The Principle

by Jérôme Ferrari

  You’re asked to look into the possible practical applications of a discovery that Otto Hahn made the previous year while studying heavy nuclei. By bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons, an obscure change is caused in the material, the appearance of a mysterious element it hasn’t yet been possible to identify with any certainty, although some bold conjectures have been advanced, and Otto Hahn has resigned himself to recognizing it as barium, a well-known metal, so ordinary as to be totally devoid of mystery—the only mystery being what it’s doing there. The only explanation for that incongruous presence is that a neutron has caused the uranium nucleus to split into two lighter atoms, one of which is of barium, liberating sufficient energy in the process to move a grain of dust. If this fission then gave birth, in sufficient numbers, to neutrons capable of splitting other nuclei, it would start a chain reaction that could be used to produce energy, or an explosive of unsuspected power. The war hasn’t yet raised barriers of secrecy everywhere, and thanks to Niels Bohr, who’s extremely excited about it, the news spreads from Europe to America. Blackboards around the world are covered with frantic equations, sketched, crossed out, corrected, and endlessly repeated by men who are increasingly febrile, not because they’ve finally realized, without even wanting to, the dreams of transmutation once dreamed by wizards and alchemists, but because they can already glimpse an exciting and terrible prospect that Niels Bohr still hopes to prove is theoretically impossible: the manufacture of a bomb with such devastating effects that it would be pointless to try to protect oneself from it, just as it’s futile to flee death or seek refuge from the wrath of God. But Niels Bohr will have to give up his hopes, because the laws of nature have no use for them. The major theoretical obstacle which should have stood in the way of a bomb shatters and gradually fragments into a series of technical problems, and the Armaments Bureau gives you the task of determining how, and in how short a time, you’ll be able to solve them, leaving you free to use, for the success of your mission, as much Jewish physics as necessary.

  Did you think, as your friend Carl Friedrich was then convinced, with incredibly childish Machiavellianism, that control of atomic energy would give scientists power over Hitler and allow them to set events on a favorable course? Did you even envisage taking advantage of your situation to preserve German science and keep its youngest and most promising representatives away from the front by claiming that they were indispensable to you? Did you agree to direct the research the better to slow it down and impede it, or simply because, in this place where you’d been carried at an unimaginable speed, you’d long ago left behind you any possibility of refusing? Unless you succumbed, even for a second, although I refuse to believe it, to the toxic enthusiasm of seeing your country regain the greatness of which it had been unfairly deprived, and you wanted to participate with all your heart in its resounding victories, forgetting any concern you might have had about the nature of the masters you were forced to serve.

  It’s impossible to untangle.

  All these stories are perfectly consistent; the most diverse and incompatible of motives would have led you to behave in an absolutely identical way and to take exactly the same decision, and of all these consistent stories in which you appear, in turn, irresponsible, self-sacrificing, upright, complacent, and despicable, nobody can guess which is the true one, especially not me, blindly living through the hot summer of 1995, incapable of perceiving the fear, sadness, and despondency in those around me, even though they’re increasingly obvious. Every night, when we get back to our closet under the stairs, where the dirt has reached such an apocalyptic level that the girls who agree to come back with us let out cries of horror when they see it and turn, ready to run—a reaction our diplomatic skills don’t always succeed in checking—my cousin asks me to wait on the street until he signals that I can join him, and I obey without even wondering why, while he advances alone toward the dark stairwell, his halting breath still audible a moment longer. Nor do I ask myself why my father seems to be ageing at a prodigious speed between each of his visits, which he devotes, after expressing his ritual anxiety about how terrible I look, to endless discussions with men I’ve already met but whose faces I won’t recognize on the front page of the regional daily paper when they’ve been gunned down outside the doors, early in the morning, or on the road to some remote village, in their cars, their bloodstained arms hanging outside the car door they haven’t had time to open. But I know nothing about blood, apart from the taste of the blood that runs from my nostrils and which I collect on the tip of my tongue, with a stupid smile, in the parking lot of a nightclub where tourists dance and jump in time to the music, raising their arms to the sky. I think less and less about the novel I wanted to write. I devote myself entirely to the childish observation of my decline, which, when it comes down to it, fills me with pride as well as assuaging my creative urges because I imagine it resembles, in its very ignominy, the kind described in Russian novels. I don’t see the bloodstained crucifixes in the corners of churches that open their shadowy mouths onto sundrenched streets. I don’t see my father and his friends waging their absurd, invisible war, which doesn’t even stop the tourists from jumping on the dance floors in time to the music, their arms raised to the sky, even though it’s lasted for a thousand years, without end, without reason, and without glory, with its victims and its killers made indistinguishable through weariness, joined in the same oblivion, the mechanical ceremonies of its bereavements, and it’ll never stop because it’s never had and will never have any consequence for the future of the world, which weighs on you with all its intolerable weight.

