Brecht's Life of Galileo is probably his most popular single work, both on stage and in print: in German, it outsells all other works by Brecht (2.4 million copies up to 1990). Yet it is also by far the most heavily rewritten of all his plays, with at least one turnabout in the ultimate horizon and intended message; Brecht was never quite comfortable with it; and he died in the middle of directing its rehearsals, not having (as I shall argue) fully resolved the play's horizon. The harsh vocabulary in his note of 25 February 1939, three months after writing the first version, can be taken as valid for all the extant versions:

Though Brecht all along believed with good reason that the final selfcondemnatory speech of Galileo's could — 'with a strictly epic performance' — subsume the empathy into this great figure under the necessary estrangement (AJ, 1, p. 27), he was aware that centrally significant ambiguities remained. A sketch of the three main versions, usually called the 'Danish', 'American' and 'Berlin' versions, may be useful here.