The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

  I tried my idea out on my two fellow actors. Sara’s generosity onstage and formidable economy I found a nightly acting lesson, but she had just had a most painful bereavement, and she was understandably too preoccupied to give me a moral lesson as well. Matthew made it clear that he disapproved. I felt chastened and put the idea out of my mind. It wasn’t until some months later, when I was staying with my sister Rosaleen in Amsterdam, on a short break before we left the National, that I thought of it again. I told my sister about it … and she laughed. The power that laughter has over a performer! Once he hears it, all caution is thrown to the winds.

  I wrote several drafts of the letter before I was satisfied. I’ve always believed that a degree of irrelevant detail adds authenticity to a forgery. People don’t just tell you the bare facts. Certainly not people like Celia. They like to be expansive. They want you to know something about their lives. They also love a chance to pass judgment. Celia, it turned out, was no exception. I had to force myself, with reluctance, to tone down her worst excesses in the first draft.

  I got Rosaleen to copy it in her own handwriting; then, back in England, I addressed myself to the task of creating the German manuscript. It was not such an easy venture. I knew no German, nor anyone who did. And what sort of information was I going to put into it? Something about physics or the physicists, presumably. Then I had a better idea. I would make the thing so absurd that as soon as Frayn translated it, neither he nor anyone else in his right mind could possibly take it seriously. Everyone laughs. Who did this? I did, sir! Naughty boy! And basta! E finita la commedia!

  I looked for something written in German—anything, the more unlikely the better. One of those instruction manuals for washing machines, perhaps, written in four or five different languages. I searched the kitchen drawers … What was this? Instructions for putting up a table-tennis table. A German table-tennis table …

  I found an ancient ledger that my father-in-law, the late Arthur Calder-Marshall, had used in the thirties and forties for writing his novels. The pages had the right yellowed, brittle look. They had been ruled into columns by some shipping clerk—and the word “code” was even used twice in the column headings.

  I filled an old-fashioned fountain pen with some Quink ink and set to work. (What memories of a forties classroom it all brought back!) I chose extracts from the manual at random, broke some of the lines up into vertical columns, added a scattering of familiar names, invented a mathematical formula, and copied a diagram of one of the legs of the table, rotated sideways.

  Then I scrunched the paper up in my fist, flicked water on it, and gave it five minutes in the tumble dryer. Now, though, it looked sixty-five years old instead of fifty-five, so I did a little gentle ironing, with the setting on SILK. A deep calm settled on me. Was this what van Meegeren felt when he finished another Vermeer?

  And off it all went. Perhaps if Frayn had been the first to see the document, he would have recognized it for what it was. By the time he got his hands on it, however, his hopes had been aroused. Hope is a powerful agent; it’s what gets us up in the morning. Then again, where someone else might have seen mere nonsense, Frayn saw ambiguity. Ambiguity is another powerful agent, a great stimulus to the imagination.

  And now he wanted more of the same. I shouldn’t have provided it. I should have come clean. I knew that’s what Matthew Marsh would have had me do. “You’re wasting Frayn’s valuable time, David!” he would have said. “He’s probably writing another play or book—you know what he’s like. I think it’s all wrong!”

  But he wanted more!

  Perhaps I would have stopped, though … But at just this point we moved our wonderful play into the West End, and Trevor Ritchie, who was to be our company manager at the Duchess, introduced us to the new stage management.

  “This is Erika,” he said.

  “Hello,” said Erika. Hint of a Northern accent there.

  “And this is Petra.”

  “Hello,” said Petra. Another accent—foreign this time.

  “Are you Danish, Petra?” I asked.

  “German,” said Petra.

  MF:

  Celia Rhys-Evans’s reply, when it finally arrived three weeks later, began with a double-edged compliment that seemed as characteristic of what I was beginning to recognize as her style as the chattily offhand put-down in her first letter, and that made me laugh almost as much. She had been in France visiting her son, she said (which was why she hadn’t got the letters from Michael Blakemore and me earlier), and had seen a review for the Paris production of Copenhagen in the Figaro. “It was surprisingly good, but I suppose the French are more intellectual than us, aren’t they?”

