The Principle

by Jérôme Ferrari

  Perhaps they remember the words of the students of the White Rose, whose echo they hear: “Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty!”

  They say: “Our lakes and our mountains.”

  They say: “This is what we’ve done.”

  But that doesn’t mean: “These are our lakes and mountains. This is our crime.”

  On the contrary, it must be understood as: “Since we’re part of the lakes and mountains, we’re also part of the crime.”

  All the same, they talk about the risks they took, bravely and alone.

  They try to again become individuals in order to break the spell of their collective utterance.

  Perhaps they still hear: “The end will be terrible.”

  There’s something sad and ridiculous about their efforts.

  They have demands.

  They’re convinced that something is owed to them.

  They assume that the Allies have nothing more important to do than to crisscross Germany delivering their letters and bringing their loved ones’ replies back to England.

  They imagine that their torments matter.

  They live in a world that doesn’t exist.

  When the mail is late, they become anxious, hostile, vulnerable. They weep.

  Professor von Laue triumphantly brandishes the letter he’s just received from his son. He wants to share his joy. Those who’ve received nothing throw him nasty smiles and sidelong glances, overflowing with a dark jealousy that resembles hatred.

  Dr. Bagge learns at last that his wife hasn’t been raped. He’s briefly euphoric. But then he quickly finds a new reason to be morose, complaining bitterly that she’s been forced to cook for the French.

  Dr. Diebner’s problems are quite different. With infinite tact, Captain Brodie tells him that it hasn’t been possible to get his letters to his wife, because she’s run off with another man and hasn’t left a forwarding address. Dr. Diebner seems to adapt with remarkable stoicism to his new situation as a cuckolded husband. He says he’s glad that someone is looking after his wife. Maybe he hasn’t quite grasped the exact nature of the news.

  As the principle stipulates, in a very short space of time, the indeterminacy of energy is such that it can go through considerable variations in intensity, and can even emerge abruptly out of nothingness; but if the time drags on, as it does in Farm Hall, without ascribable limits, it invariably regains the monotony of its basic level, its lowest level.

  They’re all bored to death.

  Something in them becomes gradually worn-out over the endless weeks.

  Professor Heisenberg plays Mozart sonatas, by heart, on the piano. Nobody listens to him anymore. Every day, Professor Hahn walks for hours in the garden, never tiring. He calculates the distance he’s covered. If he’d walked straight ahead, he would have crossed the sea. By now, he would have been in Germany for ages.

  The guests are sometimes visited by British physicists. Patrick Blackett. Sir Charles Darwin. Sir Charles Frank. They discuss theoretical problems with new ardor, the nuclear reactor, heavy water, the separation of the isotopes. They talk about their dreams of the future, their return to Germany, the laboratories, the universities, everything that will need to be rebuilt. Beyond the garden of Farm Hall, a wider world still exists of whose intoxicating presence they again become aware. Professor Gerlach is in a mischievous mood: “What Sir Charles says isn’t completely stupid!” They all burst out laughing. The memory of Wolfgang Pauli’s unbelievable nerve takes them back for a moment to the paradise of the 1920s. But of course Sir Charles leaves in the end, and every visit acts as a bomb blast whose shock waves, increased by boredom, spread for a long time through the emptiness of Farm Hall, provoking sudden patches of turbulence.

  The guests grow agitated, they overflow with useless energy, which they expend on futile discussions.

  They’re suddenly convinced that the whole of the international scientific community is concerned about their fate.

  They write endless letters, they squabble.

  They make futile plans, lose themselves in absurd schemes, because they no longer have any doubt that their demeanor and their decisions are capable of bringing about a change in their situation.

  They endlessly calculate the probability of seeing their families and country again. Their estimates reflect with mathematical precision the constant fluctuations in their fickle moods, confidence and depression, euphoria and despair and impatience, the motionless hours painfully illumined by the vague memory of a loving or unfaithful wife. They’re afraid of one day forgetting their children’s faces.

  Professor Heisenberg has perfected a little turn that he reiterates endlessly. Whenever the guests have gone too long without news of their families, or whenever they suddenly decide that they need immediate answers to all the questions they’re asking themselves about their future or the length of their detention, Professor Heisenberg marches into Captain Brodie’s office with a serious threat: if their just demands aren’t taken into account by the authorities, he’ll break his word and immediately announce his presence in Cambridge. After this same scene has been repeated with tiny variations at increasingly short intervals, Captain Brodie finds it hard to stop himself from laughing in Heisenberg’s face. But he never does so. Because he has to make sure of the guests’ cooperation and can’t run the risk of offending them. And because he likes Professor Heisenberg a lot. Apart from anything else, he’s an ideal prisoner. In the vast slaughterhouse that Europe has become, he still feels so bound by his word of honor as to make chains, bars, and jailers seem perfectly pointless. He holds such store by it that he doesn’t doubt the effectiveness of his terrible threat, even though of course it has absolutely no effect.

  They’re remarkably intelligent men all the same.

