What history of science can learn from Michael Frayn's 'Copenhagen'

Abstract

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. This paper analyses one of its central characteristics, namely what I have termed 'historical polyphony'. Instead of advocating one amongst a multitude of widely differing 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 break with tenets of classical dramaturgy such as the 'uniqueness' and 'separability' of the stage characters parallels strange features of the quantum world. 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 andcontextualisationis the task of the historian.