  You’re working on a nuclear reactor capable of producing energy.

  You know it’s possible, at the cost of considerable technical effort, to build a bomb that will decide the outcome of the war, and you can’t expect your colleagues who’ve emigrated to the United States not to know that as well as you do.

  What a strange movement it is, the movement that’s flung you, at a speed no instrument can measure, into the very heart of that which you wanted to escape, and which disgusts you, a place where knowledge is subservient, useful only for the power it promises to provide. You still pretend to believe that it’s up to men to decide if this promise must be kept, but you know that power doesn’t belong to men, it ignores their dreams of control and walks among them, through them, as indifferent to those who desire it as to those who fear it, holding sovereign sway over all of them. Otto Hahn, after vainly suggesting that all the stocks of uranium should be disposed of, warned that, if the research in which he’s participating led to the building of a bomb, he would kill himself, and his resolve, however ridiculous it was, at least bore witness to an unquestionable lucidity, because it concerned only that which can still be decided. For all the rest, it’s too late, even though you don’t want to admit it and you go all the way to Copenhagen, in September 1941, to have a conversation with Niels Bohr in which you place all your hopes but which will turn out, of course, to be as pointless as it’s disastrous. Niels Bohr doesn’t listen to you, he doesn’t understand what you’re getting at, even supposing you understand it yourself, and everything he thinks he understands makes him lose his temper, you’re being unforgivably naive, either you’re trying cynically to use him in order to pass on false information to the Allies, or you’ve come looking for an absolution he can’t give you because Germany’s sins and yours are no concern of his, he isn’t and never has been your father, and he isn’t even your friend anymore, but you don’t realize that, you make a great effort to tell him everything—what you know, what you’re doing, what you fear, and what you’re planning—in an inextricable jumble of a speech still darkened by the shadow of the bomb, and you draw the diagram of a reactor on a piece of paper, hoping to make it clear to Niels Bohr that it’s a reactor you’re working on, not a bomb, even though you know now without the slightest doubt that a bomb could be built, but he looks at you in horror, convinced that you’ve drawn the bomb i
tself and that you’re going to do everything you can to build it.

  All these stories are consistent and all are incomplete, as if the principle no longer governed only the relations between position and speed, energy and time, but was now going well beyond the world of atoms, spreading its influence over men, whose thoughts were blurring into the pale hues of indeterminacy.

  But that isn’t the case.

  Thoughts may be hidden, secret, shameful, forgotten, they may be painful, unacceptable, misunderstood, they may be contradictory: they are not indeterminate.

  Even though Niels Bohr and you never agreed on what really happened in Copenhagen during that sad autumn night, nor on the words that were uttered, nor on their meaning, nor even on the exact place where they were uttered, something did happen, something that the spells of memory, the wounds, and the feelings of remorse won’t be able to change.

  Perhaps you’re both wrong.

  You can’t both be right.

  It’s pointless to look for truth in consistency. But I have the feeling that one day I recognized a familiar smell in a village in Franconia, near the war memorial, on the back of which a timid hand had carved beneath the high grass, almost at the level of the soil, an invisible prayer for the disavowed souls of the defeated—an elusive smell of wet earth, smoke, dreams, and mist, an ageless smell that connects my childhood to yours, and I like to think that this connection, however fragile and tenuous, alone gives me the right to talk to you from the noxious gloom of the closet under the stairs, just as it allows me also to sense a truth I know will always escape me.

  You still thought you were the citizen of a spiritual Athens.

  In that Athens that no longer existed except in your dreams, you would still have been allowed to go to Copenhagen to entrust what tormented you to Niels Bohr’s inexhaustible kindness, he would have recognized your fear of seeing your work used for military purposes, and your hope that all the physicists in the world would give up the idea of building a bomb because, in that Athens the war hadn’t suspended but destroyed, you would still have been Werner Heisenberg, the loyal, brilliant, sensitive Werner Heisenberg, and not the man you’d become in everyone’s eyes, the representative of a scorned nation that was occupying Denmark and almost all of Europe and committing despicable crimes, a cursed nation you had refused to leave for illusory or incomprehensible reasons and where, to make things worse, you held official posts, so that your hopes were completely insane, you had no chance of being heard, and even if, by some miracle, Niels Bohr had listened to you, you would have had to suspect that the only conclusion he could possibly draw was that on the pretext of saving the world, you were merely trying to protect Germany from the just punishment that would come to it from the very people it had ignominiously thrown out, and he wouldn’t have been entirely wrong, because the image of those you loved buried beneath the ruins of a city flattened by an atomic blast would haunt your nights until the end of the war and, even though you at least understood that your anxieties wouldn’t earn you anybody’s compassion, you didn’t understand much else, you knew perfectly well that your conversation with Niels Bohr hadn’t gone well, but you didn’t know to what extent hope and fear, and perhaps need, had made you such a poor psychologist that you wrote to Elisabeth, with great delight, that you and Carl Friedrich had spent a last evening with Niels and Margarethe Bohr on the eve of your departure, in a charming setting, and had played them a Mozart sonata, although its joyful A major tonality must have sounded particularly out of place, and you added, again with delight, that you’d walked back to your hotel beneath a wonderful starry sky, that same sky where, two nights earlier, you’d been lucky enough to observe a gorgeous aurora borealis.

