Copenhagen - Michael Frayn [39]
You wonder at times whether it wouldn’t look better if it was handwritten in green ink, with no paragraph breaks. Rose seems to be aware himself of the effect he is producing. He realises, he says, that some readers may ‘find distasteful the recurrent moral judgments passed on Heisenberg.’ They may also, he thinks, be put off by what seems a ‘lack of sympathy with German culture’—he cannot say, he confesses, that his ‘British background’ has made him entirely sympathetic to it. He is at pains to distance himself from any unfortunate echoes that this attitude may awaken: he hopes that readers will not accuse him of ‘unthinkingly preaching a crude view of German “national character,” whatever that term may mean.’ What he is concerned with, he explains, is not that at all, but ‘the enduring nature of what one might call the “deep culture” of Germany … In this book I have tried to penetrate into how Germans think—or rather, perhaps, used to think—and to show how radically different are German and what I have termed “Western” mentalities and sensibilities.’ It is this that underlies what he calls, without apparent irony, ‘the Heisenberg problem.’
Some of his evidence induces a certain dizziness. He quotes without comment, as the epigraph to a chapter, a remark by Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments: ‘I do hope Heisenberg is not now claiming that they tried, for reasons of principle, to sabotage the project by asking for such minimal support!’ It’s true that any claim to have sabotaged the project, particularly for reasons of principle, would represent an astonishing departure from Heisenberg’s habitual caution on the subject. But the question is not what Speer hoped, but whether Heisenberg did make such a claim.
So did he or didn’t he? Rose doesn’t tell us, and the only reference he gives is Gitta Sereny’s new book, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. The allusion is to the crucial meeting at Harnack House in 1942, mentioned in the play. Speer said in his memoirs that he was ‘rather put out’ by the very small amount of money that Heisenberg requested to run the nuclear research programme. In an earlier draft of the manuscript (the ‘Spandau draft’), says Sereny, he had added in brackets the remark that Rose quotes—and Heisenberg, she says, ‘did in fact try precisely that after the war.’
So he did make the claim! But when and where? Sereny doesn’t tell us. The only references to the smallness of the sums of money he asked for that I can find in the record are the one quoted, by Speer himself, and another by Field Marshal Milch, Goering’s deputy in the Luftwaffe, who was also present at the meeting. There’s certainly nothing about it in Heisenberg’s memoirs, or in Robert Jungk’s book, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, or in Heisenberg’s long interview with Irving, or in the other two obvious places, his interview with Der Spiegel in 1967, when living’s book was published, or his review of the book in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. I hardly like to put myself forward to fill the gap, but so far as I know the only reference he made to the subject was posthumously and fictitiously in my play.
Sereny, like Rose, is markedly unenthusiastic about Heisenberg in general. She goes on to argue that Heisenberg’s claims about his intentions in meeting Bohr in 1941 ‘are now shown by Speer’s Spandau account to be false’, though quite how this is so she doesn’t explain. About what she calls ‘the facts’ of the Copenhagen meeting she is remarkably brisk. In the conversation ‘ … which Bohr subsequently reported to his associates at the Niels Bohr Institute, Heisenberg had made his political stand crystal clear. His team, he told Bohr, had gone some way towards discovering a way to produce an atom bomb. Germany was going to win the war, probably quite soon, and Bohr should join