Copenhagen delves deep into a 1941 meeting that purportedly ends their friendship. Once strong during a time of peace and scientific prosperity in the 1920s, their relationship strains and breaks due to the politics and ethics of World War II as Heisenberg works for Nazi weapons development and Bohr, who is half Jewish, lives in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Together, the two invented quantum mechanics, a theory that revolutionized not just atomic physics or even subdivisions of philosophy but the manner in which people perceive the universe.īut Frayn does not principally concern the play with these rather, he focuses on one aspect of the relationship between these two men. It might also lead to a wider appreciation of a new level of historiography in which documents (such as the recently released draft letters by Bohr to Heisenberg) are neither ‘authorities’ nor ‘witnesses’ but simply traces of past processes whose reconstruction and contextualisation is the task of the historian.Frayn’s Tony Award-winning play, Copenhagen, explores the relationship between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenburg, two of the most significant physicists-and indeed intellects in general-of the twentieth century. This break with tenets of classical dramaturgy such as the ‘uniqueness’ and ‘separability’ of the stage characters parallels strange features of the quantum world. Instead of advocating one amongst a multitude of widely di.ering reconstructions of what ‘really’ happened at a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in occupied Copenhagen in September 1941, Frayn’s piece enacts three somewhat plausible versions one after another. This paper analyses one of its central characteristics, namely what I have termed ‘historical polyphony’. 31 (2002) Michael Frayn’s play ‘Copenhagen’, which premiered in 1998, has attracted much attention and is certainly one of the most intriguing plays taking its inspiration from the history of science.

Copenhagen play