Copenhagen

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

After Margrethe establishes the central question of the play, her husband questions the necessity of her quest for knowledge. Bohr reveals that all three characters are now “dead and gone” (6) and that their actions while alive are no longer particularly important. This is ironic, given the fame of the two scientists and the fact that the entire play revolves around the conceit of their clandestine meeting. Bohr asks whether his wife’s question matters, but the fact that his spirit spends the remainder of the play trying to find an answer demonstrates that yes, it does matter.

“I carry my surveillance around like an infectious disease.”

Heisenberg is well aware of his precarious position. Both a German and a Jew, as well as an internationally renowned scientist, he is closely monitored by the Nazi’s secret police. Because of this, everyone he comes into contact with is potentially infected by his presence. By meeting with Bohr, Heisenberg places him under the Gestapo’s suspicion. Heisenberg is a disease vector for a greater threat, carrying with him an infectious surveillance network that can result in torture and death for those he encounters. This raises the stakes of his meeting with Bohr.

“I don’t think anyone has yet discovered a way you can use theoretical physics to kill people.”

Bohr’s comment employs dramatic irony, making an almost facetious point about the relative lack of threat posed by theoretical physics. Given the play’s subject matter and the audience’s knowledge of World War II, it is evident that theoretical physics was essential in the creation of the atomic bomb, which killed thousands of people and posed an existential threat throughout the Cold War. That Bohr should say this in 1941, however, illustrates his relative innocence and naivety, something this is interrogated later in the play.

“Perhaps Margrethe would be kind enough to sew a yellow star on my ski-jacket.”

Bohr’s comment is pointed, witty, and tragic. It brings a precise end to the discussion of ski holidays while also reminding Heisenberg of the Nazi occupation of Denmark. The dark humor arrives from the juxtaposition between the yellow star (a pointed reminder of the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany) and the frivolous image of the ski-jacket. The conflation of the two ideas creates a contrast that is both darkly humorous and tragic, reminding Heisenberg of the reality of being Jewish in a country occupied by the regime for which Heisenberg works.

“You stood up and laid into me.”

The two men share different recollections of the same event. To Heisenberg, standing up and offering a few remarks after a lecture was a benign act. To Bohr, it was a personal attack. The difference in interpretation regarding a prior meeting is emblematic of the play as a whole. Just as Bohr and Heisenberg are attempting to figure out the reason for their 1941 meeting, they struggle to agree about the first time they met. The extant agendas, biases, perspectives, and a litany of other factors inform their motivations, demonstrating how difficult it will be to resolve the premise of the play.

“The faster you ski the better you think.”

Skiing is a metaphor for the two men’s different approaches to science. Where Bohr is prone to a slow, steady, and introspective approach, Heisenberg favors a quicker dash toward the finish line. He believes that, as long as the math adds up, then he is justified, while Bohr values the philosophical questions that surround his work. In this situation they criticize one another’s skiing to criticize one another’s science without being rude.

“Tantalizingly difficult […] mercifully difficult.”

Reflecting on the difficulties in creating an atom bomb, these two interpretations reflect each character’s different attitude toward the problem. The first belongs to Heisenberg, the latter to Bohr. For Heisenberg, fission is a problem to be solved, a simple math equation that he will try to solve as quickly as possible. To him the difficulty is tantalizing, a mental exercise. But Bohr is thankful that fission is so difficult, as he worries that—if it were easy—the technology could fall into the wrong hands (or be used at all). To Bohr, the wider philosophical and moral considerations outweigh the importance of fission as a mental exercise. Heisenberg thinks only of whether something can be done; Bohr debates whether it should be done.

“So what was this mysterious thing you said?”

Just as in the play’s opening line, Margrethe takes the audience’s position and tries to uncover the clandestine truth about what was said between the two men. It is clearly an emotional matter, as the issue left the two men angry and at odds, but also an intellectual one. Bohr and Heisenberg could likely talk in the abstract forever, so Margrethe’s role in refocusing the narrative is important. When the conversation becomes too abstract or too technical, Margrethe works on behalf of the audience to reassert control over the narrative.

“Everything that we were doing was based on that fundamental insight of yours.”

