© Cathryn Carson 2001
University of California, Berkeley
clcarson@socrates.berkeley.edu
This text was composed for spoken delivery at the conference "Copenhagen and beyond: drama meets history of science," at the Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen, 22-23 September 2001.
Abstract: Michael Frayn's play takes its place in a series of reflections on the Copenhagen meeting. This talk gives a brief overview of that history of representations.
My comments are meant as a preface to the symposium's real business, to give background for the speakers to come. I am aiming to provide an overview of the range of accounts offered to date of Heisenberg's visit to Bohr. This overview serves to sketch out the universe of interpretations against which Michael Frayn's scenarios play out. The goal is to provide common points of reference when we talk about drama and history. This task is made more necessary by the unfortunate absence of many people who have been influential in shaping these interpretations. I am uncomfortable speaking for them without their having the chance to reply, but I will try to do so as open-mindedly as possible.
So I am aiming to be catholic and expansive. But I am not trying to reach an answer to the question: What happened in Copenhagen? That is not the point of this symposium. Instead I am trying to show what approaches have been followed, what aspects of the story have been highlighted, what sorts of accounts have resulted. My own ineliminable point of view will come through here and there, but I hope not unfairly. (At the least, in some way I disagree with everybody, so I may be less likely to play favorites.)
Being a historian, I am inclined to fulfill my task by presenting things historically. I will sketch out four temporal phases, as I perceive them, in the discussion of the visit. And I will signal the different interests that have surfaced in each. My starting point is my essay in the volume Matthias Dörries edited, which dealt with the representations of the actors themselves.[1] For this symposium I will also trace out the second-order accounts, trying to show some structure to their themes and their foci.
I
The first phase: the rumors, challenges, and explanations of the early years after World War II. The Copenhagen visit was a matter for the scientists themselves — not just Heisenberg and Bohr, but also their colleagues. Stories spread through the postwar networks: stories told over drinks, in letters, in hushed conversations. Episodes were collected of Heisenberg's statements and actions in German-occupied territories during the war. And of these, Copenhagen was only one example, not always even the most interesting or spectacular.[2] The context that seemed relevant to the parties involved was war, occupation, National Socialist exploitation, and terror.
These political circumstances were also part of the context when Heisenberg wrote down his first postwar account of the visit. Recall that Heisenberg and Bohr met in late summer 1947, talked over the visit, evidently did not reach agreement. If Bohr made notes, we have not yet seen them. Heisenberg put down a version on paper.[3] This was the first telling of the story we associate with him. He went to talk to Bohr, he said, at a moment of lability in 1941, to ask Bohr whether it was right for physicists to work at exploiting nuclear fission. Bohr was upset by the question (so Heisenberg told it), broke off the conversation, and that was it.
When recounting the events, Heisenberg added that Bohr was probably upset with him to start. And that because of the political circumstances, which were still salient after the war. Denmark had been an occupied land; Heisenberg could see that this was part of the problem. And Heisenberg had come to Copenhagen (so he now noted) under the aegis of National Socialist cultural propaganda.
Admittedly, this was not just about occupation. Obviously feeding into the account was the matter of nuclear weapons. But the account was not always centered on that problematic, in the strong sense in which we have learned to tell the story since. That is, it was not necessarily centered on the physicists' presumptive power to bring about among themselves a proto-political understanding, nor did it focus on debates (already underway) about what Heisenberg understood about bomb design when. Those notes were certainly present in the early postwar story. However, they did not dominate. What interested people then, we need to remember, is different from what has interested us since.
II
There matters rested for several years. Dissension continued among the physicists, but it did not yet capture interest for a broader public. What ushered in my second stage, the beginning of the public fascination, was Robert Jungk's book of 1956, Brighter than a thousand suns.[4] The book was subtitled A personal history of the atomic scientists, and Jungk, a journalist and successful author, framed a deliberately popular account. His leading interest was in the breakdown of what he saw as an idyllic community of international science, as the nuclear physicists (in the war and with the prospect of the bomb) separated into hostile camps.
Jungk wanted to bring this theme home, present it palpably. In his hands, the Bohr-Heisenberg encounter became a parable. It was made into a personal tragedy, the destruction of a friendship standing in for geopolitical division. It also became the story of a chance for a physicists' conspiracy against their government. This was a conspiracy, as Jungk told it, gone sadly astray when a troubled Bohr proved unable, perhaps unwilling to pick up on Heisenberg's supposed offer.