  But maybe we shouldn’t look for truth in the letters that disappointed men send their wives in wartime.

  Maybe you’re trying, without entirely succeeding, to turn away from the truth as if it were a deadly poison.

  The movement that’s sweeping you along has taken you so far that those whose respect and trust have illuminated your life now consider you an enemy, nothing will ever be repaired, and it can’t be any other way, and to admit it is beyond your strength. Would you have agreed to pay such a price? I don’t know, the time to ask the question is long past, nor do I know how fair or unfair your friends are towards you, but I do know that in the spring of 1942, you find yourself in front of Albert Speer, who asks you about the current state of German research into nuclear energy. You talk about your reactor, but Speer turns to you and asks: is an atomic bomb conceivable?

  You tell him frankly that it is, at least theoretically, but that its manufacture poses colossal technical problems there’s no hope of overcoming—and even then without any guarantee of success—except after several years of unremitting work and a massive investment in manpower and money, so much so that by the end of the meeting, the project isn’t given the go-ahead. For your basic research, you demand such a ridiculously modest sum that Speer allocates it to you with an appalled sigh. And while the Allies, fearing that you might get ahead of them in the race for the bomb, a race in which they think they’re competing with you, come up with plans to abduct or kill you, you pursue your attempts to develop a reactor, and you obtain permission for young scientists to be exempted from their military obligations to join you in the relative shelter of your “islands of stability” on which the Royal Air Force never ceases to rain down bombs. You stubbornly carry on living, making children who are born into a world in flames, a world so ugly that nobody can look it in the face without wanting to die, for truth is indeed a deadly poison.

  You know that. You saw it destroy Hans Euler, whose thesis you had supervised and for whom you felt such affection. When war was declared, you offered to have him appointed to your laboratory, but he had drunk the poison of truth, and no longer wanted to be saved. He could no longer live among the Nazis, he could no longer live elsewhere, his compatriots’ attitude disgusted him, and the rotten souls of men, and he joined the Luftwaffe to carry out reconnaissance flights in the course of which he couldn’t kill anybody.

  As for himself, he didn’t care if he died.

  You tried talking to him, the war would end, the world would still be there, a different world, probably not a better world, but it would need men of goodwill to survive in order to at least make sure that it didn’t become worse than this one, it was a useful task, a necessary task, some things deserved to be saved from oblivion, but he shook his head sadly, however much you insisted, he no longer believed you, all words of hope seemed to him to give off an unbearable stench, the stench of lies and illusions, and he was suffering terribly, because the effects of the poison of truth are first of all painful, we think nostalgically of the lost sweetness of dreams of the future that we will never have again, the delights of lies and delusions whose stench we can no longer bear after being so long intoxicated by their delicate perfume, the promises of love in which we can no longer believe, but, a few months later, when the poison has dried up even the roots of life, there is no more nostalgia, no more suffering, just the incomparable stillness of despair, and Hans Euler wrote to you from Greece to tell you only about the blue sky, the wine-dark sea, the taste of oranges. His youthful face had grown calmer beneath the curls of his blond hair. He wore an expression similar to that of all young people who, like him, have attained the serenity of a place situated beyond their own death, where they have nothing more to fear and where they live on within the narrow limits of a present that is identical to eternity—First Lieutenant Kurt Wolff and all the dead pilots of Jasta 11, little Ernstel Jünger, the young Soviet tank commander Vasily Grossman met on the Kalmyk steppes, and so many others, they all look life in the face, without regrets and without reproaches, with a childlike gravity full of gentleness. Hans Euler is a hero, maybe the highest kind there is, and you aren’t. His death was perfect. As for you, you aren’t looking for death, in fact you flee it as much as possible, you do
n’t take any unnecessary risks, and you would never have been so foolhardy as to proclaim publicly, as Ernstel Jünger will do, that if Hitler was hanged, you would walk all the way to Berlin to pull the rope. You’re afraid, for those you love and for yourself. You want to live because you know we don’t fight a world that devotes all its strength to celebrating an obscene death cult by offering it an extra death, however perfect, but by setting against it the imperfect stubbornness of life, and you’re still alive, still stubbornly alive, while Hans Euler’s plane goes down in flames over the Sea of Azov and in Italy, near Carrara, a young boy who will never know how The Charterhouse of Parma ends lies motionless, his wide-open eyes turned up to the sky, on the marble cliffs his inconsolable father has set up for him like a cradle.

  That bastard Schardin doesn’t even believe in his own theory anymore!