Copenhagen

by Michael Frayn

  Michael Frayn

  C O P E N H A G E N

  Michael Frayn has written plays, novels, and screenplays, in addition to being a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and translator of Chekhov. His thirteen plays include the classic comedy Noises Off. His latest play, Copenhagen, was awarded the Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards and, in the United Kingdom, the Olivier and Evening Standard awards. The most recent of his nine novels, Headlong, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Born in London in 1933 and educated at Cambridge, he is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin; they live in London.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Publisher’s Note

  Act One

  Act Two

  Postscript

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I should like to record my gratitude to Professor Balázs L. Gyorffy, Professor of Physics at Bristol University, for his kindness in reading the text of the play and making a number of corrections and suggestions.

  Michael Frayn

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Copenhagen was first previewed at the Cottesloe Theatre, Royal National Theatre, London, on May 21, 1998, and opened on May 28, 1998, with the following cast:

  MARGRETHE Sara Kestelman

  BOHR David Burke

  HEISENBERG Matthew Marsh

  Directed by Michael Blakemore

  Designed by Peter J. Davison

  Lighting by Mark Henderson

  Sound by Simon Baker

  This production moved to the Duchess Theatre, London, where it was presented by Michael Codron and Lee Dean, and opened on February 5, 1999.

  It previewed at the Royale Theatre, New York, on March 23, 2000, and opened on April 11, 2000, with the following cast:

  MARGRETHE Blair Brown

  BOHR Philip Bosco

  HEISENBERG Michael Cumpsty

  Directed by Michael Blakemore

  Designed by Peter J. Davison

  Lighting by Mark Henderson and Michael Lincoln

  Sound by Tony Meola

  Act One

  Margrethe But why?

  Bohr You’re still thinking about it?

  Margrethe Why did he come to Copenhagen?

  Bohr Does it matter, my love, now we’re all three of us dead and gone?

  Margrethe Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.

  Bohr Some questions have no answers to find.

  Margrethe Why did he come? What was he trying to tell you?

  Bohr He did explain later.

  Margrethe He explained over and over again. Each time he explained it became more obscure.

  Bohr It was probably very simple, when you come right down to it: he wanted to have a talk.

  Margrethe A talk? To the enemy? In the middle of a war?

  Bohr Margrethe, my love, we were scarcely the enemy.

  Margrethe It was 1941!

  Bohr Heisenberg was one of our oldest friends.

  Margrethe Heisenberg was German. We were Danes. We were under German occupation.

  Bohr It put us in a difficult position, certainly.

  Margrethe I’ve never seen you as angry with anyone as you were with Heisenberg that night.

  Bohr Not to disagree, but I believe I remained remarkably calm.

  Margrethe I know when you’re angry.

  Bohr It was as difficult for him as it was for us.

  Margrethe So why did he do it? Now no one can be hurt, now no one can be betrayed.

  Bohr I doubt if he ever really knew himself.

  Margrethe And he wasn’t a friend. Not after that visit. That was the end of the famous friendship between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

  Heisenberg Now we’re all dead and gone, yes, and there are only two things the world remembers about me. One is the uncertainty principle, and the other is my mysterious visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. Everyone understands uncertainty. Or thinks he does. No one understands my trip to Copenhagen. Time and time again I’ve explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margrethe. To interrogators and intelligence officers, to journalists and historians. The more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt. Now we’re all dead and gone. Now no one can be hurt, now no one can be betrayed.

  Margrethe I never entirely liked him, you know. Perhaps I can say that to you now.

  Bohr Yes, you did. When he was first here in the twenties? Of course you did. On the beach at Tisvilde with us and the boys? He was one of the family.

  Margrethe Something alien about him, even then.

  Bohr So quick and eager.

  Margrethe Too quick. Too eager.

  Bohr Those bright watchful eyes.

  Margrethe Too bright. Too watchful.

  Bohr Well, he was a very great physicist. I never changed my mind about that.

  Margrethe They were all good, all the people who came to Copenhagen to work with you. You had most of the great pioneers in atomic theory here at one time or another.

  Bohr And the more I look back on it, the more I think Heisenberg was the greatest of them all.

  Heisenberg So what was Bohr? He was the first of us all, the father of us all. Modern atomic physics began when Bohr realised that quantum theory applied to matter as well as to energy. 1913. Everything we did was based on that great insight of his.

  Bohr When you think that he first came here to work with me in 1924 …

  Heisenberg I’d only just finished my doctorate, and Bohr was the most famous atomic physicist in the world.

  Bohr … and in just over a year he’d invented quantum mechanics.

  Margrethe It came out of his work with you.

  Bohr Mostly out of what he’d been doing with Max Born and Pascual Jordan at Göttingen. Another year or so and he’d got uncertainty.

  Margrethe And you’d done complementarity.

  Bohr We argued them both out together.

  Heisenberg We did most of our best work together.

  Bohr Heisenberg usually led the way.

  Heisenberg Bohr made sense of it all.

  Bohr We operated like a business.

  Heisenberg Chairman and managing director.

  Margrethe Father and son.

  Heisenberg A family business.

