Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [38]
There was always something a little sharp and harsh about him, something that at its best inspired respect rather than love, and that after the war occasioned really quite astonishing hostility and contempt. Even Samuel Goudsmit turned against him. Goudsmit was an old friend and colleague; when the investigators of the Alsos mission, the Allied agency for gathering intelligence on German atomic research, for which he was working, finally broke into Heisenberg’s office in 1945, one of the first things they saw was a picture of the two of them together that Heisenberg had kept there as a memento of happier days. But when Goudsmit subsequently interrogated Heisenberg he found him arrogant and self-involved. Goudsmit had understandably bitter feelings at the time—he had just discovered the record of his parents’ death in Auschwitz. Heisenberg was also caught in a false position. Confident that his team had been far ahead of the Americans, he offered Goudsmit his services in initiating them into the secrets of uranium fission. (Goudsmit did nothing to correct his misapprehension, which gave Heisenberg, when the truth finally came out, grounds for returning Goudsmit’s bitterness.) In his superficial and strangely unimpressive book on Alsos, Goudsmit wrote about Heisenberg and his team with contemptuous dismissal, and in the year-long correspondence in the American press that followed its publication, accused him of self-importance and dishonesty.
Weisskopf gave a reception for Heisenberg during his trip to America in 1949, but about half the guests—including many people from the Los Alamos team—failed to appear, explaining to Weisskopf that they didn’t want to shake the hand of the man who had tried to build a bomb for Hitler. Even Cassidy, who gives full measure to Heisenberg as a physicist in his biography, is notably cool and cautious in his assessment of Heisenberg’s role in the German bomb programme. Ronald Fraser, the British intelligence officer who escorted Heisenberg back to Copenhagen in 1947 (the British seem to have been frightened that he would defect to the Russians, or be kidnapped by them) replied to living’s inquiry about the trip in tones of patronising contempt that seem slightly unhinged. The whole story of “a kind of confrontation”,’ he wrote to Irving, ‘in the matter of his 1941 natter with Bohr in the Tivoli Gardens [sic] is a typical Heisenberg fabrication—maybe a bit brighter than a thousand others, but like them all a product of his Blut und Boden guilt complex, which he rationalises that quickly that the stories become for him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Pitiful, in a man of his mental stature.’
The historian Paul Lawrence Rose, who has focussed upon Heisenberg as an emblem for what he regards as the general failings of German culture, also takes a remarkably high moral tone. In a paper he wrote in 1984, entitled Heisenberg, German Morality and the Atomic Bomb, he talked about Heisenberg’s ‘guff,’ his ‘self-serving, self-deluding claims,’ and his ‘elementary moral stupidity.’ After a further fourteen years research Professor Rose returned to the subject in 1998 in a full-length book which was published after the play was produced, and which has attracted considerable attention, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: a Study in German Culture. His contempt for Heisenberg remains unmoderated. He believes that Heisenberg failed, in spite of his perfect readiness to serve the Nazi regime, because of his arrogance and wrong-headedness, and because he embodied various vices of German culture in general, and of the Nazi regime in particular, whose values he had absorbed.
It is a difficult book to read—Rose can scarcely quote a word of Heisenberg’s without adding his own disparaging qualification. Here is a selection of his interjections on two facing pages taken more or less at random: ‘ … self-incriminating … a somewhat