When I was asked to
replace David Cassidy, because he decided not to come as a consequence of the
horrible events in New York, I was very hesitant at first, because David is the
expert on Heisenberg and my own contribution to the Heisenberg and Copenhagen
debate is rather marginal. But I agreed finally, because I think I know David
well enough—since about twenty years now—to have a feel for his work.
I am not going to read
his paper word by word. Instead, I would like to highlight some of his
arguments, in particular about the political stance of the historical
Heisenberg. Michael Frayn’s Heisenberg and David Cassidy’s Heisenberg, in my
opinion, diverge in particular in this regard. Despite this divergence,
however, David is full of praise about the play. He said:
„drama can add a
new and fertile dimension to history,”
and he is aware of the
different aims of drama and history:
“... while enhancing our perception of the past, drama can—and often must—also distort the past in order to succeed in the pursuit of its own aims and methods. Drama, as we know, is not history, nor should it be regarded as such.”
In the concrete case
of Frayn’s Heisenberg, David finds that
“the real interplay between fact and fiction occurs, not on the plane of externals, but in the realm of Heisenberg's internal intentions, thoughts, and motives during his Copenhagen visit. This is precisely where the direct evidence is weakest or non-existent, and this is precisely the stage on which the play unfolds its greatest dramatic effects.”
Nevertheless, there is
no room for arbitrary imagination, because
“we do have the advantage of familiarity with the person, which we can gain by observing him acting and reacting in different situations throughout his entire life. Depending upon our diligence, we can achieve fairly good insights into his attitudes, decisions, and personality leading up to and surrounding important historical events. The September 1941 meeting in Copenhagen did not occur in a historical or biographical vacuum.”
David, in his present
text, does not provide the details concerning these “important historical
events,” but he did this in an earlier paper, to which he refers in footnote 2.
Rather than reading David’s present paper to the end, I would like to make this
historical context of Heisenberg’s Copenhagen visit more transparent, by
quoting from David’s earlier paper. First, it seems necessary to clarify
Heisenberg’s political stance. This is how David summarized this attitude:[1]
“Heisenberg's
outlook throughout this period was very much in line with that of other
patriotic non-Jewish Germans among artistic, academic, and military circles...
As the German army blitzed across Europe during the early years of the war,
these circles welcomed the news of victories on all fronts. Final victory, they
believed, was close at hand in September 1941.
However, while this
cultural and military elite wanted Germany to win the war, this did not mean
that they wanted Hitler or the Nazi regime to win. They were not Nazis but
proud, upstanding nationalists.”
From this perspective,
Heisenberg’s Copenhagen visit appears in a different context, a context which
is not mirrored in Michael Frayn’s play:
“While emphasizing
the single episode—perhaps for good dramatic reasons—the play leaves out at
least ten other equally controversial visits that Heisenberg made to
Nazi-occupied countries and to German-speaking Switzerland during the war.
Among these travels were trips
To German-occupied
Budapest in 1941 and 1942.
To Switzerland in
1942 and 1944.
To the occupied
Netherlands in October 1943, just after the deportation of many Dutch Jews to
Auschwitz.
To Krakow, Poland,
in December 1943 as a guest of the infamous Dr. Hans Frank, general governor of
Poland, just months after he and his murderous henchmen had annihilated the
heroic inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto.
To Copenhagen twice
in 1944 after Bohr had fled to England and America.
To Königsberg in
East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in February 1944.
Historian Mark
Walker has pointed out, in a study of Heisenberg's war-time travels, that
Heisenberg undertook each of these trips to occupied nations, including his
trip to Copenhagen in 1941, as an explicit representative of the German office
for cultural propaganda. On several of these trips, Heisenberg is reported to
have made compromising and deeply painful statements to his foreign colleagues.
One of Heisenberg's Dutch colleagues later attributed the following statement
to him during his visit to the occupied Netherlands in October 1943:
Democracy cannot
develop sufficient energy to rule Europe. There are, therefore, only two
alternatives: Germany and Russia. And then a Europe under German leadership
would be the lesser evil.
One wonders if
Heisenberg really had anything different to say in Copenhagen two years
earlier.”
To me, this addresses
a crucial aspect of the entire Copenhagen visit. Although the details of the
conversation between Heisenberg and Bohr are not known, do we really have to
speculate about other reasons for the dispute or “misunderstanding,” as
Heisenberg later put it? Heisenberg, a representative of the German cultural
elite, visiting a Nazi occupied country and arguing for a Europe under German
leadership!? How could Bohr react other than with dismay? I have compared this
situation elsewhere[2] with a
situation described in a novel by Lion Feuchtwanger,[3]
in which two former friends meet in Paris in the late 1930s: The one lives
there in exile, the other comes as a visitor. Like Heisenberg, the visitor
belongs to the German cultural elite, like Heisenberg he is no Nazi, but has
made compromises with the Nazi regime for the sake of his career. I do not want
to strain this comparison, I just want to emphasize that one must not seek
hidden causes, such as controversial opinions with respect to nuclear bombs, in
order to understand why the friendship between Heisenberg and Bohr ended in
Copenhagen in 1941.
I do not know whether
David would share this opinion. He argues that the bomb question might have
been a second cause.
“So, what was Heisenberg trying to tell Bohr during this meeting, and what did he want from Bohr? The broader historical setting and a fuller appreciation of Heisenberg's outlook and relationship to the war and to fission research strongly suggest that he wanted to convince Bohr that the seemingly inevitable German victory would not be so bad for Europe after all. (...) What he apparently wanted from Bohr was for Bohr to use his influence to prevent Allied scientists, who were surely far behind the Germans, from working toward building a bomb that could be used against Germany.”
I think that we have
not enough historical evidence in support of such a far-reaching statement. To
me, the second cause seems speculative, and the first one sufficient to explain
Bohr’s dismay. David Cassidy is careful enough to admit some degree of
historical uncertainty, although a smaller one than to allow for as much
imagination as in the play. Let me conclude with his own words:
“The challenge then becomes to create a successful drama
of these events in which the uncertainty, or Unbestimmtheit, in the situation
is greatly reduced and in which there is no longer any significant need to
resort to pure imagination. But, then,
that would be a wholly different play, and
one probably much less enjoyable than Michael's extraordinary
"Copenhagen."”
[1] David Cassidy: “A Historical Perspective on Copenhagen,” Physics Today 53, no. 7 (July 2000), 28–32.
[2] Michael Eckert: “Wer für gemeine Ohren Musik macht, macht gemeine Musik...”, in: Matthias Dörries (ed.), Michael Frayn: Kopenhagen: Stück in zwei Akten, mit zehn wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Kommentaren (Göttingen, Wallstein-Verlag, 2001), pp. 166–174, on p. 168
[3] Lion Feuchtwanger: Exil (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Verlag, 1981), pp. 351–364. The novel was the final part of a trilogy, which was finished in 1939. See Feuchtwanger's epilogue, dated “Oktober 1939”, ibid., pp. 787–791