  Margrethe Even though we had sons of our own.

  Bohr And we went on working together long after he ceased to be my assistant.

  Heisenberg Long after I’d left Copenhagen in 1927 and gone back to Germany. Long after I had a chair and a family of my own.

  Margrethe Then the Nazis came to power .…

  Bohr And it got more and more difficult. When the war broke out—impossible. Until that day in 1941.

  Margrethe When it finished forever.

  Bohr Yes, why did he do it?

  Heisenberg September, 1941. For years I had it down in my memory as October.

  Margrethe September. The end of September.

  Bohr A curious sort of diary memory is.

  Heisenberg You open the pages, and all the neat headings and tidy jottings dissolve around you.

  Bohr You step through the pages into the months and days themselves.

  Margrethe The past becomes the present inside your head.

  Heisenberg September, 1941, Copenhagen .… And at once—here I am, getting off the night train from Berlin with my colleague Carl von Weizsäcker. Two plain civilian suits and raincoats among all the field-grey Wehrmacht uniforms arriving with us, all the naval gold braid, all the well-tailored black of the SS. In my bag I have the text of the lecture I’m giving. In my head is another communication that has to be deli
vered. The lecture is on astrophysics. The text inside my head is a more difficult one.

  Bohr We obviously can’t go to the lecture.

  Margrethe Not if he’s giving it at the German Cultural Institute—it’s a Nazi propaganda organisation.

  Bohr He must know what we feel about that.

  Heisenberg Weizsäcker has been my John the Baptist, and written to warn Bohr of my arrival.

  Margrethe He wants to see you?

  Bohr I assume that’s why he’s come.

  Heisenberg But how can the actual meeting with Bohr be arranged?

  Margrethe He must have something remarkably important to say.

  Heisenberg It has to seem natural. It has to be private.

  Margrethe You’re not really thinking of inviting him to the house?

  Bohr That’s obviously what he’s hoping.

  Margrethe Niels! They’ve occupied our country!

  Bohr He is not they.

  Margrethe He’s one of them.

  Heisenberg First of all there’s an official visit to Bohr’s workplace, the Institute for Theoretical Physics, with an awkward lunch in the old familiar canteen. No chance to talk to Bohr, of course. Is he even present? There’s Rozental … Petersen, I think … Christian Moller, almost certainly .… It’s like being in a dream. You can never quite focus the precise details of the scene around you. At the head of the table—is that Bohr? I turn to look, and it’s Bohr, it’s Rozental, it’s Moller, it’s whoever I appoint to be there .… A difficult occasion, though—I remember that clearly enough.

  Bohr It was a disaster. He made a very bad impression. Occupation of Denmark unfortunate. Occupation of Poland, however, perfectly acceptable. Germany now certain to win the war.

  Heisenberg Our tanks are almost at Moscow. What can stop us? Well, one thing, perhaps. One thing.

  Bohr He knows he’s being watched, of course. One must remember that. He has to be careful about what he says.

  Margrethe Or he won’t be allowed to travel abroad again.

  Bohr My love, the Gestapo planted microphones in his house. He told Goudsmit when he was in America. The SS brought him in for interrogation in the basement at the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.

  Margrethe And then they let him go again.

  Heisenberg I wonder if they suspect for one moment how painful it was to get permission for this trip. The humiliating appeals to the Party, the demeaning efforts to have strings pulled by our friends in the Foreign Office.

  Margrethe How did he seem? Is he greatly changed?

  Bohr A little older.

  Margrethe I still think of him as a boy.

  Bohr He’s nearly forty. A middle-aged professor, fast catching up with the rest of us.

  Margrethe You still want to invite him here?

  Bohr Let’s add up the arguments on either side in a reasonably scientific way. Firstly, Heisenberg is a friend .…

  Margrethe Firstly, Heisenberg is a German.

  Bohr A White Jew. That’s what the Nazis called him. He taught relativity, and they said it was Jewish physics. He couldn’t mention Einstein by name, but he stuck with relativity, in spite of the most terrible attacks.

  Margrethe All the real Jews have lost their jobs. He’s still teaching.

  Bohr He’s still teaching relativity.

  Margrethe Still a professor at Leipzig.

  Bohr At Leipzig, yes. Not at Munich. They kept him out of the chair at Munich.

  Margrethe He could have been at Columbia.

  Bohr Or Chicago. He had offers from both.

  Margrethe He wouldn’t leave Germany.

  Bohr He wants to be there to rebuild German science when Hitler goes. He told Goucdsmit.

  Margrethe And if he’s being watched it will all be reported upon. Who he sees. What he says to them. What they say to him.

  Heisenberg I carry my surveillance around like an infectious disease. But then I happen to know that Bohr is also under surveillance.

  Margrethe And you know you’re being watched yourself.

  Bohr By the Gestapo?

  Heisenberg Does he realise?

  Bohr I’ve nothing to hide.

  Margrethe By our fellow-Danes. It would be a terrible betrayal of all their trust in you if they thought you were collaborating.

  Bohr Inviting an old friend to dinner is hardly collaborating.

  Margrethe It might appear to be collaborating.

