ARTicles vol.6 i.2b: Three Characters in Search of an Ending

In 1940, the Germans invade Denmark, claiming that they need to occupy the country to protect it from a British invasion. On an autumn night in 1941, two physicists meet in Copenhagen and — stop me if you know what happens. But no one knows, which is why everyone is still talking about it, even Michael Frayn. Why would the playwright of such farces as Noises Off undertake the impossible task of guessing what happened that night? Why would anyone? The mystery is compelling because these two physicists held the fate of the world in their hands.

Few facts are known: In 1941 Werner Heisenberg, the head of the Nazi atomic bomb project, arrived in German-occupied Copenhagen to visit his mentor, physicist Niels Bohr. They dined with Bohr’s wife, Margrethe, and then took a walk alone. The walk ended badly. Bohr’s son reported that his father returned from the walk with this conclusion: “Either Heisenberg is lying, or he is being used by the Nazis.” Bohr’s close friends feared that Heisenberg had come to pump Bohr for information about the Allies’ progress on creating a bomb and fish for clues that would help the Germans build one. In a 1945 letter, Lise Mietner, an Austrian physicist essential in the discovery of nuclear fission, called Heisenberg’s visit to Denmark “unforgivable.” Two years after the meeting, Bohr escaped to the United States, where he worked on the Manhattan Project, America’s atomic bomb operation. In May 1945, the United States Army arrested Heisenberg as a war criminal. Two months later, the U.S. dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The nature of the Bohr-Heisenberg meeting remains the topic of heated debate. The encounter might have gone unnoticed if not for a 1956 book, Brighter than a Thousand Sunsby Robert Jungk. In a letter to Jungk, Heisenberg implied that he had serious moral qualms about building a bomb. But many German physicists had emigrated when Hitler took power, and Bohr helped Jewish peers find jobs. Heisenberg, however, chose to stay in Germany. As a strong German patriot and national hero for his Nobel Prize–winning work, he held high hopes for his country’s future. Even after the war, he and his colleagues on the Nazi bomb project did not want to be seen either as traitors to their Fatherland or as war criminals by the Allies. Their ambiguous statements walked a vague line to preserve their reputations on both sides.

From compilations of carefully worded statements by German scientists, an argument has arisen that Heisenberg was morally opposed to the idea of creating an atomic bomb. Some have even suggested that he wanted Bohr to persuade Allied scientists to agree with German scientists not to build a bomb, by withholding information from their governments. Nuclear fission had been discovered only two years earlier, and only a handful of scientists understood it. In Heisenberg’s War, Thomas Powers claims that Heisenberg sabotaged German efforts at nuclear weapons. Others insist that the only reason Heisenberg did not build an atomic bomb was that he did not know how.

Heisenberg remains a villain in the eyes of many. Historian Paul Lawrence Rose cites repeated inconsistencies in Heisenberg’s statements after the war. He also notes a widespread condemnation of Heisenberg’s refusal to recognize the moral difference between Hitler’s cause and that of the Allies in such statements as “I certainly thought it a crime to make atomic bombs for Hitler; but I find it also not good to give them to other holders of power.” This attack on the morals of Allied physicists offended many, still spinning from the atrocities of the Third Reich.

As for the fateful meeting in Copenhagen, Thomas Powers hypothesizes that regardless of what Heisenberg was trying to do that evening, there was something he most certainly did do: he confirmed Bohr’s fears of a Nazi atomic bomb project. Powers explains that “Heisenberg, in talking with Bohr, betrayed at a stroke the single most important secret of the German bomb program — its existence.” This knowledge, if relayed to the scientists at Los Alamos, would have heightened the sense of urgency in their nuclear research.

In a recent interview, Dr. Peter Galison, Harvard professor of the History of Physics, presents another perspective: “I think that as a historian looking at these power relations, you can’t simply say: Heisenberg had one interpretation, Bohr another. This was a discussion between the conqueror and the conquered. That’s not a discussion between friends. Bohr knew him very well and respected him greatly and was horrified by what he thought Heisenberg was saying. Will we ever know the details of what was said? No.”

Michael Frayn distills this debate into an intense evening of theatre. He conjures Heisenberg and Dr. and Mrs. Bohr to examine what might have happened. As they search their consciences, the three specters employ the logic of physics. They apply Heisenberg’s Nobel Prize–winning Uncertainty Principle to their own memories. Dr. Galison calls it “a fascinating exploration of the unknown and the unknowable.” This January, the A.R.T. will welcome the New Year by investigating the past — real and imagined — with two of the greatest minds of modern history.

Katie Rasor is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

Special thanks to Dr. Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University.6_25