Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Blog Post #6

All of scene 15

During this scene, Andrea is leaving Italy with Galileo's book. The guard and the clerk needed to search his belongings before they could let him through. They notice that he has a lot of books and they lazily check the books. Eventually, they give up and just let Andrea through, saying "After all, what can be in those?'

When the guard said this, I was immediately thinking about every instance where I've heard "How bad can it be?" or "What's the worst that can happen?" just before something bad happens. I can actually hear Timmy Turner saying "What could possibly go wrong?". Keeping the context when this play was written (just before WWII in the midst of the rise of the Nazis), a question came to mind: is this a reference to Hitler and the Nazis? Is this Brecht's way of warning us that no one is immune to propaganda, advertisement, or any other for of persuasion, no matter how immune we think we are? Did Brecht choose to make us nauseously aware that we are reading a play because of this? Does Brecht think that knowledge in and of itself (to a certain extent) is a cancer on society?

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