The Holocaust And "copenhagen"

In September of 1941, at the height of the Second World War, the world’s two leading nuclear physicists met in Denmark’s capital city of Copenhagen. Werner Heisenberg, then the head of Germany’s nuclear program, set up a difficult meeting with Neils Bohr, a Jewish Dane who had, at one time, been Heisenberg’s greatest friend and mentor. Their meeting, far from the watchful eyes of the SS and the hidden recording devices of the Gestapo, has intrigued historians, physicists, and at least one playwright for decades. This meeting serves as the crux of the 2000 Tony Award winner for Best Play, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. The play is a fascinating conversation between three characters: Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr’s wife Margarethe.

Awash in time and space, our characters

sometimes speak as ghosts in the present, at times as their former selves. Originally conceived “in the round” – a staging style where the acting area is surrounded by the audience – the characters of Bohr and Heisenberg move as particles around the nucleus of Margarethe, their dialogue centering upon that fateful meeting in 1941. Throughout the play, they explore several “drafts” of the conversation, sometimes following the recollections stated at various times by both Heisenberg and Bohr, but also diverting into possibilities conjured by the author’s imagination. Heisenberg began his relationship with Bohr in 1924 at the University of Copenhagen, fresh from his doctorate at the University of Göttingen. Bohr was one of the preeminent physicists in the world, having generally been seen as continuing the work of Einstein. Together, they formulated one of the core interpretations of atomic theory: the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics – today the most commonly accepted theory of quantum mechanics.

Bohr contributed the

theory of Complementarity – the theory that all matter and energy can be

Armato |2 postulated as both a particle and a wave as they exhibit the properties of both – and Heisenberg posited his famous Uncertainty Principle. “Everyone understands Uncertainty,” Heisenberg opines in the play.

“Or

thinks he does.” Heisenberg’s principle is commonly understood to be “the act of observing a phenomenon changes it;” however, more technically the principle states that we can never know everything about a particular phenomenon: we can never ascertain with any certainty both the position and the velocity of a particle as measuring for one necessarily affects the value for the other. This triune theme of Uncertainty – the common perception of the principle, the technical explanation, and Heisenberg’s emotional uncertainty – are major forces throughout the course of the play. While everyone thinks he understands Uncertainty, “No one understands my trip to Copenhagen,” Heisenberg continues. “Time and again I’ve explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margarethe.

To interrogators and intelligence officers, to

journalists and historians. The more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become.” In the years after his tenure in Copenhagen, the two physicists remained good friends. Heisenberg’s career brought him to the informally titled Uranverein – the Uranium Club – Germany’s nuclear program at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, begun only a few months after the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939. Bohr, on the other hand, had remained in his position at the Copenhagen Institute, and at the onset of the war, feared for his life as a Jew. Heisenberg was the most important nuclear physicist in Germany, and our character of Margarethe says that one of his reasons for the visit in 1941 was “to show himself off to us,” while the Bohrs were beset with an uncertain future in Nazi-occupied Denmark. While the race laws had not yet been enforced, Kristallnacht was not a distant memory, and the fate of the

Armato |3 Danish Jewry was expected to be much the same as in the remainder of Nazioccupied Europe. In Frayn’s first exposition of the meeting in 1941, the prelude to that fateful conversation is explored.

Heisenberg and Bohr exchange various pleasantries,

while Margarethe comments. The conversation quickly falls apart, as Heisenberg callously asks Bohr, “Have things here been difficult?” He asks if Bohr has had the opportunity to engage in his pastime of sailing, and the Bohrs remind him that the sound separating Denmark from nearby Sweden has been mined. Heisenberg goes on to ask if Bohr’s had the opportunity to go skiing, recalling that Neils had enjoyed doing so in Norway, not realizing that personal travel through occupied countries is no longer a possibility.

Heisenberg goes so far as to invite Bohr to skiing at

Bayrischzell in Germany; Bohr admonishes him, “…it would be an easy mistake to make, to think that the citizens of a small nation… wantonly and cruelly overrun, by its more powerful neighbor, don’t have exactly the same feelings of national pride as their conquerors…,” saying, “Perhaps Margarethe would be kind enough to sew a yellow star on my ski-jacket.” Heisenberg continues this scene by telling Bohr that he could “find congenial company” at the German Embassy, intimating that Bohr is being protected by his friends there. This scene is meant to reinforce the audience’s understanding of what was at stake for these two men.

It quickly characterizes Heisenberg as the daft, well-

meaning, slightly self-important victor, while reminding us that the Bohrs’ fate could very well be a gas chamber. In so doing, this is the audience’s first opportunity to align with either Bohr or Heisenberg, and Bohr is seen as the more sympathetic character.

