University, University Property Management now includes the removal of political posters: “The aim is to provide efficient premises, accommodation and services that meet the needs of the University.” Whose needs are we talking about? Over the last few years, we have furthermore seen how campus police stand guard against students, kicking them out of the universitas magistrorum et scholarium, or how legal teams remind scholars to respect their (often short-term) contracts. The message to all is clear: toe the line.2
With his thirteenth scene, Brecht painfully reminds us how difficult it is to stand up to such pressures. Even the Great Galileo, of all people, betrayed his cause and chose personal comfort. How much, then, can we really expect from a scholar faced with all these pressures today? As any good playwright, Brecht prepared the audience for this question. In preceding scenes, the German Marxist playwright repeatedly reminded the viewer of the material conditions in which Galileo lived and worked; Galileo’s very real, historically specific, dependence on the rich and powerful. If we want to figure out the meaning of Galileo’s actions, Brecht seems to suggest, the question we must ask is not only whether Galileo should have acted differently. It is also: “Could he have?” What were his options, really?
history is cruel
With this move, Brecht’s work comes closer to our concerns in the CAT project, and one of the things we are frustrated with in debates about academic freedom—if I can be so bold to speak for my CAT team members Hampus, Audrey, Tobias and François. Often, debates on the topic of academic freedom, broadly defined, are dominated by concerns about political pushback, SLAPP-cases, anti-vax movements, state censorship, or even violence. Important phenomena, of course—scary, even—which demand courage as well as cunning. Yet in the meantime commentators often forget that being able to pay your bills and feed your family are crucial pre-conditions for any kind of academic work to happen. If, together with Brecht, we forget for a moment about Galileo’s fear of the Church’s torturing devices and look instead at the conditions that made his work possible in the first place, what comes into view is another, more social, and much more humbling, history of science. Who was the Italian Great Scholar dependent on, where could he go for protection?
Scene 10 is instructive. “The depths are hot, the heights are chill. The streets are loud, the court is still.” Galileo and his daughter Virginia stand on a staircase in the Medicean palace in Florence. An industrialist called Matti enters the stage, proposing to support Galileo for his services. Galileo, who had previously built a machine for Mr. Matti’s iron foundries, immediately refuses: “Offer honey to a bear, and lose your arm if he is hungry.” A second later, Galileo’s daughter Virginia is quick to remind her father: “We haven’t had this month’s salary yet—”. But the scholar sticks with his gut. He is not taking Mr. Matti’s money and prefers the support of his patron, the Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, on whom he has relied before. Galileo, we know, was indeed in the business of exchanging his reputation for that of the duke, rather than trying to sell off his engineering. In Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (2006), Mario Biagioli described in detail how Galileo, between 1610 and 1616, stopped selling his instruments and managing a student house as primary sources of income, and instead began to move within another economy: the reputation-economy of patronage. Seeking new opportunities and more fame for his work, the scholar strategically allied himself with the Florentine court.
History is cruel, however, and so is Brecht’s play. Only moments after Galileo refuses Mr. Matti, the Medici turn on him. The Duke refuses to receive the physicist at the court and a Lord Chamberlain descends the stairs. “Oh, Mr. Galilei, His Highness has just charged me to inform you that the Florentine court is no longer in a position to oppose the request of the Holy Inquisition to interrogate you in Rome.” Galileo is taken captive, interrogated and given a clear choice: capitulate or die. Tragically, his powerful allies in truth-telling let him down, and the scientist found himself vulnerable and alone.
no clean choice
It is in these scenes, which precede the austere self-condemnation, that Galileo (and with him the audience) finds out there is no clean choice available to him. What Brecht presents us with are different forms of dependence—different funders, different ‘funding regimes’, to bring in a term I developed in other writings—in which every choice demands the scholar to sell out. Brecht could not possibly expect Galileo to work for the industrialist Mr. Matti, who would chew off his arm and make Galileo complicit in the production of iron! Our author was a staunch anti-war activist, and iron implies nothing other than weapons and tanks. Nor did the poet really wish for Galileo to become Science’s martyr and die; at least I don’t think so. After all, Brecht let the protagonist himself proclaim that there is “no such thing as a scientific work that only one man can write”. So even if Galileo’s self-criticism hits hard—“I am a sell-out, and you are a buyer”—Brecht’s play appears to suggest that submitting is tragically inescapable. Galileo had no good options. All scientists belong to a “bargaining, whitewashing, death-fearing community,” the protagonist/author says.
