Verified by 
“What people say about their own motives and intentions, even when they are not caught in the traps that entangled Heisenberg, is always subject to question…. Thoughts and intentions, even one’s own – perhaps one’s own most of all – remain shifting and elusive….”
Excerpted from Michael Frayn’s Postscript to a published version of his 1998 award-winning stage play Copenhagen.
The play has us wonder – just as historians have wondered – what compelled a brilliant German nuclear physicist to seek a private meeting with his eminent former mentor, in Nazi-occupied Denmark, in September 1941?
What were Werner Heisenberg’s motives and intentions for traveling to Copenhagen in an effort to meet with his former mentor, Niels Bohr?
Niels Bohr was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in comprehending atomic structure and quantum theory. In 1941, he was the esteemed head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, which he founded in 1920.
For years, in addition to his own research, Bohr provided considerable counsel and encouragement to young physicists from all over Europe. Scientific papers and drafts of imagined breakthroughs arrived for him “on every international mail-train.”
In the 1930s, Bohr was also doing what he could to assist those who were fleeing Nazi Germany.
Werner Heisenberg was the brilliant physicist and math genius who had become Bohr’s rising star, the boy wonder, in the 1920s. In 1927, Heisenberg conceived and explicated the Uncertainty Principle that bears his name.
He had returned to his native Germany where, at the age of 26, he became that country’s youngest full professor. By the late 1930s, Heisenberg was appointed to head the Nazi nuclear program; to research the possibilities of an atomic bomb – and to move toward the development of some such weapon to aid the Nazi cause.
Mysteriously, in 1941, he travels to Copenhagen. He suspects he is being watched by the SS. He suspects microphones have been hidden to capture the conversations he hopes to have with Niels Bohr.
Why did Heisenberg travel to Copenhagen to meet with Bohr – in September 1941, in Nazi-occupied Denmark?
Historians have pondered and debated that question, ever since.
A Psychological Uncertainty Principle: “The uncertainty of thoughts has much in common with the uncertainty of atomic particles.”
In the aforementioned Postscript to a published version of Copenhagen, playwright Michael Frayn observed that difficulties in grasping the uncertainties of atomic particles have challenged the most renowned physicists. Likewise, the uncertainty of thoughts poses challenges for psychologists, psychoanalysts, and neurologists.
Frayn asserted that complete grasp and understanding will still be elusive “even when everything is known about the structure and workings of the brain.” He maintained that elusiveness will not yield to grasp and understanding “any more than semantic questions can be resolved by looking at the machine code of a computer.”
And thus, historians, physicists, and political scientists still argue and guess as to why Heisenberg traveled to Copenhagen to meet with Bohr – in September 1941, in Nazi-occupied Denmark.
Michael Frayn’s 1998 stage play allows us to speculate about Heisenberg’s thinking – his possible motives and intentions
· Did Heisenberg assume that Bohr had at least some knowledge of the American atomic program, and did Heisenberg hope that Bohr might let slip the extent to which the Americans had advanced? Might Bohr intimate the “velocity” of the development, and the likely timetable for a possible deployment of the American bomb?
· Did Heisenberg imagine that Bohr had some knowledge of the Americans’ advances and setbacks, and might share the scientific discoveries with his former (and perhaps most-favored) student – in the interests of pure science?
· Was Heisenberg intent on gauging the obstacles to his taking over Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, in then-Nazi-occupied Denmark?
· Did Heisenberg hope that Bohr would share critical calculations that had, so far, eluded Heisenberg?
· Win or lose, was Heisenberg hoping that Bohr had notions about how they might monetize (profit financially and professionally from) their atomic brilliance and mastery, in a post-war world?
· Was the relatively impecunious Heisenberg hoping to secure a post-war livelihood for himself, even as he spoke of his allegiance to his fatherland?
· Was Heisenberg “feeling out” Bohr as to the latter’s willingness to come to his aid, and even his defense, should he be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the Nazi war machine?
· Was Heisenberg hoping to so alarm Bohr about the prospects of a Nazi nuclear weapon that Bohr would be compelled to alert and alarm the right people who would, in turn – most expeditiously – convince the Allies to sue for peace before such a Nazi weapon could be deployed?
· At great risk to himself and his family, was Heisenberg hoping to gain from Bohr the scientific means by which he could further delay and even sabotage the Nazi nuclear program?
· At great risk to himself and his family, was Heisenberg in Copenhagen in September of 1941 to warn Bohr and his family of the impending round-up and “deportation” of Jews? Was Heisenberg hoping to “feel out” Bohr as to the latter’s willingness to escape in advance of a likely mass “deportation”?
Or – some of the above? all of the above?