  Bohr Yes. He’s put us in a difficult position.

  Margrethe I shall never forgive him.

  Bohr He must have good reason. He must have very good reason.

  Heisenberg This is going to be a deeply awkward occasion.

  Margrethe You won’t talk about politics?

  Bohr We’ll stick to physics. I assume it’s physics he wants to talk to me about.

  Margrethe I think you must also assume that you and I aren’t the only people who hear what’s said in this house. If you want to speak privately you’d better go out in the open air.

  Bohr I shan’t want to speak privately.

  Margrethe You could go for another of your walks together.

  Heisenberg Shall I be able to suggest a walk?

  Bohr I don’t think we shall be going for any walks. Whatever he has to say he can say where everyone can hear it.

  Margrethe Some new idea he wants to try out on you, perhaps.

  Bohr What can it be, though? Where are we off to next?

  Margrethe So now of course your curiosity’s aroused, in spite of everything.

  Heisenberg So now here I am, walking out through the autumn twilight to the Bohrs’ house at Ny-Carlsberg. Followed, presumably, by my invisible shadow. What am I feeling? Fear, certainly—the touch of fear that one always feels for a teacher, for an employer, for a parent. Much worse fear about what I have to say. About how to express it. How to broach it in the first place. Worse fear still about what happens if I fail.

  Margrethe It’s not something to do with the war?

  Bohr Heisenberg is a theoretical physicist. I don’t think anyone has yet discovered a way you can use theoretical physics to kill people.

  Margrethe It couldn’t be something about fission?

  Bohr Fission? Why would he want to talk to me about fission?

  Margrethe Because you’re working on it.

  Bohr Heisenberg isn’t.

  Margrethe Isn’t he? Everybody else in the world seems to be. And you’re the acknowledged authority.

  Bohr He hasn’t published on fission.

  Margrethe It was Heisenberg who did all the original work on the physics of the nucleus. And he consulted you then, he consulted you at every step.

  Bohr That was back in 1932. Fission’s only been around for the last three years.

  Margrethe But if the Germans were developing some kind of weapon based on nuclear fission …

  Bohr My love, no one is going to develop a weapon based on nuclear fission.

  Margrethe But if the Germans were trying to, Heisenberg would be involved.

  Bohr There’s no shortage of good German physicists.

  Margrethe There’s no shortage of good German physicists in America or Britain.

  Bohr The Jews have gone, obviously.

  Heisenberg Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born … Otto Frisch, Lise Meitner .… We led the world in theoretical physics! Once.

  Margrethe So who is there still working in Germany?

  Bohr Sommerfeld, of course. Von Laue.

  Margrethe Old men.

  Bohr Wirtz. Harteck.

  Margrethe Heisenberg is head and shoulders above all of them.

  Bohr Otto Hahn—he’s still there. He discovered fission, after all.

  Margrethe Hahn’s a chemist. I thought that what Hahn discovered …

  Bohr … was that Enrico Fermi had discovered it in Rome four years earlier. Yes—he just didn’t realise it was fission. It didn’t occur to anyone that the uranium atom might have split, and turned into an atom of barium and an atom of krypton
. Not until Hahn and Strassmann did the analysis, and detected the barium.

  Margrethe Fermi’s in Chicago.

  Bohr His wife’s Jewish.

  Margrethe So Heisenberg would be in charge of the work?

  Bohr Margrethe, there is no work! John Wheeler and I did it all in 1939. One of the implications of our paper is that there’s no way in the foreseeable future in which fission can be used to produce any kind of weapon.

  Margrethe Then why is everyone still working on it?

  Bohr Because there’s an element of magic in it. You fire a neutron at the nucleus of a uranium atom and it splits into two other elements. It’s what the alchemists were trying to do—to turn one element into another.

  Margrethe So why is he coming?

  Bohr Now your curiosity’s aroused.

  Margrethe My forebodings.

  Heisenberg I crunch over the familiar gravel to the Bohrs’ front door, and tug at the familiar bell-pull. Fear, yes. And another sensation, that’s become painfully familiar over the past year. A mixture of self-importance and sheer helpless absurdity—that of all the 2,000 million people in this world, I’m the one who’s been charged with this impossible responsibility .… The heavy door swings open.

  Bohr My dear Heisenberg!

  Heisenberg My dear Bohr!

  Bohr Come in, come in …

  Margrethe And of course as soon as they catch sight of each other all their caution disappears. The old flames leap up from the ashes. If we can just negotiate all the treacherous little opening civilities …

  Heisenberg I’m so touched you felt able to ask me.

  Bohr We must try to go on behaving like human beings.

  Heisenberg I realise how awkward it is.

  Bohr We scarcely had a chance to do more than shake hands at lunch the other day.

  Heisenberg And Margrethe I haven’t seen …

  Bohr Since you were here four years ago.

  Margrethe Niels is right. You look older.

  Heisenberg I had been hoping to see you both in 1938, at the congress in Warsaw …

  Bohr I believe you had some personal trouble.

  Heisenberg A little business in Berlin.

  Margrethe In the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse?

  Heisenberg A slight misunderstanding.