  When I read the next paragraph, however, my amusement gave way to surprise.

  “As for the German stuff,” she wrote, “it’s all very exciting, isn’t it: a bit like a John le Carré thriller. And, as you will see from the enclosed, more evidence! When I told my son Micheal (sorry!—another Micheal)…”

  Another Micheal? I glanced back at the first paragraph. Yes, I had now become Micheal, I saw, and so had Michael Blakemore. Not all that surprising—it’s a name that a lot of people have trouble with. But I was taken aback to discover that her own son was also a Micheal. Mrs. Rhys-Evans seemed to have as many problems with spelling as our anonymous German scribe.

  Anyway, when she had informed her Micheal about what she had done, he had replied: “But Mummy, you should have told me! I’ve got tons of that old German bumph!” He had kept it as a child, he had told her, because he was reading a lot of Biggles at the time and thought it might be “spy stuff.”

  My interest in her literacy vanished abruptly. I turned to the end of her letter—and there was one of the pages her son had preserved.

  It was another leaf torn from the same British signals log, also handwritten in German on both sides of the paper. The writing, however, was completely different from the neat, self-contained, and barely legible script in the earlier pages. It was bold and sprawling—and it was easy to read. I glanced quickly through it. This second author plainly had no difficulties with the German language. There were no mathematical formulae, diagrams, or lists of technical terms, nor any references to uranium or table-tennis tables. This new page appeared to be part of an entry from some kind of journal of daily life at Farm Hall, and it began in the middle of a sentence:

  No problems in deciphering this:

  … Ende der Woche geklärt sein muß. Gerlach beschwert sich ohne Ende, wie barbarisch wir hier behandelt werden …

  Or in understanding it:

  … must be settled at the end of the week. Gerlach complains endlessly about how barbarically we are treated here …

  No problems, either, in knowing whom this referred to. Walther Gerlach was the Nazi Government’s administrator of the German nuclear program, even though he seems to have understood very little about nuclear matters.

  … He was sitting on the veranda and consuming a banana (!) while he went on about “these people.” “When the war is over we shall take them to the international court. They have no right to hold us here without informing us of the reason. We are not criminals. We are not even soldiers!!” He’s downright comic! W said to him: “How many English people do you think are getting bananas to eat at the moment?” He replied: “No idea—nor does it interest me in the least.” Typical…!

  Who was the fair-minded “W”? Presumably either Weizsäcker or Karl Wirtz.

  … Recently there was even Champagne. It was O’s birthday …

  No ambiguity with this one. There was only one “O” at Farm Hall, and that was the great chemist Otto Hahn, who in 1939 in Berlin had done the crucial analysis that detected the barium in the products of the uranium that Fermi had bombarded with neutrons in Rome four years earlier, and so established that its nucleus had fissioned, and transmuted the heavy uranium into lighter elements.

  … There was only a thimbleful each, but after all it was kind of Rittner to take the tro
uble. We raised our glasses and sang that silly “Happy Birthday” song. O had tears in his eyes. G refused to drink—I emptied his glass for him. In the evening we had our usual reading, as on every Wednesday. Rittner said: “I’m going to read a famous passage from Dickens…”

  Another familiar point of reference. Major Rittner, according to Otto Hahn in his memoirs, used to read Dickens to the internees to improve their English, though Hahn remembered the readings as taking place in the afternoon.