“Welcome to 2026,” is what I think when reading that line. All human, perhaps we are still just that: bargaining, whitewashing, death-fearing. We live under government and take it one day at a time. Marching under the banners of excellence, we are dependent on our funders and afraid to find ourselves poor and alone. Yet such an uncomfortable truth gives little solace, not to Andrea who stands for a next generation of scholars, nor to the audience. In the end, the idea that we have to choose between cholera and the plague, that bravery is structurally impossible, serves only Galileo’s bad conscience.3 His self-hatred and denunciation of the entire scientific community can even tragically be read as Catholic penance for his betrayal; an atonement for his sins. We are flawed, in a flawed world, part of a flawed community! Or, as we find it in Luke 18:13: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”
Obviously, that cannot be where Brecht, the father of dialectical drama, leaves the play and the responsibility of the scientist. Nor is it where I would end today. Read against the light of the current constraints on academics, we can also take Brecht’s continuous emphasis on the material conditions in which we do our work as a call to action. Galileo deserves a harsh judgment because he insufficiently interrogated the political context in which he worked. Years on end, the scholar lacked the suspicion that is crucial for those who want to speak out.4 Instead of scrutinizing the patronage relationship in which his knowledge was turned into power, he optimistically believed he could get away with it. To make things worse, this naivety made him blind to his third option: to work not for Mr. Matti, nor the Medici, but to act as an intellectual in the service of humanity.
Notes
1 Brecht wrote the script for his Leben des Galileis twice. Once in exile in 1939, and again in 1945—in the meantime making important changes both in the portrayal and ultimate judgment of the main character. In the first version of the play, the German playwright (more or less) depicted Galileo as a hero of the resistance, who managed to smuggle the truth out despite the authorities forbidding him to do so. This was a courageous Galileo. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, however, it became impossible for Brecht not to look at the history of physics anew—and to set Galileo in a harsher light. While Galileo I was a “‘liberal’ defence of freedom against tyranny,” to cite Brecht specialist Eric Bentley, Galileo II became “a Marxist defence of a social conception of science against the ‘liberal’ view that truth is an end in itself.” It is in this second version of the play that we find the passage in which Galileo condemns himself as a sell-out.
2 The phrase “toe the line” means to conform strictly to rules, policies, or authority. The idiom likely originated in the late 17th or 18th century, primarily from British naval practices where sailors had to stand with their toes touching a straight line (deck planking) for inspection. See: https://stephaniehuesler.com/2014/08/16/toe-the-line-vs-tow-the-line/.
3 I thank my friend Markus Hansen for this comment on Galileo’s conscience. It is interesting to note that Brecht probably also struggled with guilt around his own political bravery, or rather the lack thereof. While Brecht spoke out against the rise of fascism in Spain, he, for example, never volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
4 The emphasis on suspicion is a deliberate nod to Michel Foucault. In a 1984 interview titled Concern for Truth, Foucault explicitly discusses a (historicist) ethics of the intellectual: “The work of an intellectual is not to mold the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).” See: Foucault, Michel. “The Concern for Truth [1984]”, 263-265.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bentley, Eric. “Introduction: The Science Fiction of Bertolt Brecht.” In: Galileo, ed. by Eric Bentley, trans. by Charles Laughton. Grove Press: New York. 1966. pp. 7-42.
Biagioli, Mario. Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006.
Brecht, Bertolt. Galileo, ed. by Eric Bentley, trans. by Charles Laughton. New York: Grove Press. 1966.
Foucault, Michel. “The Concern for Truth [1984].” In: Michel Foucault: Politics, philosophy, culture. Interviews and other writings, 1977-1984, ed. by L. D. Kritzman, trans. by A. Sheridan. New York: Routledge. 1988. pp. 255-267.
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