Bohr is horrified that Heisenberg could even contemplate working on an atomic energy project. But with this one line, Heisenberg turns the blame back around on Bohr. All of Heisenberg’s research is based on a throwaway line from Bohr that has become the foundational idea of the Nazi atomic project. Rather than an innocent party, Bohr is now complicit. He has accidently become a collaborator but has been denied the opportunity to refuse participation in this project. Heisenberg has involved Bohr without Bohr’s consent, complicating the relationship between the friends and hanging a huge weight on Bohr’s moral conscience.

“Bohr, my childhood in Munich came to an end in anarchy and civil war.”

Heisenberg attempts to defend his work and the meeting by separating the German people and nation from the Third Reich. He is acting in defense of his people, not his government, he insists. By knowing whether the Americans are developing an atomic bomb, Heisenberg will know whether he has to fear for the lives of his loved ones, whether another crushing defeat will lead to suffering as was experienced during the interwar years. It is a difficult moral quandary to navigate, but Heisenberg finds himself backed into a corner and unable to find a way out.

“You were no longer running that program, Heisenberg. The program was running you.”

Bohr’s observation about Heisenberg’s research ties into Bohr’s observation about Heisenberg’s character. Just as Heisenberg focused on success at the exclusion of larger, more complicated questions, Bohr believes that Heisenberg became so focused on the idea of making his atomic reactor work that he was in danger of causing a meltdown. His race toward the end, his desire to finish in first place, led to Heisenberg creating a dangerous and potentially cataclysmic situation.

“A new Enlightenment, with Germany back in her rightful place at the heart of it.”

Heisenberg’s nationalistic tendencies are occasionally revealed in his dialogue. In discussing interwar Germany and the progress made in the scientific community at the time, he is delighted that his country led the way in many respects. This, Heisenberg seems to believe, is the natural order of matters. Germany can and should be a leader, even when it has been decimated by war (and is about to be decimated by hyperinflation and the rise of the Nazi party). For all his scientific insight, Heisenberg cannot help but reveal his patriotism in moments such as this.

“Yes, suddenly everyone’s turned their backs on your wonderful new matrix mechanics.”

Heisenberg’s pride is also evident in the subtext. But the telling moment of this exchange is that Margrethe teases Heisenberg about how the scientific community seemed to concentrate on work other than his own. She knows Heisenberg well enough to detect his jealousy and feels confident that their friendship will withstand his pride being wounded. While Heisenberg’s pride is key to his character, that Margrethe understands this well enough to gently mock him reveals the closeness of the bond shared by all three characters.

“You think so long as the mathematics works out, the sense doesn’t matter.”

The disagreement between the two physicists can be summarized by this quote from Bohr. In his opinion, Heisenberg treats science too much like a puzzle that needs to be solved. Heisenberg pays little attention to the wider philosophical, political, or moral questions that must be answered, focusing only on the mathematics at hand. Heisenberg cannot see the difference between math and sense, believing that they are one and the same. The two men are arguing different points but cannot find a common thread of argument, and so they are doomed to repeat their investigation forever.

“Explain it to me? You couldn’t even explain it to each other.”

There are times when the two scientists attempt to use Margrethe’s presence to avoid admitting that they are on unsure footing. In the middle of a discussion, for example, Bohr worries that they have begun to lose Margrethe. They must endeavor to explain the situation to her, he says. But Margrethe responds with the quote above; she has followed along perfectly well and noted that the two men cannot explain the problem to each other. She refuses to be used as an easy escape and instead pushes her husband and friend toward a more intellectually honest resolution by demonstrating that she has an intellect worthy of respect.

“You reveled in the contradictions.”

If Heisenberg is too obsessed with the mathematics to pay attention to the wider issues, then he believes that Bohr focuses too much on the complications to the detriment of science. He accuses Bohr of reveling in the contradictions, of spending too much time delighting in the strange paradoxes presented by scientific conundrums rather than actually finding solutions. Bohr believes that the paradoxes are beautiful, while Heisenberg believes that they are a distraction. The only way the two men will find a resolution is if they can explain their respective points of view to one another.

“Because if you don’t know how things are today you certainly can’t know how they’re going to be tomorrow.”