An atomic bomb – to build or not to build, that was the question
In Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, Heisenberg and Bohr recall their younger days when they enjoyed pastimes and family gatherings at Elsinore. Frayn surely meant to have us think of Hamlet’s dithering, vacillating – Hamlet’s wavering intentions, his hesitations; his angst – his uncertainty.
Even today, there is still considerable disagreement and dispute – uncertainty – as to whether Heisenberg was unalterably committed to building an atomic bomb for Hitler.
There have been those who attribute Heisenberg’s sticking with miscalculations and wrongheaded assumptions to his prideful math conceits. There also are those who believe that his premise and presumptions about critical mass, along with his miscalculations, were cunningly well-calculated.
In Copenhagen, Margrethe Bohr seems to credit Heisenberg’s falterings to oversights and inattention, obstinance and arrogance.
The woman at the center of the two physicists’ 1941 encounter
In Frayn’s play, Bohr’s wife Margrethe is wary of Heisenberg, who she describes as a self-important and devious “son,” come to visit “to show off.” She tells her husband that Heisenberg is “burning to let us know that he’s in charge of some vital piece of secret research” which he is guarding “with a lofty moral independence.” She has insights and forebodings beyond her involvement as the typist for her husband’s scientific papers.
Margrethe finds Heisenberg’s smile “awkward and ingratiating.” She tells us her husband’s initial smile “rapidly faded from incautious warmth to bare politeness.”
For his part, Niels Bohr tries to be hospitable, for old-times’-sake. There’s restraint, strained cordiality, more restraint, then distancing and hostility.
For her part, Margrethe distrusts Heisenberg. She is clear as to the younger man’s motives and intentions, even if the younger man is not wholly clear as to them. She is quite sure that the younger man wants something from her husband – something that may not be good for them or the non-Nazi world. She fears her husband is too indulgent, not sufficiently wary.
The stage is bare. Initially, the two physicists stand at opposite sides of a circle. They may be thought to be polar opposites in temperament and allegiance. They may be seen as orbiting around Margrethe who is seated at the center of the circle. Perhaps she is meant to represent the nucleus of an atom; with her husband and his former student as electrons or some kind of atomic particles, revolving around her. She fears that one or both of them will spin out of control. She is wary of a collision.
A Detente and Possible Reconciliation in the Afterlife
Michael Frayn has the threesome meet in The Hereafter, on the chance that, unentangled, past artifice, beyond betrayal, and with Hiroshima and Nagasaki as history, the Bohrs might mute their antipathies and Heisenberg might come clean with candor.
· Is Heisenberg spinning the past, intimating that, out of high-mindedness, out of regard for all of humanity, he continued to ask Nazi Minister of Armaments (Albert Speer) for minimal funding and thereby undercut his team’s efforts to develop atomic-bomb technology?
· Is the genius who conceived the Uncertainty Principle claiming that his conscience motivated him to be purposely careless and wayward in not doing the correct calculations? Were Heisenberg’s inaccuracies and inattentions intentional? Had those supposedly-intended failings allowed him to slow-walk and sabotage his and other German arms scientists’ efforts to progress to a viable atomic weapon? Did he succeed in not succeeding?
In the play, in death as in life, Margrethe Bohr isn’t buying it. To Heisenberg, “You were afraid of what would happen if the Nazis committed huge resources, and you failed to deliver the bombs. Please don’t try to tell us that you were a hero of the resistance.”
Margrethe Bohr’s psychoanalysis of Werner Heisenberg
In Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, the German boy-wonder is “sized up” and “taken down” by the wife of his mentor. “I’ve kept my thoughts to myself for all these years. But it’s maddening to have this clever son forever dancing about in front of our eyes, forever demanding our approval, forever struggling to shock us, forever begging to be told what the limits to his freedom are, if only so that he can go out and transgress them!”
She has told readers and audiences, “Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.”
Her “answer” as to Heisenberg’s psyche: Each time he offered an explanation for his 1941 visit, his real purpose or objective “became more obscure.”
She ventures that he came to his mentor – his “spiritual father,” his “father confessor” – to seek absolution. In disdainful refutation, she tells us, “I thought absolution was granted for sins past and repented, not for sins intended and yet to be committed.”
Werner Heisenberg’s claim that he was a savior, of a sort
In Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, Heisenberg claims that, in 1941, he warned Bohr of the Nazis’ likely deportation agenda. He intimated that he would be able to intervene on Bohr’s behalf – out of gratitude, and perhaps with his taking over the resources of Bohr’s labs and institute, in exchange.
To escape being murdered, in 1943, Niels Bohr had to “crawl down to the beach in the darkness to flee his homeland, like a thief in the night.” Margrethe continues her prosecution of Heisenberg: “The protection of the German Embassy that you boasted about didn’t last for long. We were incorporated into the Reich.
“Even as the fishing-boat was taking him across the Sound [to Sweden], two freighters were arriving in the harbor to ship the entire Jewish population of Demark eastwards. That great darkness inside the human soul was flooding out to engulf us.”