  They’ve entered the sanctuary of the master of Delphi.

  They understand what to most men remains a mystery.

  But they don’t understand that they’re no longer masters of their own fates. They don’t understand that nobody cares what they want, or that their constant demands are pointless and annoying. They don’t understand what being defeated means because, when it comes down to it, they don’t even understand that they’ve lost the war.

  No, the simplest things they don’t understand.

  In November, the Daily Telegraph announces that the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1944 Nobel Prize for chemistry to Professor Hahn, in recognition of his discovery of nuclear fission. The guests organize a celebration meal, to which they invite Captain Brodie. At the tops of their lungs, they sing the words of a rough, humorous poem in an unlikely mixture of English and German, jokingly accusing Professor Hahn of being responsible for all the ills of the world, and when they come to the chorus they bang on the table and cry in unison: “And who’s to blame? Otto Hahn!”

  They’re as merry, carefree, and unruly as a band of old students.

  Professor Hahn proclaims that, if he’s granted permission to go to Stockholm, he fully intends to get totally plastered with his Swedish friends, as the honor paid him demands.

  Everything, though, is spoiled when Professor von Laue is tactlessly unable to stop himself from including Frau Edith Hahn in his fulsome tribute to her husband, thus unwittingly summoning the cherished shades of absent wives to the banquet table, where they silently take their places, bringing with them their forgotten perfumes and the distant gentleness of lost homes. Professor Hahn passes instantaneously from joy to tears. Not to be outdone, Professor von Laue now also bursts into sobs. Stuck between the two distraught men, Captain Brodie makes an effort to keep up a dignified front in order to conceal the awful embarrassment into which this painful scene has plunged him. Above all, he’s afraid the contagion might spread to the other guests, who, not wishing to pass up this unique opportunity to feel sorry for themselves in their shared misery, would collectively infl
ict on him the distressing, tearstained spectacle of their sorrow.

  In the days that follow, Professor Hahn waits in vain for official confirmation of his Nobel Prize. He suspects Captain Brodie of taking a wicked pleasure in keeping him on tenterhooks. He demands to be allowed to write to Stockholm, to avoid the Royal Academy being offended at his incomprehensible silence. He feels forever dishonored. He loses his temper and screams that he can no longer answer for anything. He wishes the worst disasters to befall the United Kingdom. Professor Heisenberg is unable to calm him down.

  Just before Christmas, the guests learn that, having been detained for six months, as permitted by British law, without any other reason than His Majesty’s pleasure, they will all go back to Germany at the beginning of January 1946.

  They forget their sadness, their resentments, the certainty they sometimes had that they were being subjected gratuitously, out of pure sadism, to pointless mental torture.

  They speak of their stay at Farm Hall as if it were a delightful vacation.

  Dr. von Weizsäcker claims with suspect enthusiasm that he would gladly spend another six months there.

  They think it would be more prudent for them not to tell anyone in Germany how they’ve been treated.

  They fear they would be accused of collaboration.

  But they want nevertheless to express their gratitude. For Christmas, they give Captain Brodie a souvenir album they’ve put together for the occasion. Each of them has written his own biography, leaving a blank space above the text for his photograph. They have no photographs. They promise they will provide them later. They won’t have the opportunity to do so. And Captain Brodie’s Christmas gift will end up in the records of British intelligence.

  On the flyleaf, in pencil, pen, or charcoal, someone has drawn Farm Hall.

  Professor Hahn has written:

  At the beginning of 1944, my institute in Dahlem was entirely destroyed by bombs. I transferred my activities to Tailfingen, in Württemberg, where I was arrested by American soldiers on April 25, 1945.

  Dr. von Weizsäcker has written:

  Even more than science in the abstract, it is its significance for the spirit of the time and its relationship with philosophy and religion that arouse my interest.

  Professor Heisenberg has written:

  I, Werner Karl Heisenberg, was born on December 5, 1901, in Würzburg, where my father taught high school and was an assistant at the University. In 1909, my father was transferred to Munich; it was there that I grew up, learning languages, mathematics, and music. From 1920—after a short interval as a volunteer soldier—I studied physics there with Sommerfeld. At the same time, I joined the youth movement, regularly participated in cross-country hikes, and practiced all kinds of sport. In 1924, I became an assistant at Göttingen and invented quantum mechanics during a stay on Heligoland. In 1926 and 1927, I was an assistant in Copenhagen, and a pupil and friend of the great physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr. From 1927 to 1941, I was a professor at the University of Leipzig, where I taught atomic physics to a large number of students, both German and foreign. In 1929, I gave classes and lectures in America, Japan, and India. I have had a family since 1937. In 1941, during the war, I was transferred to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics.

  And no doubt there is nothing more to be said.

  On January 3, 1946, accompanied by Major Rittner and Captain Brodie, they land in Germany, in a landscape of ruins and rubble. They will have to live surrounded by it for years to come, but for the moment they pretend not to see it.

  They travel through the occupation zones to Hamburg, Göttingen, Bonn, and Munich, watched by Allied soldiers and Soviet spies.