While Heisenberg is quickly demonized, as the scene progresses, the

two rehash some of the lighter moments of their past, and Margarethe tells us that

Armato |4 “Neils has suddenly decided to love him again, in spite of everything…. [B]y the time we’ve sat down to dinner, the cold ashes have started into flame once again.” The audience, while accepting Heisenberg at arm’s length as a Nazi, has also decided to love him. Following dinner, the two physicists take a walk to escape the microphones the Gestapo has hidden in the house – these are the intriguing moments that form the basis of the play.

Our character’s historical counterparts have had differing

accounts as to the content of the discussion. While Bohr never said much regarding the meeting, Heisenberg’s recollections have portrayed him impossibly as both a hero of the Resistance and a dutiful German. In these seemingly disparate states of affairs Frayn explores both Complementarity and Uncertainty. “Ten minutes after they set out… they’re back!” Margarethe explains, and Heisenberg quickly leaves them – though, of course, he does not leave the stage. Margarethe asks Bohr what was discussed on their walk: Margarethe Something about fission? Bohr What happens in fission? You fire a neutron at a uranium nucleus, it splits, and it releases energy. Margarethe A huge amount of energy. Yes? Bohr About enough to move a speck of dust. But it also releases two or three more neutrons. Each of which has the chance of splitting another nucleus. Margarethe So then those two or three split nuclei each release energy in their turn? Bohr And two or three more neutrons…. An ever-widening chain of split nuclei forks through the uranium, doubling and quadrupling in millionths of a second from one generation to the next. First two splits, let’s say for simplicity. Then two squared, two cubed, two to the fourth, two to the fifth, two to the sixth…. Until eventually, after, let’s say, eighty generations, 280 specks of dust have been moved. 280 is a number with 24 noughts. Enough specks to constitute a city, and all who live in it. Heisenberg But there is a catch.

Armato |5 Uranium exists in two isotopes – U235 and U238. The vast majority of the uranium on the planet exists in the heavier isotope of U238, and this isotope is not able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction – instead of releasing neutrons, it absorbs them. On the other hand, the lighter isotope of U235 is extremely fissile – so called “weapons-grade” – but less than one percent of the natural uranium exists in this isotope, and it’s extremely difficult to separate. “Tantalisingly difficult,” Heisenberg tells us.

The difficulty of separating the two has convinced both men of the

impossibility of obtaining enough U235 in time to supply either side with a bomb; Bohr calculates it as taking 26,000 years, “By which time, surely, this war will be over.” Heisenberg claims that during their initial conversation he “simply asked [Bohr] if as a physicist one had the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy,” causing Bohr to jump to the conclusion that Heisenberg came to Copenhagen to tell him that he had the intent to supply Hitler with an atomic weapon. However, Heisenberg goes on to explain that he was building a reactor, “A machine to produce power! To generate electricity, to drive ships!” The uranium used in such a generator is the heavier isotope of U238 which would absorb the fast neutrons, and would be transformed by them into a new element altogether: neptunium.

This neptunium would eventually decay into another new element:

plutonium. “If we could build a reactor, we could build bombs,” Heisenberg tells us. He goes on to protest that Bohr’s conclusion was incorrect: Heisenberg is caught between his desire to do what’s right for his country and his revulsion at providing Hitler with the bomb. While Heisenberg currently controls the nuclear program at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, there is a rival polity at Army Ordnance, run by party

Armato |6 member Kurt Deibner.

Deibner has the zeal Heisenberg lacks.

“He should be

running [my program] anyway. Wirtz and the rest of them only smuggled me in to keep Diebner and the Nazis out of it. My one hope is to remain in control.” He continues: Heisenberg [N]uclear weapons will require an enormous technical effort…. [T]hey will suck up huge resources…. [S]ooner or later governments will have to turn to scientists and ask whether it’s worth committing those resources – whether there’s any hope of producing the weapons in time for them to be used…. [T]hey will have to come to you and me…. In the end the decision will be in our hands, whether we like it or not.

Heisenberg is hoping that Bohr has contacts in the Allied nuclear program – perhaps Oppenheimer can discouraging truth.

be persuaded

to tell their respective governments the

However, since Bohr had already assumed otherwise, his

response to Heisenberg’s question was to “mutter something about everyone in wartime being obliged to do his best for his own country.” Heisenberg returns to Germany, telling the Nazis that he can produce atomic bombs.

