Reading Order
Copenhagen Reading Order
Copenhagen (1998) by Michael Frayn is the most intellectually ambitious British play of the 1990s — the physicist Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and Werner Heisenberg, meeting in the afterlife to revisit their 1941 meeting in Copenhagen, when Heisenberg (then heading the German nuclear weapons program) traveled to occupied Denmark to meet his former mentor Bohr. The central question that organizes the play — what did Heisenberg say to Bohr, and what did he mean? — is a historical mystery that has never been conclusively resolved; Bohr's account (that Heisenberg was trying to establish that German physicists would not build the bomb if Allied physicists refused to) and Heisenberg's account (that he was trying to sound out Bohr's moral position) are both available, and both are partially supported by the historical record. Frayn uses the theatrical form (characters discussing and re-enacting a meeting from three different angles) to embody his philosophical argument about the relationship between physical complementarity and moral ambiguity: just as an electron cannot have both a precise position and a precise momentum simultaneously, the meaning of the 1941 meeting cannot be fixed in both its content and its intention at the same time.
Where to start
Copenhagen (1998) — the complete text, including Frayn's postscript, which is as important as the play. Basic familiarity with quantum mechanics (specifically wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and nuclear fission) helps but is not essential. Best Frayn reading order: Noises Off → Copenhagen → Democracy → Afterlife
Complete Copenhagen Book List
- 1Buy
Copenhagen
Michael Frayn·1998·The most intellectually ambitious British play of the 1990s — Bohr, Margrethe, and Heisenberg in the afterlife revisiting their 1941 meeting. Winner of the Tony Award and the Evening Standard Award; the postscript is essential reading alongside the text - 2Buy
Arcadia
Tom Stoppard·1993·Stoppard's companion in the tradition of the British drama that integrates scientific thinking into theatrical form — chaos theory, entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics. Copenhagen and Arcadia are the two British plays of the 1990s that most successfully integrated scientific thinking into theatrical form: Stoppard's with chaos theory; Frayn's with quantum mechanics - 3Buy
Life of Galileo
Bertolt Brecht·1943·The companion in the tradition of the dramatic investigation of the relationship between physics and moral responsibility — Galileo's recantation. Companion dramatic investigations of the relationship between scientific knowledge and political/moral responsibility; both organized around a meeting at which the scientist's moral choice is made - 4Buy
The Physicist
Friedrich Dürrenmatt·1962·Dürrenmatt's companion in the post-war Central European tradition of the drama about scientific knowledge and political power — the three physicists in the sanatorium. The Physicist and Copenhagen are companion post-war dramatic investigations of the same question: what is the scientist's responsibility when the knowledge they possess could be catastrophically misused? - 5Buy
Heisenberg: Uncertainty in the Nuclear Age
David Cassidy·1992·Cassidy's companion biography of Werner Heisenberg — the standard scientific biography of the physicist at the center of Copenhagen. Essential reading alongside the play for anyone who wants to understand the historical complexity that Frayn's drama is based on; Frayn lists it in his postscript as one of his primary sources - 6Buy
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes·1986·Rhodes's companion Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Manhattan Project — the scientific and political story of how the atomic bomb was built. The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Copenhagen are companion investigations of the same historical moment from opposite sides: Copenhagen investigates the German nuclear program and why it failed; Rhodes investigates the American program and how it succeeded - 7Buy
Oppenheimer
Various·2023·Nolan's 2023 film companion — J. Robert Oppenheimer's development and moral reckoning with the atomic bomb. Copenhagen and Oppenheimer are companion investigations of the same historical question from opposite sides: Heisenberg's failure and Oppenheimer's success in building nuclear weapons, and the moral consequences of that difference - 8Buy
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
Ananyo Bhattacharya·2021·Bhattacharya's companion in the tradition of the investigation of the physicist at the center of the development of twentieth-century science and technology. Copenhagen and The Man from the Future are companion investigations of the relationship between exceptional scientific intelligence and the political and moral world in which that intelligence operates
Copenhagen — Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Copenhagen meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg?
In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg — then heading the German nuclear weapons program, the Uranverein — traveled from Berlin to German-occupied Copenhagen to visit his former mentor Niels Bohr. The two men walked together in the evening; they had a conversation; and Bohr ended the meeting abruptly and never spoke to Heisenberg again until after the war. What was said in that conversation has never been definitively established. Bohr's account (which he never published publicly but which exists in draft form as unsent letters to Heisenberg) was that Heisenberg had tried to establish that German physicists would not build the bomb if Allied physicists refused to — a proposal that Bohr interpreted as meaning that Heisenberg believed the Germans could build the bomb and was trying to establish whether the Allies could too. Heisenberg's account was that he was trying to sound out Bohr's moral position — to discuss the ethics of the physicist's involvement in building weapons of mass destruction. The historical evidence is incomplete and contradictory; Frayn's play makes the incompleteness and contradiction its subject. The meeting's importance in the play is not what was actually said but what the uncertainty about what was said reveals about the relationship between intention and communication, between what we mean and what we are understood to mean — which is the theatrical embodiment of Heisenberg's own uncertainty principle.
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