The Human Dimension to the Play Copenhagen

The Human Dimension to the Play

One of the things I really like about Copenhagen, as I say, is the way in which these wider issues of human understanding emerge out of the sharp particularity of human character and specific human relationships. The wider issues, in other words, are not imposed on the characters (who would then become mere spokespersons for ideological standpoints) but arise from their very human interactions.

Here the multi-layered nature of the relationships is vital. On one level the three characters we see are a family united by love. That Bohr and Heisenberg have a strong paternal and filial bond is clear enough (it's even announced in the play—and reinforced by Bohr's patriarchal authority in the science community), and Margrethe's response to this bond registers first and foremost as arising from the family dynamics of a partially estranged wife—estranged by the way in which Heisenberg has replaced her drowned son (perhaps drowned, we are led to believe, by Bohr's failure to take the bold step and dive into the sea to attempt a rescue of his son) and by the way the two of them form a bond which seems to shut her out (they pursue their scientific interests, for example, by abandoning her to look after two very young children, whose names Bohr cannot get right). She serves their scientific enterprise by typing manuscripts endlessly and by acting as the sounding board for their ideas, but there's strong sense of resentment in Margrethe, as if the success of the men in her life has come at considerable personal cost to her family (although there is no questioning her absolute loyalty to her husband).

So in that sense, the play is a family dispute, and there is a family explanation for the events of the play: that Heisenberg came to Copenhagen seeking Bohr's approval, to obtain his blessing, or, as he calls it, "absolution," or alternatively that he came to proclaim his independence and superiority over and independence of the other members of his family.

But, of course, Heisenberg and Bohr are also scientists, both collaborators and rivals (teacher and famous pupil) in the most exciting area of modern physics. One of the most interesting things about this play is the way in which it makes their collaboration in the glory years (1924-1927) so imaginatively exciting and intellectually stimulating. We come to understand that in those years these two, working cooperatively and as rivals, felt most gloriously alive. This emerges most clearly in the way this play links the pursuit of physics to creative play, to skiing, piano playing, duelling with cap pistols in a laboratory, playing poker, touring Europe in a huge international debate, with people rushing to train station to carry on the conversation—all these activities get fused in the excitement of an ongoing love affair between Bohr and Heisenberg and the science they are pursuing (which at this point has no relationship at all to politics or technology--the issue is a purely intellectual exercise, a supremely exciting intellectual game). One of the great attractions of this play (particularly in performance) is the way it conveys the genuine excitement of modern scientific enquiry—carried out in a spirit of intense rivalry but also fuelled by love, respect, and a sense of adventurous seeking after the truth of things, without the slightest thought of any practical consequences.

We also are given a sense of some of the cut-throat rivalry of modern science, where professional success, fame, the ability to earn a living rest on the publication of a paper, where rivals are dangerous (both to one's ego and to one's prospects), and where motives for particular theories are often obscure (Is the Copenhagen school a genuine melding of rival theories or an uneasy compromise stitched together for the mutual professional benefit of both parties?   Was Heisenberg's major motive for coming up with the Uncertainty Principle a personal resentment of a rival physicist, and so on?).

Out of this dimension of the story emerge more interpretative possibilities for Heisenberg's visit. Perhaps he came to Copenhagen to restore or regain a sense of that imaginative vitality in the great years, perhaps he is seeking direct assistance from Bohr in some scientific problems associated with his present work, perhaps he comes to Copenhagen to assert his new power and prestige in the presence of his old patron and collaborator—all of these possibilities arise naturally out of the conduct of the characters as we witness them probe through the evidence.

Beyond that, Bohr, Margrethe, and Heisenberg live in a sharply demarcated political environment in which the Germans have occupied Denmark and are on the point of moving against the Danish Jews, with ample evidence by 1941 of what that "moving against" involves. As a successful and prominent German scientist, Heisenberg stands out as a collaborator with the racist murderers determined to conquer Europe and exterminate the race to which Bohr belongs. We see clearly that the political situation places Heisenberg in a conflict (a problem which has aroused the suspicions of his Nazi superiors and earned him the title of a White Jew), but it is by no means clear where he stands exactly. For although there is no suggestion the Heisenberg is a Nazi or sympathetic to the Nazi, it is clear that he is a strong German nationalist, ready to compromise whatever distaste he has for the Hitler regime in order to protect Germany and to avert the disasters he witnessed as a child and to promote and advance German science.

Here again, mutually exclusive possibilities for Heisenberg's visit present themselves. Has he come to Copenhagen to co-opt Bohr for the German cause (by encouraging him to attend functions sponsored by the occupying powers)? Has he come to warn Bohr of what is in store? Has he come to glean some important information from Bohr important for furthering his research efforts on behalf of the Nazi regime? Has he come to pass onto Bohr information about the German war effort, in effect, to betray his own government?

But the most important (and ethically interesting) level of all these possibilities arises from the fact that both Bohr and Heisenberg are scientists working or about to work on weapons of destruction, putting their creative scientific energies at the disposal of politicians who think in terms of mass killings. They have both moved beyond their glory years of theoretical physics, when no one had to think about the practical consequences of the rival theories into a world where their brains are in demand by the merchants of destruction and what they come up with may well have the most painful and important practical results. The wonderful excitement of has changed into a race for power, and the game with the cap pistols in the laboratory has now changed into a game with massive guns and bombs, capable of unheard of massacres of the innocents. The purity and innocence and wonder of the science in the great years has, for reasons beyond their control, transformed itself into a quest for technological power of destruction.

So we are invited to consider further alternatives: that Heisenberg comes to Copenhagen to seek Bohr's assistance in stopping all efforts at nuclear research in the service of the war effort, that Heisenberg comes to Bohr seeking ethical advice about his participation in the Nazi atomic research project, that Heisenberg deliberately sabotages the Nazi program to keep the bomb out of Hitler's hands (like Bohr faced with his drowning son, he chooses to say on the boat and swing it around by the tiller rather than dive into the sea in a futile gesture to save people by joining the plot against Hitler); that, by contrast, Heisenberg's failure to develop a working reactor has nothing to do with moral concerns and everything to do with his keenness to get the reactor working and his failure to make the necessary calculations.

The play offers two different accounts for the Nazi failure to develop the bomb, both equally coherent: the first is that Heisenberg knew what he was doing and made sure his program would not be successful, the second is that Bohr deliberately withheld from Heisenberg (at the meeting) the information or encouragement Heisenberg needed to be successful. In the same way, the play puts pressure on us to distribute our moral sympathies in different ways: Heisenberg may have worked for the Nazis but he saw to it that their bomb project never reached fruition; Bohr was a persecuted Danish Jew who ended up helping to inspire and design the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alternatively, Heisenberg was a keen scientist working hard to resolve key problems for his tyrannical racist sponsors, while Bohr's scientific efforts on the bomb were either trivial (as he mentions) or part of a worthwhile cause.

While it is possible to list separately these different levels on which the characters operate (and others), in the play itself they are always manifesting themselves all at once. The combined result is a very complex sense of all sorts of different permutations and combinations of forces which might have led in one direction or another—and the play steadfastly refuses to privilege one or the other (in fact, the way in which Frayn can present with equal intensity conflicting possibilities is very eloquently rendered here, for example, Heisenberg's excitement about how he might have succeeded with the reactor played off against his equally evocative defence of his conduct as stalling the German atomic research effort).