Werner Heisenberg’s persecution complex
In the play, Niels Bohr advises Heisenberg to tell his Nazi funders that a nuclear-arms program would be too difficult, too time-consuming, and too expensive. “Perhaps they’ll be discouraged. Perhaps they’ll lose interest.”
Did Heisenberg take his mentor’s advice. We don’t know. But there seems to be evidence that Heisenberg felt sorry for himself – for having had to endure years of hostility and reproach; in his lifetime and in his afterlife.
To Bohr, his “spiritual father,” Heisenberg claims he took great risks – personal and professional – in traveling to Copenhagen to lay out his burdens. In the play's 1941 visit, he claims, “I carry my surveillance around like an infectious disease.”
In Michael Frayn’s play, Heisenberg recalls that his 1941 visit was “a deeply awkward occasion.” He tells Niels and Margrethe that in his travel bag he has the text of an astrophysics lecture he is scheduled to deliver. He then claims that in his head there is “another communication” which he has to deliver, presumably to his mentor. He says that the text he is carrying in his head is “more difficult” than astrophysics.
In 1941, Frayn has him declare, “I’m the one who’s been charged with this impossible responsibility.” For vanity, did Heisenberg seek and eagerly assume the responsibility for building an atomic bomb for Hitler? Given the scientific work being advanced all over the world, are we to believe that a man of his genius and reputation had no choice?
Fusion and Fission for Thought
In his extensive Postscript, Michael Frayn referred to no fewer than twenty significant treatises, biographical volumes, memoirs, and official transcripts of war-time and post-war interrogations and de-briefings, which deliver some semblance of speculative certainty regarding the uncertainty of Heisenberg’s 1941 trip to Copenhagen.
In that Postscript, Frayn provided a wide-ranging and balanced landscape of views and guesses as to Heisenberg’s intentions and motivations. Frayn revealed what he consulted and what he relied on in crafting his play. He went on to explain what was beyond his play’s – perhaps any play’s – competence to resolve.
Generously, that Postscript’s bibliography was offered as a fount of information for dramatists and screenwriters. Frayn wrote, “There is material here for several more plays and films yet.”
The Tribulations of “the Father of the Atomic Bomb”
Playwright Tom Morton-Smith’s Oppenheimer was given its American premiere this past October, in Venice, California, at the Rogue Machine at the Electric Lodge.
Remarkably – on a small, confining but ingeniously-employed stage – a cast of 23 managed to orbit about J. Robert Oppenheimer; colliding with him regarding politics, personal relationships, management style, morality, and physics. As to nuclear science, however, his energy and power would seem to have been unassailable.
The time frame: 1939 to 1945
The settings: university faculty offices and homes; an out-of-the-way ultra-high-security army base, in the New Mexico desert, where a thousand people lived in timber-frame dwellings; and a remote nuclear test site where a detonation is simulated on stage and registers with the audience.
For those of us who cannot begin to grasp even elementary Physics, there was enough explication – aided by projections on the back wall of the stage – to have us begin to understand the scientific significance and moral implications of that atomic breakthrough.
The play opens in a lecture hall with Oppenheimer reading from Niels Bohr’s 1934 treatise Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature: “The task of science is both to extend the range of our experience and to reduce it to order.”
Oppenheimer stands downstage, front and center, addressing the audience as if we are the brainiest physics post-docs, math geniuses, and Oppenheimer-protégé-wannabees. Through the play’s curriculum, he will extend our experience of history, but will leave it to us to consider how to grapple with the moral and political issues, which would seem to defy reduction.
As to acolytes, and even to some colleagues, Oppenheimer forewarns, “There is no negotiation – no debate – with the complexity of the universe... I can make it clearer, but I cannot make it simpler. Let us begin.”
That can be read, heard, as the play’s mission – to make a bit clearer how the atom bomb came to be. But most certainly, the import and impact of that history are anything but simple.
“Critical Mass” – fuses lit on apprehensions, anxieties detonated
There is erudite but well-delivered super-meta-level dialogue about energy, fission, enriched uranium, plutonium, chain reactions, the release of energy, yield, blast radius – about splitting atoms. The audience does not incur splitting headaches, but is in awe of the complexity and enormity of the thinking that went into manipulating sub-atomic particles we cannot easily imagine, let alone actually see.
We got a sense of the tensions – personal, political, and scientific. Commitments and loyalties are questioned, challenged, tested, divided, and re-examined. There is discord: personality conflicts, rivalries, dissensions, ego bombardments and fractures; ego annihilations.
We are told that it may take ten-percent of the national grid to trigger whatever needs to be triggered in an atom-smashing apparatus that somehow contains, harnesses, and then can be made to release lethal phenomena.
There are high-security concerns and intrigues: Redacted correspondence and intercepts.
