Copenhagen
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Historically, only a few facts about the meeting are known. Heisenberg, who’d been Bohr’s student in the 1920s, was head of Hitler’s nuclear program when he visited Denmark to deliver a lecture at a conference. He also got clearance to meet with Bohr, a half-Jewish Dane who discovered nuclear fission–a man Hitler could only have viewed as a serious threat. Though not a Nazi, Heisenberg was a staunch patriot, and Bohr was so alarmed by his discussion of the German nuclear program–just acknowledging its existence to an enemy scientist was treason–that he cut the meeting short. Heisenberg returned to Germany, and Bohr stayed in Copenhagen until he escaped to America in 1943 and joined the Manhattan Project. The 1941 meeting, which the director of the Niels Bohr Institute characterized in a 2002 essay as “comparatively trivial,” resulted in little beyond hurt feelings that mended quickly: the two scientists visited each other many times after the war and even vacationed together in Greece. Yet Frayn repeatedly asserts that the meeting destroyed their friendship.
Over the past 65 years many theories have been advanced about Heisenberg’s motives in contacting Bohr, and Frayn alludes to all of them: the ethical complexities here are compelling, if you can stomach the play’s improbabilities. Perhaps Heisenberg wanted reassurance from his colleague that the technical challenges to creating atomic weapons were nearly insurmountable, which might have been a relief to him. Perhaps he was seeking moral guidance: Heisenberg asserted years later that his first question to Bohr was “whether or not it was right for physicists to devote themselves in wartime to the uranium problem.” Or maybe he was spying for the Nazis, hoping to learn something about the status of weapons research in the United States and Britain. Perhaps he was trying to persuade Bohr to join the German effort, because in Bohr’s recollection, Heisenberg asserted that German victory was certain and that the war would probably be decided with atomic weapons. One speculation, which seems highly unlikely given that Heisenberg knew how many Allied physicists were working on fission, is that he hoped to forge a pact with Bohr to prevent development of the bomb.
Playing fast and loose with history is a dramatist’s prerogative. Where would Shakespeare be without it? But when a playwright abuses artistic license, diffusing tension and rendering characters implausible, it should be revoked.
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