  “… It’s about Little Nell and what happened to her.” He read aloud for a rather long time. Every now and then he paused and pointed out English grammatical peculiarities to us, such as, for example, “subordinate clause” and “hyperbole.” But we were much too much taken up with the story, which was really sad, so that we were all affected by tears. Rittner reached the end and said: “We have here a good example of ‘pathos’ and/or ‘bathos,’” (the former means more or less sympathy, the latter slipping into the ridiculous)—it depended upon our point of view. He concluded with “Good night, and enjoy your cocoa.” The maid prepared the cocoa for us soon afterward and said: “My goodness, what’s the matter here, then? You all look so down in the mouth. Here, drink up your cocoa and you’ll soon feel better.” These English people—so heartless—have nothing in their heads beyond bodily well-being.

  By now I felt a little like Heisenberg that famous night on Heligoland when he first realized that the mathematics of quantum mechanics were working out, and had the sensation, as he recalls in his memoirs, of looking through the surface of atomic phenomena at a hidden interior world. Heisenberg found this new world of mathematical relationships inside the atom strangely beautiful. It was the strangely childish banality of the human relationships inside this hidden world of Farm Hall that I felt I was at last glimpsing, and that I found so touching.

  I read on, and now a rather more disturbing aspect of this world began to emerge:

  The business with the keys is very annoying. I’ve now been talked to about it by Capt. M for the third time. Always very politely, but there is no doubt that he is concerned. I am under suspicion because I use the gymnasium more often than all the others. This is what is claimed, anyway. But H and W are in there very early in the morning, sometimes even before the guards are up.…

  I could find no mention in the transcripts of any “Capt. M” at Farm Hall, but the letters “H” and “W” leapt out at me. “H” could have been Hahn or Harteck, just as “W” could have been Wirtz. But together, particularly involved in some kind of private conversation, they were almost certainly Heisenberg and Weizsäcker, who had always been close.

  … What are they doing there? Whenever I get there they’re merely conversing. No exercises—merely intense conversations. On my entrance I always have the feeling that they are changing the subject.

  I recalled that it was through his conversations with Weizsäcker that Heisenberg had first become interested in the philosophical implications of quantum physics. Was it philosophy they were talking about so early in the morning in the gym, before the guards were up? Or was it some more delicate subject? It had after all been Weizsäcker who made the sinister discovery that sent Heisenberg on his trip to Copenhagen. He had realized, as Fritz Houtermans had independently, that if they could once get the reactor they were building to go critical it would produce plutonium, and that with plutonium at their disposal as an alternative to the uranium 235 that they still found impossible to separate they would be faced after all with the practical possibility of manufacturing nuclear weapons. Were Heisenberg and Weizsäcker now talking secretly about things that they had not shared with the others, or revealed to their captors?

  … The rules lay down that the keys for the gymnasium must be fetched from the house and taken back there. Why are they so significant? It could be that the keys open other doors as well. Perhaps the guards use them even. I have the suspicion that some of the guards are making “unofficial” visits to the village. We of course are not allowed out, apart from planned “expeditions to the woods,” for gathering mushrooms or picking flowers and such. One further thing: during these conversations there is always an interpreter present, even though most of us speak English reasonably well. But every time it’s a different interpreter. How many “interpreters” have they got here? What do they all do? Something is going on here, and I should very much like to know what! Do they want to secretly murder us one night, or will the crazy English suddenly shout “April fool”? The English sense of humor is something that I could write whole volumes about—but no one would laugh.

  And on this melancholy note the extract ended.

  There were a number of surprising revelations to take in. I knew from the transcripts that some of the Germans had feared at one point that they had been brought to Farm Hall to be quietly murdered, but I had not realized that there were guards and interpreters there. According to the transcripts, the physicists had simply been required to give their word not to try to escape, and the eavesdropping team understood German perfectly well without interpreters.

  Even more puzzling, though, was the reference to Otto Hahn’s birthday. The German team was kept at Farm Hall from July to January, and Hahn’s birthday was on March 8. Puzzling as this anomaly was, it was perhaps only to be expected; one of the themes of my play, after all, was the baffling irreconcilability of so much of the historical evidence from the beginning of the story to the end.