There are moral and managerial, personal and political dilemmas. Those who have been leaning way Left are advised, then admonished, to be far less vocal in their political views; far more vigilant and circumspect in their associations. Loyalties are again questioned.
Super intelligence (“the exponential power of mathematics”) is accompanied by arrogance which is partnered with a driving sense of mission, which requires suppression of personal and political ties, which entails personal and ego sacrifices.
And there’s trepidation: Just prior to intermission, Oppenheimer tells us, “I have it within me to murder every last soul on the planet. Should I not be scared?”
Atom-bomb agonistes – personal options as to nuclear options leading to a non-immaculate conception
There’s more intrigue: Something – a sketch? – has been smuggled out of Copenhagen. Is it Niels Bohr’s insights and tips as to how to build a bomb? Is it Niels Bohr’s cryptic to-be-deciphered warnings about what Heisenberg has been able to do in advancing the Nazis’ atomic-bomb ambitions?
There is debate as to whether “a static demonstration” witnessed by diplomats from Germany and Japan might suffice to end the transcontinental wars. There is insistence that such a benign demonstration would merely tip America’s hand and hasten Japanese and especially German efforts to counter with increased lethality. Would a benign demonstration suggest to Japanese and German “defense” ministers that insufficient progress had been made by American scientists to pose a threat to Germany’s and Japan’s continuing conventional carnage? Have Oppenheimer and his team managed to devise “the gadget to end all war”?
New nuclear ambitions – new apprehensions and trepidations
Given the 1944 – 1945 arguments made for and against “the need” for an actual grand-scale-life-taking detonation, playgoers are likely to wonder what, if any, cautionary deliberations are taking place in Iran and North Korea. Are there any qualms and hesitations being aired at those cyclotrons and enrichment plants?
Now, as there was 75 years ago, there is a “battle of laboratories” – a pitting of cyclotrons. But intentions and motivations may be even more ominous. Now there is no uncertainty as to threshold feasibility.
In 1945, a scientist was dispatched to Hiroshima, to measure shadows of those living things that had been vaporized. Do the reports of fallout and descriptions of those consequences register in today's laboratories, enrichment plants, and test sites?
Prior to those vaporizations, the play's Oppenheimer articulates an existential trade-off, his mission: “Every decision I make… every scratch on a blackboard… is life and death. Every second I deliberate over an idea… every moment of consideration or discussion… is a soldier in the Pacific dead…. Every order I place for chalk and for pencils is a frontline request for bullets that will never be filled….”
At the conclusion of Tom Morton-Smith’s play, "the father of the atomic bomb" gives us another take – an aftermath perspective in which pride gives way to horror: “If I have brought atomic power to the world… if I have nullified war… then I welcome it all. But… no… instead… instead I feel I’ve left a loaded gun in a playground.
“In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”
That’s the title of a stage play (a theatrical docudrama) “freely adapted” from actual transcripts of proceedings brought against “the father of the American atom bomb” by the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.
In the 1968 publication of the play’s translation into English (from German, by Ruth Speirs), the playwright, Heinar Kipphardt, assured readers, and prospective presenters and their audiences, that the play “is not an assemblage of documentary material.” He explained that while the play “adheres strictly to the facts that emerge from documents of the investigation,” he did “exercise his freedom only in the selection, arrangement, formulation, condensing and intensification of the material.”
In the play, following the 1954 AEC investigation, Oppenheimer states that his loyalty had been questioned as if just thinking about the role and commitments of government could be a high crime – “ideological treason.”
Speaking on behalf of many physicists whose allegiance was questioned (and for many whose loyalty was never questioned), Oppenheimer declared, “We have spent years of our lives in developing even sweeter means of destruction… I will never work on war projects again.”
The fallout from nuclear envy and ambitions
We wonder – we can wish – that there are physicists and engineers in North Korea and Iran who may pause and even be chastened by the remorse expressed by Oppenheimer, and others.
It can be argued that in vaporizing so many lives to bring about the end of a life-taking conflict almost 75 years ago, Oppenheimer hoped he had demonstrated a “one-off” – “a one-and-done” – for all time.
Can it be hoped that the scale of there-to-fore unimaginable obliteration gives pause to some nuclear scientists in North Korea and Iran? Will they find ways to sabotage the initiation of the grand-scale annihilation that their “supreme leaders” threaten?
We should rightly fear a political or religious centrifuge that spins irrational animus and fear, accelerated by fanaticism and megalomania.
It may be that a few nuclear scientists get to decide the fate of millions, and perhaps the Earth.
We can hope that a post-apocalyptic novel such as Nevil Shute’s 1957 On the Beach, and the 1959 movie adaptation of that end-of-life-on-earth story, will engender enough uncertainty to spare us what would certainly be the horror of horrors.