Jungk did not get Bohr's side of the story. He did get cooperation from an initially reluctant Heisenberg. If you ask me, Jungk's account of the visit took off from Heisenberg's, but took it in new directions. I have tried to sketch how in my contribution to Matthias Dörries's volume.[5] Simplifying for brevity, I will highlight two things. First, Jungk stressed division over nuclear weapons at the expense of division over Heisenberg's behavior under National Socialism. The early postwar context was being displaced by the concerns of the mid-1950s. Second, Jungk parabolically dramatized the personal relation between Heisenberg and Bohr to suggest an irreparable break. I do not think the break was actually so sharp; from the archives I would say that the two men in fact grew closer again over the early 1950s. (Friendships survive without total transparency. That may be inconvenient for dramatic stories, but to me it feels like ordinary experience.) So far as I can tell, the Bohr-Heisenberg relationship by the early 1950s caused little comment among their peers.
I strongly suspect that Jungk himself helped provoke the final breakdown. That was because he was taken as speaking for Heisenberg. Against that Bohr by all accounts reacted sharply and swiftly. (While it is clear from 1947 that Bohr's and Heisenberg's accounts diverged, it is no accident, I think, that Bohr's famous angry draft of a letter was written after Jungk's book appeared.) I have tried to argue elsewhere that Jungk was not ventriloquizing Heisenberg, and that anyone interested in what Heisenberg had to say would be well-advised to pay close attention to the texts. I read this in exactly those letters that Jungk presented as Heisenberg's confirmation of his version in the new edition of his book — presented as confirmation in selective quotations while leaving out crucial sentences, such as: "I would not want these remarks to be misunderstood as saying that I myself engaged in resistance to Hitler."[6] Between the lines of those letters I also read a concern that Jungk was likely to tell the story in a way damaging to Bohr. Between the lines of Jungk's book, I think that is what happened.
However, this new account of the Copenhagen encounter was powerfully suited to the mid-1950s. It was now a dramatic story of opportunities lost for nuclear cooperation. More than that, it had a pronounced human-interest component. Jungk had originally started out, he mentioned in his memoirs, to write a work of fiction.[7] What one might call his need for dramatization found expression in the book that resulted.
As a dramatic story it then attracted public interest. This mode of depiction has carried through in the accounts that have followed. Jungk found a number of imitators or refuters over the next decades — for instance, in popular books, or of course television productions, documentary and fictional.[8] After him, when the story of the German fission project was told, the Copenhagen visit could not be left out. When David Irving (in the 1960s still taken seriously as a historian) tried to do so in his book The virus house, journalists inquired about its absence.[9] With the narrative model in place, every author since has had to address it.
Finally, the episode came out again in Heisenberg's stylized memoirs of 1969, which had nothing much to add.[10] The account now stressed nuclear weapons, which, since the 1950s, had become one of Heisenberg's issues as well as one of Jungk's. By the late 1960s, on the other hand, Heisenberg had less to say than he had earlier about the context of German occupation. He finally tried to downplay the personal drama that since Jungk had taken center stage. Heisenberg's memoirs were strangely depersonalizing, but that attempt, one can well say, did not work.
III
In the third period, the 1980s and early 1990s, academic historians took hold of the story. What marked this period were deliberate attempts to get scholarly distance from the previous decades' popular accounts. But the impetus was not just higher standards of rigor. The two main authors, Mark Walker and David Cassidy, would probably agree that they took on a specific task. That was to put the singular episode of the Copenhagen visit into what they took to be its historical context.
If contextualization was the strategy, the question was what this context would be. Cassidy and Walker have largely agreed: Heisenberg's actions in the Third Reich. Here there enter new impulses from the critical historical study of science in National Socialism, a program that was still in formation when Walker and Cassidy were writing, and to which they each contributed immensely. This form of contextualization is a contribution to the accounts of the Copenhagen visit that is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. Since Cassidy and Walker, any account can be criticized if it does not situate the episode in the context of the Third Reich from 1933 (or 1939) to 1945.
