Leben des Galilei

Galilei can prove it: The earth revolves around the sun – not the other way around. He challenges the authorities, the Vatican, almost becoming a revolutionary. Only once he recants, however, is a compromise between scientific practice and institutional political power established, marking the era of modernity. Which was it: brilliant strategy, hidden narcissism, or total failure?

Bertolt Brecht wrote his Galileo in the late 1930s in exile in Denmark and revised the play twice: first in the United States, later in East Berlin. Now, 125 years after his birth and 80 years to the day after the play’s premiere at Zurich’s Pfauen, Nicolas Stemann takes on the Life of Galileo. He asks about the political resistance that new ideas have to struggle with today and about the precarious relationship between science and power in the face of war, pandemics and hypercapitalism.