He stresses the

difficulty of separating the U235, believing the amount to be wildly unattainable, but tells some minor officials about plutonium, eventually asking the Nazis for such little money that they don’t take the program seriously. Heisenberg overestimated the amount of U235 a bomb would require by twentyfold, and he subsequently fails to calculate that the precise amount necessary is far less than he thinks – and thus that much more attainable.

He never builds a bomb, and the Nazis eventually

surrender at Reims. Heisenberg and Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation is but one of many current interpretations of particle theory – the other widely accepted interpretation is the Many-Worlds Interpretation – known popularly as the theory of parallel universes. In

Armato |7 this theory, every possible outcome of a particular event actually occurs within its own separate universe. Following this theory, there is a universe that exists where Bohr’s response energizes Heisenberg enough to make him calculate the exact amount of uranium necessary for a bomb.

Where he realizes that it is something that could be

achieved before the end of the war, and he therefore doesn’t sabotage the German nuclear program. A universe where Heisenberg returns to Germany and provides Hitler with an atomic weapon. In this theoretic universe, Hitler obtains the bomb in time to use during the war, and drops one on London and another on Moscow. This seals the Nazi’s victory in Europe.

With Nazism free to run rampant over the

continent, Hitler’s intention of wiping Judaism from the planet is an easy task. Today, Judaism is a footnote in the history books. After having grown up during WWI, Heisenberg was all too aware of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities.

In the play, he accuses Bohr and

Margarethe – and by extension the audience at large – of having no comprehension of what it means to bomb a city. The Bohrs had never experienced it, and nor have we. Heisenberg was well aware of the consequences of his actions. He was aware that the Allies were also working on a bomb; he was well within his rights to return home and provide the Reich with a bomb. Had he, the 6,000,000 lives lost in the Holocaust would pale in comparison to the subsequent carnage. It’s a stretch to say that Heisenberg’s Hamlet-esque indecision won the war for the Allies, but had he the zeal of Deibner, the history in this universe could have been quite different. In our character’s final draft of the conversation, Bohr controls his anger and asks Heisenberg why he never calculated the amount of uranium he would need for a bomb. Heisenberg never consciously realized that there was a calculation to be

Armato |8 made.

He finally calculates the diffusion, and, as Bohr says, “…suddenly a very

different and very terrible new world begins to take shape…” – one in which the Nazis win the war and exact their plans on the Jews, and, with them, Bohr and Margarethe.

Heisenberg’s failure to undertake this fundamental equation, in all

likelihood, saved lives. Frayn recognizes this possibility, and credits our character of Heisenberg with the salvation of the Danish Jews.

Georg Duckwitz, the attaché at the German

Embassy in Copenhagen who’d fought against the Jews’ deportation and convinced the authorities at Stockholm to accept the Danish Jewry as refugees, is attributed with being one of Heisenberg’s friends at the Embassy, intimating that Heisenberg was implicit in the rescue of the Danish Jews.

Bohr recounts their deliverance:

“When the ships arrived on the Wednesday there were eight thousand Jews in Denmark to be arrested and crammed into [the German freighter’s] holds. On the Friday evening, at the start of the Sabbath, when the SS began their round-up, there was scarcely a Jew to be found….

[Duckwitz] told us the day before the

freighters arrived…. He gave us the exact time that the SS would move.” Since the entire

German

squadron

of

patrol

boats

had

“suddenly

been

reported

unseaworthy,” an armada of fishing boats with the entire Danish Jewry secreted aboard was able to make safe passage to Sweden. Bohr So perhaps I should thank you. Heisenberg For what? Bohr My life. All our lives.

Heisenberg’s

duality

–

explored

in

the

play

in

terms

of

Bohr’s

Complementarity and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty – saved lives. He was both a dutiful German and a moral man – two variables which, in time of war, could not be measured simultaneously.

As we look upon that meeting in Copenhagen with

Armato |9 modern eyes, perhaps Bohr should credit himself with his own survival. While we’ll never know quite what was said, Heisenberg was left with the sentiment that providing Hitler with a bomb was perhaps not the best of ideas. When Heisenberg realized that Bohr wasn’t going to help him collude with the Allies, he should have returned to Germany with the intent to build a bomb faster than his adversaries. Instead, perhaps it was this reminder of his friendship with Bohr that dissuaded him, and, in turn, saved countless Jews from certain death in a gas chamber. acknowledges this possibility in the last line of the play: Heisenberg But in the meanwhile, in this most precious meanwhile, there it is. The trees in Faelled Park. Gammertingen and Biberach and Mindelheim. Our children and our children’s children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things.

Frayn