  Where had his birthday shifted to? There was no indication of the date of the extract. And who had written it? Not Gerlach or Hahn, evidently, nor, if my reasoning was correct, Heisenberg or Weizsäcker. I wondered whether to ask Weizsäcker for his opinion on this new document. I’d had a reply by this time to the letter I’d sent him about the first one. He recalled playing table tennis at Farm Hall, but the fact that they were interned, he reassured me carefully, meant that they had had “no uranium at [their] disposal.” Apart from the table tennis, he said, they had scarcely any possibilities for sport apart from running around the garden. There was no mention of any gymnasium. Would the diary extract jog his memory? Would he recall any early-morning meetings there with “H”?

  First, though, I decided to fax the new page to Thomas Powers, the author of Heisenberg’s War, the wonderful book in which I’d first read about the trip to Copenhagen, and which had first set me thinking of the play. I had some dim recollection of his mentioning a diary … and, yes, there it was in his footnotes. It had been kept by Karl Wirtz. Wirtz seems never to have published it, but had shown it privately to Powers.

  When I got through on the phone to Powers at his home in Vermont, he said he couldn’t remember the Wirtz material, and that in any case the style of the extract suggested not Wirtz but another of the team, Erich Bagge, whom Powers had met, and who had seemed to him “slow, correct, and innocent.” He had a vague feeling that after the war Bagge and Gerlach had collaborated on a book, and that this book had drawn on a diary kept by Bagge. I dived back into his notes. Yes— Von der Uranspaltung bis Calder Hall (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), though it was written not with Gerlach but with Kurt Diebner and Kenneth Jay. And indeed Powers quoted from the diary itself, though without giving any details of publication.

  So perhaps all this material was known already. But in that case, why was it hidden under the floorboards? Why hadn’t Powers, or anyone else who had written about Farm Hall, mentioned any of the details that emerged from this extract? Had Bagge perhaps lost or abandoned part of his manuscript when he was released? Where could I find the ancient From Uranium Fission to Calder Hall? Or even the published version of the diary itself, if there was one?

  By this time I had told everyone I knew about Mrs. Rhys-Evans and her strange treasure trove—told them not once, but twice, three times, four times, as I brought them up to date on the latest developments, difficulties, and theories. I was obsessed with the subject. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the material.

  There was a slight problem here, howev
er. The problem was Micheal, Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s curiously spelled and plainly rather difficult son. “I’m terribly sorry,” she explained in her letter, “but he will only agree to release one page at a time, on condition that you sign a piece of paper, also enclosed, to acknowledge that all the papers belong, as of right, to the Rhys-Evans family, and may not be used without their permission. I’m sorry about this! He’s always had a suspicious streak.”

  And indeed she had enclosed the piece of paper spelling out this agreement. In fact, she had enclosed it in triplicate. It wasn’t clear to me that the copyright belonged to anyone in the Rhys-Evans family; it was presumably with the authors, if by any chance they were still alive, and if not then with their heirs. I couldn’t see how my acknowledgment of the Rhys-Evanses’ possession of a right they couldn’t possibly in law possess had very much meaning. But I had become even more eager to see them; it had occurred to me that the story of their finding, and of the new light that it cast upon a minor but intriguing corner of this century’s history, might make a rather nice little book.

  So I signed. In triplicate.

  DB:

  I was beginning to find Frayn’s replies even more amazing than he found my forgeries.

  He had actually signed up to it. In writing. In triplicate. He also thanked Mrs. Rhys-Evans for her “charming letter,” and for her “even more astonishing and intriguing news” that there were more of the papers still extant. He would absolutely love to see them, he said. He went into the question of copyright. He promised to make no use of the papers without Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s permission. He couldn’t imagine that they had any commercial possibilities, he said solemnly, but promised that if it ever did seem possible to write anything about them, then he would of course consult her first, then credit her as the source and come to some arrangement about payment that she felt was fair.