  They look for places to settle.

  They request authorizations that are sometimes only granted after an endless wait.

  They hope that something will finally emerge from the ruins.

  In spite of his tactlessness at Farm Hall, it is to Max von Laue that the honor falls to give, before a gathering of physicists, the eulogy for Max Planck, whose pupil he was and who, after gradually losing everything in the course of far too long a life—his house, his library, his manuscripts, and all his children—has at last found an island of stability where he may forget to ask God for an explanation.

  While in Washington, in a melodramatic gesture of despair, Robert Oppenheimer holds his long, pale hands out in front of him, arms open and fingers trembling, so that President Truman can certify that they’re covered in blood, Werner Heisenberg flies to Copenhagen, where he will complete his apprenticeship in the need for silence. Because he’ll never be able, as he still hopes he will, to justify himself to Niels Bohr and will have to concede that, for their relationship to continue, it would be best never again to mention their encounter in 1941, or anything relating to the war. So they talk of other things. Pi mesons. The aurora borealis. The future.

  But they can’t forget that, in spite of his regrettable fondness for sententious turns of phrase, Oppenheimer is absolutely right: physicists have known sin, a sin that is much too big for them.

  They have all fallen, all of them, all at once.

  And Werner Heisenberg, whose dazzling youth has abruptly vanished without a trace, may be thinking that a long time ago, at the end of another war, in a time of defeat and revolutions, an old mathematician and his devil dog had a mysterious presentiment of it. Professor von Lindemann had seen what the shy boy who wanted to study mathematics and was then standing full of hope in front of his desk already bore within him without even knowing it.

  An evil energy, silently radiating.

  The seeds of sin, its indelible stain.

  The promise of a destiny pretending to be chance, the inevitable achievement of which would be at one and the same time a triumph, a fall, and a curse.

  Professor von Lindemann couldn’t help but be seized with a holy terror and chase away that boy in whom Werner Heisenberg may not recognize himself but who nevertheless arouses in him an irresistible nostalgia, not for youth, but for lost innocence.

  TIME

  From the sultanate of Oman to the shores of the Gulf, of which the Persians and the Arabs still contest the honor of being the eponymous heroes, across the sands that were the age-old home of Bedouin for whom no beauty, except that of God, was greater than the beauty of poetry, there may still be men dazzled by the incomparable lines that Al-Mutanabbi composed more than a thousand years ago:

  The horse, the night, and the desert all know me,

  And so do the bow, the sword, the paper and the pen.

  But nobody these days can ascribe the boundless pride of those lines to themselves. They’ve become the silent relics of a world that’s vanished abruptly, an ancient treasure, strange and venerated, which glitters now with an incomprehensible glow in the shrine of an empty temple. In less than forty years, on the sand of the desert, on the shore of the burning sea where poor pearl fishers once dived all summer long, oil has fertilized the arid earth and brought forth towers of glass, marble, and steel that thrust ever higher into the dusty furnaces of the sky. Hidden behind the tinted glass panes of their luxury cars, the children of the Bedouin, whose lofty destitution was so admired by occasional British adventurers, and who today have lost even the memory of their former poverty, casually ride through vast cities where tourists and businessmen, financiers, princes, slaves, and whores rub shoulders. The ancient silence throbs with the incessant hum of air conditioners, and echoes day and night with all the languages in the world. In the evening, the pale disk of the sun slowly descends onto a horizon bristling with cranes and billboards.

  The hotels, the businesses, the restaurants, the boutiques lined up in the colossal aisles of the shopping malls, everything that emerges from the earth, must be given a name.

  Everything must be transfigured by lies.

  We are not the master of Delphi, who neither speaks nor hides his
meaning. Our words are simply human. They can only reveal the world imperfectly or bury it in lies—and thus attain perfection. I’m very well acquainted with the art of giving deceptive names to things, the art of shopkeepers and politicians. At the end of a road that, however unlikely, I know owes nothing to chance, I’ve finally learned many things. I’ve learned to arouse that vain, compulsive appetite that’s become the only face of desire. I’ve learned to make everything that’s base glitter. I’ve learned to turn all ideas into sales pitches. That’s the only way the study of letters and philosophy can still justify their existence in this world, by producing men like me who’ve finally understood how to make their creativity effective.

  I can say anything.

  I can even allow myself to mention death.

  I call it eternity or heritage. I call it serenity. Those who hear me are no longer afraid. They smile and think of the passage of time—death, the destroyer of worlds—as if it were a friend. They buy luxury products that are supposed to survive them and may indeed survive them after all.

  You see, there really is nothing to be done: when it comes down to it, all I’ve been able to do is move ever further away from you, just as, admittedly, you never ceased moving so painfully away from yourself. At least I’ve never had to live up to a poet’s vocation in a world where, like the verses of Al-Mutanabbi, it no longer means anything.

  You asked: “What is strong?”

  You spoke of the white rose and the mysterious sound of the silvery string.