Sphinx

The physicist Werner Heisenberg opens Der Teil und das Ganze (1969; published in English as Physics and Beyond in 1971), his personal account of the development of atomic physics in the first half of the twentieth century, with a citation from Thucydides; 1.22.1, to be precise:

Was nun die Reden betrifft, die … gehalten worden sind, so war es mir als Ohrenzeugen … unmöglich, den genauen Wortlaut des Gesagten im Gedächtnis zu behalten. Daher habe ich die einzelnen Redner so sprechen lassen, wie sie nach meinem Vermuten den jeweiligen Umständen am ehesten gerecht geworden sein dürften, indem ich mich dabei so eng wie möglich an den Gedankengang des wirklich Gesprochenen hielt.

As for the speeches, which…took place, it was for me as a hearing witness… impossible, to retain in my memory the exact wording of what was said. Therefore I have made the individuals speak as they were in my estimation most likely to have done in accordance with the circumstances, while I kept as closely as possible to the train of thought of what was really said.*

This is somewhat unexpected for a book about physics, but the rationale is simple. Science, Heisenberg argues, is made by people – an obvious fact that is easily forgotten. It proceeds through experiments – which produce results as a result of the conversations of those carrying them out, discussing with one another their significance; hence, such conversations form the main content of his book. However…

Dabei versteht es sich von selbst, daß Gespräche nach mehreren Jahrzehnten nicht mehr wörtlich wiedergegeben werden können. Nur Briefstellen sind, wo sie zitiert werden, im Wortlaut angeführt. Es soll sich auch nicht eigentlich um Lebenserinnerungen handeln. Daher hat der Verfasser sich erlaubt, immer wieder zusammenzuziehen, zu straffen und auf historische Genauigkeit zu verzichten; nur in den wesentlichen Zügen sollte das Bild korrekt sein.

It goes without saying that, after multiple decades, conversations can no longer be reproduced verbatim. Only extracts from letters, where these are cited, are quoted word for word. This book is not actually intended to be autobiographical. Therefore the author has permitted himself to abridge, to condense, and to refrain from historical accuracy; the picture is correct only in its essential details.

Heisenberg goes still further: he has not attempted to describe or characterise the individuals involved in the conversations he presents, or in most cases to identify them with more than a forename. In this way it’s easier to avoid the impression that he’s offering a historically accurate reproduction of actual events, in order to make the reader concentrate on what is said by different people, and how they said it.

Großer Wert wurde jedoch gelegt auf die korrekte und lebendige Schilderung der Atmosphäre, in der die Gespräche stattgefunden haben. Denn in ihr wird der Entstehungsprozeß der Wissenschaft deutlich, an ihr kann am besten verstanden werden, wie das Zusammenwirken sehr verschiedener Menschen schließlich zu wissenschaftlichen Ergebnissen von großer Tragweite führen kann.

However, great importance was attached to the correct and vivid depiction of the atmosphere in which the conversations took place. Because in this depiction the process of development of science becomes clear, and it can best be understood how the interaction of very different people can in the end lead to scientific results of great significance.

Heisenberg makes a final claim; his chosen method is concerned not just with communicating the real processes of scientific investigation and discovery to a lay audience – but also with trying to broaden the discussion of the implications of those processes beyond the narrow, or at least tightly focused, perspective of science:

Endlich hat der Verfasser mit der Aufzeichnung der Gespräche noch ein weiteres Ziel verfolgt. Die moderne Atomphysik hat grundlegende philosophische, ethische und politische Probleme neu zur Diskussion gestellt, und an dieser Diskussion sollte ein möglichst großer Kreis von Menschen teilnehmen. Vielleicht kann das vorliegende Buch auch dazu beitragen, die Grundlage dafür zu schaffen.

Finally, the author has with his depiction of these conversations had yet another goal in mind. Modern atomic physics has opened up new discussions about fundamental philosophical, ethical and political problems, and these discussions should involve the greatest possible circle of people. Perhaps this book can also lay the groundwork for this.

Heisenberg’s father was the Byzantinist August Heisenberg, who received his Habilitation in Mittel- und Neugreichische Philologie in Wurzburg in the year of Werner’s birth, and was called to the chair of Byzantinistik in Munich in 1910. His maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was Nikolaus Wecklein, a prolific scholar of classical Greek drama, and headmaster of the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich where Werner studied – including the thorough grounding in classics that was a standard component of such an education. It seems most likely that this is where he encountered Thucydides (and that’s a useful bit of evidence for the presence of that text in early C20 German schools), though he continued to engage with Greek philosophy (especially Plato) through his career, and could conceivably have returned to Thucydides at some point.

