+1 862 207 3288 the play Copenhagen (1998) by Michael Frayn
The following extract is taken from the play Copenhagen (1998) by Michael Frayn. Through several shifts in time, the play offers Frayn’s dramatisation of an actual meeting which took place in the midst of World War Two in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen on 17 September 1941 between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. After the war, both Bohr and Heisenberg gave very different versions of what occurred at the meeting and the exact purpose of Heisenberg’s visit has never been fully understood. Characters: NIELS BOHR (1885–1962): Danish theoretical physicist, based in Copenhagen until 1943 when he escaped to America and worked on the Allies’ atomic bomb programme. WERNER HEISENBERG (1901–1976): German theoretical physicist and former colleague of Niels Bohr. Nine months after this meeting with Bohr, Heisenberg convinced the Nazi government that a German atom bomb could not be made before the end of the war. Heisenberg was eventually captured by the Allies in April 1945 and was thereafter shunned by many in the scientific community. MARGRETHE BOHR (1890–1984): wife of Niels Bohr. Read the extract carefully and then answer the question that follows it (Page thirty-two). Extract from Copenhagen MARGRETHE: But why? BOHR: You’re still thinking about it? MARGRETHE: Why did he come to Copenhagen? BOHR: Does it matter, my love, now we’re all three of us dead and gone? ACT ONE
5 MARGRETHE: Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life. BOHR: Some questions have no answers to find. MARGRETHE: Why did he come? What was he trying to tell you? BOHR: He did explain later.
10 MARGRETHE: He explained over and over again. Each time he explained it became more obscure. BOHR: It was probably very simple, when you come right down to it: he wanted to have a talk. MARGRETHE: A talk? To the enemy? In the middle of a war? MARGRETHE: It was 1941! BOHR: Heisenberg was one of our oldest friends. MARGRETHE: Heisenberg was German. We were Danes. We were under German occupation.
15 BOHR: Margrethe, my love, we were scarcely the enemy.
20 BOHR: It put us in a difficult position, certainly. [X270/13/01] Page twenty-six
MARGRETHE: I’ve never seen you as angry with anyone as you were with Heisenberg that night. BOHR: Not to disagree, but I believe I remained remarkably calm. MARGRETHE: I know when you’re angry. MARGRETHE: So why did he do it? Now no one can be hurt, now no one can be betrayed. BOHR: I doubt if he ever really knew himself.
25 BOHR: It was as difficult for him as it was for us.
MARGRETHE: And he wasn’t a friend. Not after that visit. That was the end of the famous friendship between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. 30 HEISENBERG: Now we’re all dead and gone, yes, and there are only two things the world remembers about me. One is the uncertainty principle, and the other is my mysterious visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. Everyone understands uncertainty. Or thinks he does. No one understands my trip to Copenhagen. 35 Time and time again I’ve explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margrethe. To interrogators and intelligence officers, to journalists and historians. The more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt. Now we’re all dead and gone. Now no one can be hurt, now no one can be betrayed.
40 MARGRETHE: I never entirely liked him, you know. Perhaps I can say that to you now. BOHR: Yes, you did. When he was first here in the twenties? Of course you did. On the beach at Tisvilde with us and the boys? He was one of the family. MARGRETHE: Something alien about him, even then. MARGRETHE: Too quick. Too eager. BOHR: Those bright watchful eyes. MARGRETHE: Too bright. Too watchful. BOHR: Well, he was a very great physicist. I never changed my mind about that.
45 BOHR: So quick and eager.
50 MARGRETHE: They were all good, all the people who came to Copenhagen to work with you. You had most of the great pioneers in atomic theory here at one time or another. BOHR: And the more I look back on it, the more I think Heisenberg was the greatest of them all.
55 HEISENBERG: So what was Bohr? He was the first of us all, the father of us all. Modern atomic physics began when Bohr realised that quantum theory applied to matter as well as to energy. 1913. Everything we did was based on that great insight of his. BOHR: When you think that he first came here to work with me in 1924 . . . 60 HEISENBERG: I’d only just finished my doctorate, and Bohr was the most famous atomic physicist in the world. BOHR: . . . and in just over a year he’d invented quantum mechanics. MARGRETHE: It came out of his work with you.
BOHR: Mostly out of what he’d been doing with Max Born and Pascual Jordan at Göttingen. Another year or so and he’d got uncertainty. 65 [X270/13/01] Page twenty-seven [Turn over
MARGRETHE: And you’d done complementarity. BOHR: We argued them both out together. HEISENBERG: We did most of our best work together. BOHR: Heisenberg usually led the way.
70 HEISENBERG: Bohr made sense of it all. BOHR: We operated like a business. HEISENBERG: Chairman and managing director. MARGRETHE: Father and son. HEISENBERG: A family business.
75 MARGRETHE: Even though we had sons of our own. BOHR: And we went on working together long after he ceased to be my assistant. HEISENBERG: Long after I’d left Copenhagen in 1927 and gone back to Germany. Long after I had a chair and a family of my own. MARGRETHE: Then the Nazis came to power . . .