Heisenberg’s defense of his uncertainty theory can be applied to the play as a whole. At the time (in 1941), neither of the two men seemed to truly know what their meeting was about. Even in death, as their spirits discuss the matter, they cannot come to a concrete understanding of the point of the meeting. If they cannot determine the point of the meeting today, in the contemporary moment when the play is taking place, then how will they be able to make a similar determination in the future? Heisenberg’s theory undermines the premise of the play, revealing the doomed nature of their goal.

“Please don’t tell us that you’re a hero of the resistance.”

Though Margrethe is the only character who is not a world-renowned scientist, she is capable of the most devastating insights into those around her. Her emotional and human intelligence allows her to peer straight into Heisenberg’s motivations and deconstruct the lies that he told himself in pursuit of intellectual vanity. Heisenberg believed that his work on the Nazi atomic project was in some way delaying the Nazis acquisition of an atomic bomb. But Margrethe sees this as an essential lie; in truth, Heisenberg was obsessed with the work, and his lie gave him moral permission to continue working on a project that could kill thousands.

“But it’s maddening to have this clever son forever dancing about in front of our eyes, forever demanding our approval, forever struggling to shock us, forever begging to be told what the limits of his freedom are, if only so that he can go out and transgress them!”

Margrethe can no longer treat the matter civilly. Her pent-up annoyance with Heisenberg erupts, and she admonishes him. But, while the quote reveals that she understands and detests many of Heisenberg’s worst qualities, she cannot help but love him. To her, he is still the young, ambitious, respectful man who first arrived in Copenhagen in 1924. Margrethe, who has lost a son, has taken Heisenberg in as her own, and his sins and transgressions wound her as if they were those of her own child. She does not criticize Heisenberg from a position of disgust but from one of love, as one would criticize a family member.

“It’s the simplest reason of all. Because you couldn’t. You didn’t understand the physics.”

Margrethe lays to waste the entire product of the two men’s intellectual endeavor, saying that it only produced a killing machine. When Heisenberg protests that he did not actually build the bomb, Margrethe skewers him with the above insult. She targets his intellectual pride, pointing out that the only reason that he did not build a bomb for the Nazis is that he failed. The failure to navigate the mathematics of the matter is, for Heisenberg, a bigger regret than any of the moral quandaries that have always obsessed Bohr. Heisenberg reduced everything to a desperate rush to the finish line, to ensure that the math worked with scant consideration for anything else. That he did this yet failed hurts him deeply.

“Until they were large enough to save a city. Which city? Any of the cities that we never dropped our bomb on.”

The irony of Heisenberg’s failure is that he likely saved more lives through his lack of success than he ever did through his triumphs. When he and Bohr discuss his fundamental misunderstanding of the issue of fission, Heisenberg reflects on the cities that he saved by being wrong. For a man who was obsessed with finding the right answer, whatever the cost, this is a demonstrable moment of growth. It is an admission that there is more to be gained than a simple rush toward the finish line. In failing to figure out the science, Heisenberg succeeded in saving potentially millions of lives.

“I looked at the two of them looking at me, and for a moment I see the third person in the room as clearly as I see them.”

For the first time when reliving this scene, Heisenberg sees himself from the perspective of his hosts. He sees the awkward conversation that he made and the difficult position he placed them in. Heisenberg is no longer at the center of the universe but examining himself from an outside perspective. This kind of self-examination was missing in previous iterations of the scene and in Heisenberg as a character; slowly, he is becoming more self-aware and—he hopes—this self-awareness might reveal why he was in Copenhagen in 1941.

“Even as the moment of collision begins it’s over.”

In the closing stages of the play, the repeated portrayal of this conversation is accompanied by a new metaphor: the exploding atomic bomb. The question Heisenberg asked Bohr is the catalyst, and then each splitting atom in the chain reaction is the actions of the two men as they expand outward and onward. The reaction is uncontrollable and—in the moment—not really understood. The explosive question posed by Heisenberg will have ramifications for the rest of the lives of all those involved, to the point where their spirits will argue about the facts long after they have died. The metaphor of the atomic explosion reveals the truly devastating nature of this moment, in that it destroyed their friendship and shaped the remainder of their lives.