Walker, to remind you, fit the Copenhagen visit into two sorts of narratives. First, he placed it against the temporal evolution of the fission project, which he saw as advancing fairly steadily until no later than 1942. At that point, he argued, a reasoned administrative decision was made not to advance to a full-scale industrial program. This course was displayed against the backdrop of the German war effort: military successes through summer 1941, military defeats thereafter. Further, Walker filled out the picture of Heisenberg as spokesman (willing or unwilling) in the service of National Socialist cultural propaganda. That is, he displayed how the Copenhagen trip was one of several such, returning to the original core of the postwar dissension.[11] For his part, Cassidy in his standard biography placed the visit in the narrative of Heisenberg's personal evolution under National Socialism. This has included, as Cassidy has seen it, his attempts to secure acknowledgment for his discipline from the regime and his troubled situation in the Third Reich, having no great love for the Nazis but finding ways to cooperate.[12]
So contextualization of the visit became the new call to arms, once academic historians of science took it up. Indeed, this is the direction academic history of science has largely taken in the last decades, part of its professionalization story. I am not sure I would go so far as to say that contextualization is the historian's job tout court. However, it does seem to be where the discipline has ended up, and that shows in the retellings of the Copenhagen visit.
For both our authors, contextualization led, finally, to definite statements about why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen. This was (and is) possible because the relevant context was (and is), to their eye, well-defined and reasonably definite. This was not a story of individual moral qualms leading to a specific request for Bohr's advice and help. It was more a matter of a pattern of cooperation with the Nazis that brought Heisenberg to Copenhagen as a leading participant in a secret war project and the representative of a momentarily victorious occupier. Walker and Cassidy have been relatively less interested in the personal drama; that is not where academic history of science has ended up. Rather, though presumptions about Heisenberg's motives are definitely introduced, attention was directed to larger-scale issues.
IV
The final phase came with the joining of the debate in the 1990s, the immediate backdrop to Frayn's play and so part of our present. Among academic historians, the Cassidy-Walker account has proved the most persuasive by far. Among other commentators this is less the case. The Copenhagen visit has again become a central and sometimes singular episode. But finally it is presented in a plurality of interpretations that undermines (I would say) an easy consensus.
Thomas Powers's book Heisenberg's war suggests that Heisenberg deliberately sabotaged a project that otherwise might just have come to fruition.[13] In some quite clear sense Powers has picked up themes from Jungk. It has been easy to construct a tradition of journalistic apologies for Heisenberg. Powers's book is sometimes written off simply for that reason, which I think is a mistake. If I am an academic historian, I also want to see the evidence. Powers's own conviction in his story comes from intelligence sources that he considers academic historians of science to have ignored. They are, he says, asking the wrong questions. This evidence they in turn have generally considered less than persuasive, though they have not always bothered to spell out all their objections.
Heading sharply in the opposite direction is Paul Lawrence Rose's book of 1998. Where Powers is an award-winning journalist, Rose is a chaired professor. Rose's Heisenberg becomes the exemplification of the flawed German: whose nationalism and moral obtuseness, in Rose's telling, find much to welcome in Hitler; whose scientific misunderstandings, in his account, send the fission project off on the wrong track; and whose visit to Copenhagen, picking up a theme from some surrounding literature, becomes an intelligence-gathering mission.[14] Again there is new evidence. But there is much disagreement over its assessment. Again, however, the discussion has often gotten displaced by constructions of intellectual pedigrees of Heisenberg-bashing.
The last ingredients in the stew are the famous Farm Hall transcripts, now circulating with commentary from which they cannot be isolated.[15] When the British government finally released the documentation of the German scientists' postwar detention, their reaction to Hiroshima reopened speculation. The transcripts themselves read like a drama, with all the interpretive issues a drama raises. The debate over what they show (scientifically or morally) has been heated. Yet there are still stark discrepancies in what commentators make of them. And what they make of them often mirrors their previous positions on Heisenberg — a not unproblematic condition.
Comments
What recent episodes bring to the fore, more than anything, is the problem of interpretation. We are plainly faced with different historical narratives. The differences are based on two things. First is evidence that points in different directions — even within the Farm Hall transcripts themselves. Some pieces of evidence are hard to reconcile with others; and so we are launched into meta-arguments about how assess it. (Actually, it is idealizing to imagine that these meta-arguments are underway. More noticeable is the tendency to ignore the problem, I think.)
