Frayn Takes Stock of Bohr Revelations

[Dave Monroe]

>From James Glanz, "Frayn Takes Stock of Bohr
Revelations," New York Times, Saturday, February 9th,
2002 ...

Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, was known to
push his scientific debates mercilessly, pursuing at
least one colleague to his sickbed to drive home a
point. Michael Frayn portrayed him exactly that way in
a play about an argument between the dead spirits of
Bohr and two others over what happened in a hazily
recalled meeting that they had in September 1941 in
Copenhagen, which was then occupied by the Nazis. 

Even a writer of Mr. Frayn's considerable powers,
however, could not have taken into account the chance
that the unmistakable voice of the real Bohr might be
heard from beyond the grave pressing his version of
events — demanding a few more lines, as it were —
after the play, "Copenhagen," had already finished its
award-winning Broadway run and set out on a national
tour. 

Bohr's rogue soliloquy is included in a previously
secret series of draft letters released by his family
last week. The letters had been written but never sent
to Werner Heisenberg, the renowned physicist who led
Hitler's atomic bomb program and who went to
Copenhagen in 1941 to meet Bohr and his wife,
Margrethe, for reasons that have remained murky. The
uncertainty over what actually occurred in a
conversation between the two physicists as they went
for a walk is the central conceit of Mr. Frayn's play,
which had a healthy run on Broadway and is about to
open in Chicago and Washington. 

The letters emphatically express a view Bohr puts
forward in more restrained tones in the play — namely,
that Heisenberg's reasons for making the trip were far
from benign, and certainly did not involve moral
qualms over his (ultimately failed) program to build
the bomb for Hitler. 

"Bohr in life plainly remained angrier for longer than
I made him seem in the play," Mr. Frayn said in an
interview yesterday after having read the letters. "In
the play he seems to have risen above the anger he
felt at the time, and rather to have forgotten the
incident until he is reminded about it by Margrethe." 

"He plainly hadn't forgotten, and he plainly remained
extremely angry," Mr. Frayn said. 

Bohr worked on the letters in the period between 1957
and 1962. Despite the worldwide outpouring of interest
in their release, Mr. Frayn said, one thing they
almost certainly will not do is change the play
itself. Even the historical postscript to the printed
version of the play will not require much
modification, he said. 

"When and if we do another edition on the play, I
think I will certainly have to record that these
letters have been published, and we now have Bohr's
direct testimony as to what his feelings were," Mr.
Frayn said. 

At issue — in the real world of history, documents and
recollections — is the question of what Heisenberg,
who had been Bohr's protégé when they led a revolution
in physics in the 1920's, was up to when he traveled
to Copenhagen.

Thomas Powers, who wrote "Heisenberg's War," the book
that inspired Mr. Frayn's play, believes Heisenberg
carried moral qualms about atomic weapons with him and
was prepared to offer Bohr a deal: German scientists
would not build a bomb if their Allied counterparts
did not either. Ultimately, Heisenberg sabotaged the
German project from within, Mr. Powers argues.

Others believe Heisenberg wanted to "do a little
espionage," as the historian Richard Rhodes put it,
and learn about the Allied effort from Bohr, who fled
Denmark in 1943 and worked on the Manhattan Project.

Mr. Frayn points out that Bohr's letters confirm
certain elements of the meeting that were known from
other sources — for example, that Heisenberg made some
intensely offensive statements, at least publicly,
about the inevitability of a German victory.

But when it comes to what Bohr and many others later
saw as Heisenberg's roundabout suggestions that he
hoped to stop the German project, the letters
contradict him. In a draft made the year of Bohr's
death, in 1962, Bohr tells Heisenberg it is "quite
incomprehensible to me that you should think that you
hinted to me that the German physicists would do all
they could to prevent such an application of atomic
science."

That angry sentence, Mr. Frayn said, "appears to be
denying some claim made by Heisenberg." But Mr. Frayn
says there is no recorded claim by Heisenberg explicit
enough to have warranted this rejoinder. So in this
view, Bohr, the spirit, is left arguing with the wind.

As a play about the uncertainty and unknowability of
intentions — especially Heisenberg's intentions — Mr.
Frayn's "Copenhagen" is securely walled off from most
imaginable documentary developments, including this
one.

What does seem to be true in the real world of the
audience is that many theatergoers, especially those
who have not studied the war and are too young to have
lived through it, emerge from performances of the play
with an impression that Heisenberg has bested Bohr in
their otherworldly debate. With the proviso that he
cannot be responsible for how others interpret his
play, Mr. Frayn said, that impression may simply stem
from historical fact.

"Heisenberg didn't, in fact, kill anyone with atomic
weapons, or indeed any other weapons," Mr. Frayn said.
"And Bohr, rightly or wrongly, did actually contribute
to the death of many people through the Allied atomic
bomb program."

Which may — or may not — provide a window into the
mind of Mr. Frayn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/09/arts/theater/09FRAY.html?todaysheadlines




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