CUSH ING STROUT
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argument had the advantage of making them look better than the Allied
scientists, who not only had produced the bomb but had dropped it on
two Japanese cities, killing thousands of civilians. Frayn's play is in no
wayan apology for the German scientists, but it does provide an oppor–
tunity for an audience to hear Heisenberg's version of what he was try–
ing to do when he headed the German nuclear program and in
particular what his purpose might have been in his wartime visit to
Copenhagen, where he talked with Niels Bohr, his former teacher, sci–
entific collaborator, and friend.
"Why did he come to Copenhagen?" is the question, asked by Mar–
grethe Bohr, that opens the play. As it unfolds, the play enables the audi–
ence to think about Heisenberg'S visit not only through his explanations
but also through the critical responses of Bohr and his wife, who were
strong opponents of fascism.
It
is a fascinating mystery to unravel. Frayn
audaciously obtains imaginative freedom for exploring it by having the
principals discuss the problem posthumously in the hope of arguing
"until they achieved a little more understanding of what was going on,
just as they had so many times when they were alive with the intractable
difficulties presented by the internal workings of the atom." The time
frame shifts back and forth to recollections of earlier meetings in 1924
and a later one in 1947. At times the characters replay a past moment in
their history as if it were happening again. Conventional realism is fur–
ther rejected by having Heisenberg and Margrethe speak thoughts that
are heard by the audience rather than by the other characters.
The play requires the audience to understand something about quan–
tum mechanics and the historical situation of the time, while it also dra–
matizes the emotional currents that animate the characters, who are on
opposite sides in the war at a time when the Germans have already
occupied Denmark. Moreover, Bohr had lost his eldest son in a drown–
ing accident when they were sailing together, and his pupil Heisenberg
is in part a surrogate; while the German feels especially drawn to Bohr
as a father-figure with the memory of their collaboration in creating the
new physics. Heisenberg is also under the strain of working for a brutal
regime for which he has no ideological sympathy, while still having
strong patriotic feelings about his country. (These feelings kept him
from accepting handsome offers of professorships in America.)
In the play, looking back on the meeting of 194
T,
Heisenberg says
that what brought him to Copenhagen was knowing that "if we could
build a reactor we could build a bomb." Therefore he asks Bohr if
physicists have the right to work on the military application of atomic
energy. Heisenberg remembers Bohr "muttering something about every-