Second are different presumptions about the narrator' task that lead authors down different paths. Is our job getting inside Heisenberg's head? How? Or is it impossible? This is an interminable debate. I read Frayn's play as being as much about knowledge and self-knowledge as about a particular event in 1941. Then is our job contextualization? If so, what context? Context is not given, either. Finally, how much interpretive imagination are we allowed? Here academic historians have sometimes taken Frayn to task. But it seems to me that their own accounts are plenty imaginative, too. I sometimes wonder why they do not see this. My work has made me acutely attentive to it, in my own texts and (I would dare to say) in theirs, too. After all, we read the same documents and hardly agree.
I am not going to leave things as "anything-goes." Some accounts I find considerably more persuasive than others. But for the purpose of this symposium, what is interesting is not which ones. Nor do I expect answers to the questions I just posed. Interesting, rather, is how historians have dealt with this multivocality, and how Frayn as a dramatist has dealt with it, too. For my taste, Frayn's play may do this better than most of the texts of my colleagues.[16] With Heisenberg as the training ground for my historian's intuitions, I have ended up suspicious of straightforward answers. Exactly that, I would hope, can open up a broad field for discussion.
Notes
[1] Cathryn Carson, "Reflexionen zu 'Kopenhagen,'" in Michael Frayn, Kopenhagen: Mit zehn wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Kommentaren, ed. Matthias Dörries (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 149-162.
[2] For example, J.G. Crowther, Science in liberated Europe (London: The Pilot Press, 1949), 107-108.
[3] Heisenberg to van der Waerden, 28 April 1948, Goudsmit Papers, American Institute of Physics, College Park; memorandum [1948], Heisenberg Archive, Munich.
[4] Robert Jungk, Heller als tausend Sonnen: Das Schicksal der Atomforscher (Stuttgart: Scherz & Goverts, 1956); Jungk, Brighter than a thousand suns: a personal history of the atomic scientists, trans. James Cleugh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958).
[5] Carson, "Reflexionen," 153-157.
[6] "Ich möchte diese Bemerkung nicht dahin mißverstanden wissen, daß ich selbst einen Widerstand gegen Hitler ausgeübt hätte." Heisenberg to Jungk, 17 November 1956, Heisenberg Archive, Munich. See also Heisenberg to Jungk, 18 January 1957.
[7] Robert Jungk, Trotzdem: Mein leben für die Zukunft (Munich: Hanser, 1993), 297-300.
[8] A few instances: Virgilio Sabel, "History of the atomic bomb," Premio Italia Televisivo, 1963; Robert Reid, "The building of the Bomb," BBC, 1965; Yves Jamiaque, "Point M," Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, 1969.
[9]David Irving, The Virus House: Germany's atomic research and Allied counter-measures (London: William Kimber, 1967); "'Gott sei Dank, wir konnten sie nicht bauen," interview with Heisenberg, Der Spiegel, 3 July 1967, 79-83.
[10] Werner Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze: Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (Munich: Piper, 1969), 245-248; Physics and beyond: encounters and conversations (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 180-183.
[11] Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the quest for nuclear power, 1939-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Walker, "Physics and propaganda: Werner Heisenberg's foreign lectures under National Socialism," Historical studies in the physical and biological sciences 22:2 (1992): 339-389; Walker, Nazi science: myth, truth, and the German atomic bomb (New York: Plenum, 1995).
[12] David C. Cassidy, Uncertainty: the life and science of Werner Heisenberg (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1992).
[13] Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's war: the secret history of the German bomb (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
[14] Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi atomic bomb project: a study in German culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For the spy-mission reading see also Arnold Kramish, The griffin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
[15] Operation Epsilon: the Farm Hall transcripts (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1993); Dieter Hoffmann, ed., Operation Epsilon: Die Farm-Hall-Protokolle oder Die Angst der Alliierten vor der deutschen Atombombe (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1993); Jeremy Bernstein, ed., Hitler's uranium club: the secret recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996).
[16] A post-conference note: This depends enormously on the performance. A few days after the Copenhagen symposium, a gifted cast gave a staged reading at the Humboldt-Stiftung's Heisenberg's centennial. The marvelous open-endedness I had previously experienced (in my own reading and in a presentation in Berkeley) congealed in this setting into a highly unambiguous affair. That had much to do with the actors and the audience, but also with Michael Frayn's post-presentation commentary. I liked the play much better before.