In his postscript to Copenhagen (1998), a play that dramatises the meeting between Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1941, Michael Frayn evokes Heisenberg’s evocation of Thucydides as justification for his own dramatic license:

Where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events it’s reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history. So let me make it as clear as I can in regard to this play. The central event in it is a real one. Heisenberg did go to Copenhagen in 1941, and there was a meeting with Bohr…  The question of what they actually said to each other has been even more disputed, and where there’s ambiguity in the play about what happened, it’s because there is in the recollection of the participants…

The actual words spoken by my characters are of course entirely their own. If this needs any justification then I can only appeal to Heisenberg himself. In his memoirs dialogue plays an important part, he says, because he hopes ‘to demonstrate that science is rooted in conversations.’ But, as he explains, conversations, even real conversations, cannot be reconstructed literally several decades later. So he freely reinvents them, and appeals in his turn to Thucydides. (Heisenberg’s father was a professor of classics, and he was an accomplished classicist himself, on top of all his other distinctions.) Thucydides explains in his preface to the History of the Peloponnesian War that, although he had avoided all ‘storytelling’, when it came to the speeches, ‘I have found it impossible to remember their exact wording. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would have done in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech.’ Thucydides was trying to give an account of speeches that had actually been made, many of which he had himself heard. Some of the dialogue in my play represents speeches that must have been made in one form or another; some of it speeches that were certainly never made at all. I hope, though, that in some sense it respects the Thucydidean principle, and that speeches (and indeed actions) follow in so far as possible the original protagonists’ train of thought.

But how far is it possible to know what their train of thought was? This is where I have departed from the established historical record – from any possible historical record. The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions – and this is precisely where recorded and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.

Frayn aims to convey a deeper understanding, and to draw out the wider implications, of the event he depicts. Of course, a play is nothing without words;  as a playwright, Frayn’s choice is between inventing, and not writing at all, and his primary goal is to represent as far as possible what the original protagonists thought (even if they didn’t actually express it). He also, or therefore, characterises Thucydides’ project in similarly limited terms (including the odd claim that he had eschewed “story-telling”) as an attempt at giving an accurate account of speeches actually made, despite the difficulties involved. This is understandable, for how else can Frayn dramatise the debates and the issues, and make them come alive for his audience – but it’s a rather limited reading of Thucydides.

I found myself reminded of some of the discussions last month of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: inside the Trump White House, which likewise presents conversations whose veracity may be questioned, at any rate on the grounds that Wolff himself cannot have been present – where at least some people on the Twitter invoked Thucydides, occasionally as a kind of justification of such reporting, but mostly as a means of disparaging the whole account – very much a “who does Wolff think he is, Thucydides?” Characters, especially Trump, are made to condemn themselves out of their own mouths – the Thucydidean approach to Cleon, according to most readers, and one of things that raises the most questions about any claim to objectivity or impartiality. The idea of Thucydides as offering a license to invent stuff for dramatic effect may be acceptable to writers of historical drama, but it sits awkwardly with any attempt at providing a reliable non-fiction account of ‘what really happened’.

But that is precisely what Heisenberg insists he is not trying to do – and it’s also worth emphasising that, unlike Frayn, he could easily have advanced his arguments about the nature of scientific progress in a quite different manner, without any recourse to invented dialogue. Speeches that don’t pretend to be exact transcriptions, because of the difficulty of accurate recollection, but which aim to reproduce what was appropriate for the speaker and the situation – with the aim not merely of recording past events as an end in itself, but of giving the reader an understanding of them, and of provoking further thought about their wider implications; this is very Thucydidean. That Heisenberg chooses such a mode of presentation is clearly not a matter of mere entertainment, but of creating a text that conveys important lessons – not presented as abstract principles but conveyed through narrative and speech.

Frayn wisely warns against trite evocations of “uncertainty” when it comes to Heisenberg; his famous Principle does not imply that everything is uncertain and/or unknowable. But perhaps an alternative trite evocation of the idea of indeterminacy may be permissible, as a reading (not necessarily an intended reading) of Heisenberg’s approach in Der Teil und das Ganze: that there is a limit to the precision with which two complementary aspects of a historical account can be known, that the more we emphasise the specific historical details and fetishise the reconstruction of details of events, the less we may understand their significance…

*Heisenberg uses August Horneffer’s 1912 translation – so, more than likely the version that he used at school, omitting Thucydides’ references to the problematic memories of other witnesses as well as his own. As is also the case with English renditions of this passage, a comparison of different German versions of Thucydides’ complex and confusing words is very illuminating when it comes to different conceptions of what the Greek author was attempting to do and how it relates to contemporary ideas of the appropriate level of invention in historiography. Also fascinated to discover, in the course of looking this up, that last year one Johann Martin Thesz published his dissertation on German Thucydides translations between the 18th and 20th centuries, and I will now have to get hold of this somehow or other…