Through Gammertingen and Biberach and Memmingen. Mindelheim, Kaufbeuren, and Schöngau. Across my beloved homeland. My ruined and dishonoured and beloved homeland.
Bohr My dear Heisenberg! My dear friend!
Margrethe Silence. The silence we always in the end return to.
Heisenberg And of course I know what they’re thinking about.
Margrethe All those lost children on the road.
Bohr Heisenberg wandering the world like a lost child himself.
Margrethe Our own lost children.
Heisenberg And over goes the tiller once again.
Bohr So near, so near! So slight a thing!
Margrethe He stands in the doorway, watching me, then he turns his head away …
Heisenberg And once again away he goes, into the dark waters.
Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over.
Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust.
Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children’s children.
Bohr When no more decisions, great or small, are ever made again. When there’s no more uncertainty, because there’s no more knowledge.
Margrethe And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?
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.
POSTSCRIPT
Where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events it’s reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history. So let me make it as clear as I can in regard to this play.
The central event in it is a real one. Heisenberg did go to Copenhagen in 1941, and there was a meeting with Bohr, in the teeth of all the difficulties encountered by my characters. He almost certainly went to dinner at the Bohrs’ house, and the two men almost certainly went for a walk to escape from any possible microphones, though there is some dispute about even these simple matters. The question of what they actually said to each other has been even more disputed, and where there’s ambiguity in the play about what happened, it’s because there is in the recollection of the participants. Much more sustained speculation still has been devoted to the question of what Heisenberg was hoping to achieve by the meeting. All the alternative and co-existing explications offered in the play, except perhaps the final one, have been aired at various times, in one form or another.
Most anxious of all to establish some agreed version of the meeting was Heisenberg himself. He did indeed go back in 1947 with his British minder, Ronald Fraser, and attempted to find some common ground in the matter with Bohr. But it proved to be too delicate a task, and (according to Heisenberg, at any rate, in his memoirs) ‘we both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past.’ This is where my play departs from the historical record, by supposing that at some later time, when everyone involved had become spirits of the past themselves, they argued the question out further, until they had achieved a little more understanding of what was going on, just as they had so many times when they were alive with the intractable difficulties presented by the internal workings of the atom.
The account of these earlier discussions in the twenties reflects at any rate one or two of the key topics, and the passion with which the argument was conducted, as it emerges from the biographical and autobiographical record.I am acutely aware of
Bohr My dear Heisenberg! My dear friend!
Margrethe Silence. The silence we always in the end return to.
Heisenberg And of course I know what they’re thinking about.
Margrethe All those lost children on the road.
Bohr Heisenberg wandering the world like a lost child himself.
Margrethe Our own lost children.
Heisenberg And over goes the tiller once again.
Bohr So near, so near! So slight a thing!
Margrethe He stands in the doorway, watching me, then he turns his head away …
Heisenberg And once again away he goes, into the dark waters.
Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over.
Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust.
Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children’s children.
Bohr When no more decisions, great or small, are ever made again. When there’s no more uncertainty, because there’s no more knowledge.
Margrethe And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?
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.
POSTSCRIPT
Where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events it’s reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history. So let me make it as clear as I can in regard to this play.
The central event in it is a real one. Heisenberg did go to Copenhagen in 1941, and there was a meeting with Bohr, in the teeth of all the difficulties encountered by my characters. He almost certainly went to dinner at the Bohrs’ house, and the two men almost certainly went for a walk to escape from any possible microphones, though there is some dispute about even these simple matters. The question of what they actually said to each other has been even more disputed, and where there’s ambiguity in the play about what happened, it’s because there is in the recollection of the participants. Much more sustained speculation still has been devoted to the question of what Heisenberg was hoping to achieve by the meeting. All the alternative and co-existing explications offered in the play, except perhaps the final one, have been aired at various times, in one form or another.
Most anxious of all to establish some agreed version of the meeting was Heisenberg himself. He did indeed go back in 1947 with his British minder, Ronald Fraser, and attempted to find some common ground in the matter with Bohr. But it proved to be too delicate a task, and (according to Heisenberg, at any rate, in his memoirs) ‘we both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past.’ This is where my play departs from the historical record, by supposing that at some later time, when everyone involved had become spirits of the past themselves, they argued the question out further, until they had achieved a little more understanding of what was going on, just as they had so many times when they were alive with the intractable difficulties presented by the internal workings of the atom.
The account of these earlier discussions in the twenties reflects at any rate one or two of the key topics, and the passion with which the argument was conducted, as it emerges from the biographical and autobiographical record.I am acutely aware of
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