çağlayan mazanoğlu, emine seda hacettepe university - faculty of letters - department of english language and literature, Ankara, turkey

“What I Remember Clearly from our Conversations”: Memory as the Method of Power Struggle in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen

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Werner Heisenberg, who worked for the Nazi German nuclear project, visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941, who took part in Manhattan Project. However, the content of this meeting during World War II remained a mystery and has been a subject of speculation. The letters which Heisenberg and Bohr subsequently wrote revealed that both scientists narrated what they had discussed and why they had ended up bitter in different ways. In Heisenberg’s memory he expressed his moral concerns about nuclear armaments; however, Bohr’s memory led him to argue that Heisenberg had the intention of making an atomic bomb for Nazi Germany. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) is a fictional account of this meeting which had a profound impact not only on scientific memory but also on historical and political memory. Hence, the aim of this article is to argue that in Copenhagen the spirits of Bohr, Heisenberg and Margrethe engage in a power struggle and use their personal memories, which are all different, to get over the global trauma of the atomic bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to evade responsibility. While the characters try to remember the real reason for Heisenberg’s visit, they re-write the history of atomic bomb through their personal memories.

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Power Struggle , Personal Memory , Atomic Bomb , World War II , Quantum Physics

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities

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