80 BOHR: And it got more and more difficult. When the war broke out impossible. Until that day in 1941. MARGRETHE: When it finished forever. BOHR: Yet, why did he do it? HEISENBERG: September, 1941. For years I had it down in my memory as October. BOHR: A curious sort of diary memory is. HEISENBERG: You open the pages, and all the neat headings and tidy jottings dissolve around you.
85 MARGRETHE: September. The end of September.
BOHR: You step through the pages into the months and days themselves. 90 MARGRETHE: The past becomes the present inside your head. HEISENBERG: September, 1941, Copenhagen . . . And at once—here I am, getting off the night train from Berlin with my colleague Carl von Weizsäcker. Two plain civilian suits and raincoats among all the field-grey Wehrmacht uniforms arriving with us, all the navel gold braid, all the well-tailored black of the SS. In my bag I have the text of the lecture I’m giving. In my head is another 95 communication that has to be delivered. The lecture is on astrophysics. The text inside my head is a more difficult one. BOHR: We obviously can’t go to the lecture.
MARGRETHE: Not if he’s giving it at the German Cultural Institute—it’s a Nazi 100 propaganda organisation. BOHR: He must know what we feel about that. HEISENBERG: Weizsäcker has been my John the Baptist, and written to warn Bohr of my arrival. MARGRETHE: He wants to see you? HEISENBERG: But how can the actual meeting with Bohr be arranged?
BOHR: I assume that’s why he’s come. 105
MARGRETHE: He must have something remarkably important to say. HEISENBERG: It has to seem natural. It has to be private. MARGRETHE: You’re not really thinking of inviting him to the house? MARGRETHE: Niels! They’ve occupied our country! BOHR: He is not they. MARGRETHE: He’s one of them.
BOHR: That’s obviously what he’s hoping. 110
HEISENBERG: First of all there’s an official visit to Bohr’s workplace, the Institute 115 for Theoretical Physics, with an awkward lunch in the old familiar canteen. No chance to talk to Bohr, of course. Is he even present? There’s Rozental . . . Petersen, I think . . . Christian Møller, almost certainly . . . . It’s like being in a dream. You can never quite focus the precise details of the scene around you. At the head of the table—is that Bohr? I turn to look, and it’s Bohr, it’s Rozental, 120 it’s Møller, it’s whoever I appoint to be there. . . . A difficult occasion, though—I remember that clearly enough. BOHR: It was a disaster. He made a very bad impression. Occupation of Denmark unfortunate. Occupation of Poland, however, perfectly acceptable. Germany now certain to win the war.
HEISENBERG: Our tanks are almost at Moscow. What can stop us? Well, one thing, 125 perhaps. One thing. BOHR: He knows he’s being watched, of course. One must remember that. He has to be careful about what he says.
MARGRETHE: Or he won’t be allowed to travel abroad again. 130 BOHR: My love, the Gestapo planted microphones in his house. He told Goudsmit when he was in America. The SS brought him in for interrogation in the basement at the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. MARGRETHE: And then they let him go again. HEISENBERG: I wonder if they suspect for one moment how painful it was to get 135 permission for this trip. The humiliating appeals to the Party, the demeaning efforts to have strings pulled by our friends in the Foreign Office. MARGRETHE: How did he seem? Is he greatly changed? BOHR: A little older.
MARGRETHE: I still think of him as a boy. 140 BOHR: He’s nearly forty. A middle-aged professor, fast catching up with the rest of us. MARGRETHE: You still want to invite him here? BOHR: Let’s add up the arguments on either side in a reasonably scientific way. Firstly, Heisenberg is a friend. . . . BOHR: A White Jew. That’s what the Nazis called him. He taught relativity, and they said it was Jewish physics. He couldn’t mention Einstein by name, but he stuck with relativity, in spite of the most terrible attacks. MARGRETHE: All the real Jews have lost their jobs. He’s still teaching.
MARGRETHE: Firstly, Heisenberg is a German. 145
BOHR: He’s still teaching relativity.
MARGRETHE: Still a professor at Leipzig. BOHR: At Leipzig, yes. Not at Munich. They kept him out of the chair at Munich. MARGRETHE: He could have been at Columbia. BOHR: Or Chicago. He had offers from both.
MARGRETHE: He wouldn’t leave Germany. 155 BOHR: He wants to be there to rebuild German science when Hitler goes. He told Goudsmit. MARGRETHE: And if he’s being watched it will all be reported upon. Who he sees. What he says to them. What they say to him.
160 HEISENBERG: I carry my surveillance around like an infectious disease. But then I happen to know that Bohr is also under surveillance. MARGRETHE: And you know that you’re being watched yourself. BOHR: By the Gestapo? HEISENBERG: Does he realise?
BOHR: I’ve nothing to hide. 165 MARGRETHE: By our fellow-Danes. It would be a terrible betrayal of all their trust in you if they thought you were collaborating. BOHR: Inviting an old friend to dinner is hardly collaborating. MARGRETHE: It might appear to be collaborating.
