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sidy, the biographer of Heisenberg, thinks he wanted Bohr to use his
influence to prevent the Allies from building a bomb that could be used
against Germany. Other sc ientists think Heisenberg was doing a little
espionage, just trying to find out what Bohr knew. From this point of
view, as Bernstein has argued, "Heisenberg may not be the 'complex fig–
ure of the play,'" but a person who is easier to understand.
I would argue on the contrary that Frayn's complex view is all the
more pertinent, given the mysteries that still surround the meeting. Why
did Bohr never send his letter? Why did he wait until
1957
to explain
what he thought Heisenberg had said? Why did Heisenberg give Bohr a
rough sketch of the German reactor, which Bohr drew from memory for
the Los Alamos scientists? Was it a message that Germany was a long
way from making a bomb? Unlike the silence of the dog that helpfully
did not bark in the night, the silence of both Bohr and Heisenberg about
this sketch leaves their meeting fraught with ambiguity.
It
is this histor–
ical uncertainty that justifies Frayn's exploration of the possibilities with
their psychological and moral implications. Our sense of being at terri–
ble risk in a nuclear world and our concern about the way dedication to
technological prowess can blunt our moral sensitivities have given
Copenhagen
attentive and enthusiastic audiences for its dramatizing of
a historical moment of what might seem at first to be only an obscure
and transitory meeting between arcane scientists.
As fictionalizers of history, Tracy Chevalier, Max Byrd, and Michael
Frayn have in their own ways exercised with artistic effect a good deal
of poetic license, but they also have the merit of not treating that license
as a blank check. A reviewer of a current historical novel in the
New
York Times
complains about its author's long afterword, telling us
which characters are imaginary and which real. "We read fiction with
our disbelief suspended," the reviewer insists, "and most of us like to
leave it that way." The historical imagination, however, is not some–
thing the literary imagination can ignore in fictionalizing history,
because modern minds care about both. Only the best practitioners
know how to solve the difficult problem of reconciling and integrating
them.
It
is their artistic practice, rather than any critical generalizations,
that in the end can bring to life the point of Benedetto Croce's elegant
aphorism: "Poetry and history are, then, the two wings of the same
breathing creature, the two linked moments of the knowing mind."
