how over-simplified my version is. Max Born described the real story as not so much ‘a straight staircase upwards, but a tangle of interconnected alleys,’ and I have found it impossible to follow these in any detail (even where I can begin to understand them). In particular I have grossly understated the crucial role played by Born himself and by his pupil Pascual Jordan at Göttingen in formulating quantum mechanics (it was Born who supplied the understanding of matrices that Heisenberg lacked, and the statistical interpretation of Schrödinger’s wave function), and of Wolfgang Pauli in Hamburg, whose exclusion principle filled in one of the key pieces in the puzzle.
But the account of the German and American bomb programmes, and of the two physicists’ participation in them, is taken from the historical record; so is the fate of Danish Jewry; Heisenberg’s experiences in Germany before and during the war, his subsequent internment, and the depression that clouded his later years. I have filled out some of the details, but in general what he says happened to him—at the end of the First World War, on Heligoland, during his nocturnal walk in Faelled Park, during the Berlin air-raid and his internment, and on his ride across Germany, with its near-fatal encounter along the way—is based very closely upon the accounts he gave in life.
The actual words spoken by my characters are of course entirely their own. If this needs any justification then I can only appeal to Heisenberg himself. In his memoirs dialogue plays an important part, he says, because he hopes ‘to demonstrate that science is rooted in conversations.’ But, as he explains, conversations, even real conversations, cannot be reconstructed literally several decades later. So he freely reinvents them, and appeals in his turn to Thucydides. (Heisenberg’s father was a professor of classics, and he was an accomplished classicist himself, on top of all his other distinctions.) Thucydides explains in his preface to the History of the Peloponnesian War that, although he had avoided all ‘storytelling’, when it came to the speeches, ‘I have found it impossible to remember their exact wording. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would havedone in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech.’ Thucydides was trying to give an account of speeches that had actually been made, many of which he had himself heard. Some of the dialogue in my play represents speeches that must have been made in one form or another; some of it speeches that were certainly never made at all. I hope, though, that in some sense it respects the Thucydidean principle, and that speeches (and indeed actions) follow in so far as possible the original protagonists’ train of thought.
But how far is it possible to know what their train of thought was? This is where I have departed from the established historical record—from any possible historical record. The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions—and this is precisely where recorded and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination. This indeed is the substance of the play.
*
I can’t claim to be the first person to notice the parallels between Heisenberg’s science and his life. They provide David Cassidy with the tide (Uncertainty) for his excellent biography (the standard work in English). ‘Especially difficult and controversial,’ says Cassidy in his introduction, ‘is a retrospective evaluation of Heisenberg’s activities during the Third Reich and particularly during World War II. Since the end of the war, an enormous range of views about this man
But the account of the German and American bomb programmes, and of the two physicists’ participation in them, is taken from the historical record; so is the fate of Danish Jewry; Heisenberg’s experiences in Germany before and during the war, his subsequent internment, and the depression that clouded his later years. I have filled out some of the details, but in general what he says happened to him—at the end of the First World War, on Heligoland, during his nocturnal walk in Faelled Park, during the Berlin air-raid and his internment, and on his ride across Germany, with its near-fatal encounter along the way—is based very closely upon the accounts he gave in life.
The actual words spoken by my characters are of course entirely their own. If this needs any justification then I can only appeal to Heisenberg himself. In his memoirs dialogue plays an important part, he says, because he hopes ‘to demonstrate that science is rooted in conversations.’ But, as he explains, conversations, even real conversations, cannot be reconstructed literally several decades later. So he freely reinvents them, and appeals in his turn to Thucydides. (Heisenberg’s father was a professor of classics, and he was an accomplished classicist himself, on top of all his other distinctions.) Thucydides explains in his preface to the History of the Peloponnesian War that, although he had avoided all ‘storytelling’, when it came to the speeches, ‘I have found it impossible to remember their exact wording. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would havedone in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech.’ Thucydides was trying to give an account of speeches that had actually been made, many of which he had himself heard. Some of the dialogue in my play represents speeches that must have been made in one form or another; some of it speeches that were certainly never made at all. I hope, though, that in some sense it respects the Thucydidean principle, and that speeches (and indeed actions) follow in so far as possible the original protagonists’ train of thought.
But how far is it possible to know what their train of thought was? This is where I have departed from the established historical record—from any possible historical record. The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions—and this is precisely where recorded and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination. This indeed is the substance of the play.
*
I can’t claim to be the first person to notice the parallels between Heisenberg’s science and his life. They provide David Cassidy with the tide (Uncertainty) for his excellent biography (the standard work in English). ‘Especially difficult and controversial,’ says Cassidy in his introduction, ‘is a retrospective evaluation of Heisenberg’s activities during the Third Reich and particularly during World War II. Since the end of the war, an enormous range of views about this man
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