BOHR: Yes. He’s put us in a difficult position. 170 MARGRETHE: I shall never forgive him. BOHR: He must have good reason. He must have very good reason. HEISENBERG: This is going to be a deeply awkward occasion.
MARGRETHE: You won’t talk about politics? 175 BOHR: We’ll stick to physics. I assume it’s physics he wants to talk to me about. MARGRETHE: I think you must also assume that you and I aren’t the only people who hear what’s said in this house. If you want to speak privately you’d better go out in the open air. BOHR: I shan’t want to speak privately. HEISENBERG: Shall I be able to suggest a walk? BOHR: I don’t think we shall be going for any walks. Whatever he has to say he can say where everyone can hear it.
MARGRETHE: You could go for another of your walks together. 180
MARGRETHE: Some new idea he wants to try out on you, perhaps. 185 BOHR: What can it be, though? Where are we off to next? MARGRETHE: So now of course your curiosity’s aroused, in spite of everything. HEISENBERG: So now here I am, walking out through the autumn twilight to the Bohr’s house at Ny-Carlsberg. Followed, presumably, by my invisible shadow. What am I feeling? Fear, certainly—the touch of fear that one always feels for a teacher, for an employer, for a parent. Much worse fear about what I have to say. 190 About how to express it. How to broach it in the first place. Worse fear still about what happens if I fail. [X270/13/01] Page thirty
MARGRETHE: It’s not something to do with the war?
BOHR: Heisenberg is a theoretical physicist. I don’t think anyone has yet discovered a 195 way you can use theoretical physics to kill people. MARGRETHE: It couldn’t be something about fission? BOHR: Fission? Why would he want to talk to me about fission? MARGRETHE: Because you’re working on it. BOHR: Heisenberg isn’t.
MARGRETHE: Isn’t he? Everybody else in the world seems to be. And you’re the 200 acknowledged authority. BOHR: He hasn’t published on fission. MARGRETHE: It was Heisenberg who did all the original work on the physics of the nucleus. And he consulted you then, he consulted you at every step. MARGRETHE: But if the Germans were developing some kind of weapon based on nuclear fission . . . BOHR: My love, no one is going to develop a weapon based on nuclear fission. MARGRETHE: But if the Germans were trying to, Heisenberg would be involved. MARGRETHE: Britain. There’s no shortage of good German physicists in America or
BOHR: That was back in 1932. Fission’s only been around for the last three years. 205
BOHR: There’s no shortage of good German physicists. 210
BOHR: The Jews have gone, obviously.
HEISENBERG: Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born . . . Otto Frisch, Lise Meitner. 215 . . . We led the world in theoretical physics! Once. MARGRETHE: So who is there still working in Germany? BOHR: Sommerfeld, of course. Von Laue. MARGRETHE: Old men. BOHR: Wirtz. Harteck. BOHR: Otto Hahn—he’s still there. He discovered fission, after all. MARGRETHE: Hahn’s a chemist. I thought that what Hahn discovered . . .
220 MARGRETHE: Heisenberg is head and shoulders above all of them.
BOHR: . . . was that Enrico Fermi had discovered it in Rome four years earlier. Yes— he just didn’t realise it was fission. It didn’t occur to anyone that the uranium 225 atom might have split, and turned into an atom of barium and an atom of krypton. Not until Hahn and Strassmann did the analysis, and detected the barium. MARGRETHE: Fermi’s in Chicago. BOHR: His wife’s Jewish. BOHR: Margrethe, there is no work! John Wheeler and I did it all in 1939. One of the implications of our paper is that there’s no way in the foreseeable future in which fission can be used to produce any kind of weapon.
MARGRETHE: So Heisenberg would be in charge of the work? 230
MARGRETHE: Then why is everyone still working on it?
235 BOHR: Because there’s an element of magic in it. You fire a neutron at the nucleus of a uranium atom and it splits into two other elements. It’s what the alchemists were trying to do—to turn one element into another. MARGRETHE: So why is he coming? BOHR: Now your curiosity’s aroused.
MARGRETHE: My forebodings. 240 HEISENBERG: I crunch over the familiar gravel to the Bohr’s front door, and tug at the familiar bell-pull. Fear, yes. And another sensation, that’s become painfully familiar over the past year. A mixture of self-importance and sheer helpless absurdity—that of all the 2,000 million people in this world, I’m the one who’s been charged with this impossible responsibility . . . The heavy door swings 245 open. BOHR: My dear Heisenberg! HEISENBERG: My dear Bohr! BOHR: Come in, come in . . .
250 MARGRETHE: And of course as soon as they catch sight of each other all their caution disappears. The old flames leap up from the ashes. If we can just negotiate all the treacherous little opening civilities . . .
Question Make a detailed analysis of the means by which Michael Frayn explores the Bohrs’ relationship with Heisenberg. In your answer you should pay close attention to • dramatic structure • dialogue • the significance of uncertainty.
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