← Back to discovery

Copenhagen

Michael Frayn

199996 pagesabout 1–2 hours
1999
first published
  • 2000Anchor Books · 132 pages · ENGISBN 9780385720793
  • 2000Methuen · 132 pages · ENGISBN 9780739409169
  • 1998Methuen Publishing, Ltd. · 116 pages · ENGISBN 9780413724908
  • 2000Plays on Disc · 118 pagesISBN 9780970589309
  • 2003Methuen Drama · 96 pagesISBN 9780413773715

"Copenhagen is a reimagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb. In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionized atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment; it ended in disaster." "Why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen and what he wanted to say to Bohr are questions that have exercised historians ever since. In Michael Frayn's new play, an ambitious, fiercely intelligent, and daring dramatic sensation, Heisenberg meets Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, once again to look for the answers and to work out - just as they had worked out the internal functioning of the atom - how we can ever know why we do what we do."--Jacket.

Worth knowing

ViolenceFrequent

When and where

ThemesWar

Content notes

  • Warmoderateunreviewed

Quotesnone available

How do you feel?