Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

Continuing the previous post’s theme of a play by Michael Frayn, here are two books connected to another Frayn play with a similarly historical bent.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (playscript)

The premise of Copenhagen is based on a historical event: in 1941, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen — which at the time was under Nazi occupation — to meet with Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It is recorded that Heisenberg met with Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, and Bohr and Heisenberg later went out for a walk so they could speak without being overheard by the Gestapo. But when Bohr returned from the walk he was absolutely furious about something, and Heisenberg left shortly afterwards. Though Bohr and Heisenberg had been close friends for many years before that meeting, they barely spoke to each other again after that. The substance of the Bohr-Heisenberg conversation has never been fully explained. Some historians say that Heisenberg was attempting to recruit Bohr to help with the Nazi nuclear energy project (on which Heisenberg was working at the time) in exchange for academic reinstatement and advancement…even though Bohr was half-Jewish. The other, more sympathetic theory is that Heisenberg was trying to give Bohr information about the Nazi nuclear project in the hope that Bohr would be able to pass that information along to the Allies — essentially, that Heisenberg was trying to derail the Nazi attempt to build atomic weapons.

Frayn’s play takes both of these theories and weaves them together, never quite promoting one or the other but (intriguingly) connecting both theories to the principles of physics that both Bohr and Heisenberg were famous for creating: Bohr’s complementarity principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It’s an amazingly complex and multilayered play that only has three characters, Bohr and his wife and Heisenberg, and yet seems to contain many more voices than just those of two men and one woman.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

The Copenhagen Papers was jointly written by Michael Frayn and by David Burke; the latter played Niels Bohr in the original London run of the play. The subject of the book is an elaborate practical joke that Burke played on Frayn during the run of the play, and the joke is complicated enough to require a short historical background even before I can summarise it. The history hinges on the fact that at the end of World War II, Werner Heisenberg and the other scientists who had been working on the Nazi nuclear energy programme were taken to England and interned at an out-of-the-way requisitioned house called Farm Hall, where they were closely watched and interviewed by British intelligence.

David Burke decided that he wanted to play a joke on Frayn, some kind of joke related to the play that Frayn had written. Burke began by inventing a woman named Celia Rhys-Evans, who had apparently lived in Farm Hall at some point during the 1960s and had discovered a number of documents hidden under the floorboards of the house. These documents were written in cryptic, barely legible German, which nevertheless seemed to hint that the captured scientists had been communicating with each other without the knowledge of their British captors. Burke enlisted the help of some friends to fake 50-year-old German documents, and then (as Celia Rhys-Evans) he sent a number of the faked papers to Frayn, along with a letter that asked if these old papers would be useful to him if he ever wanted to write another play.

Not only did Frayn believe that the documents were genuine, but he also began a correspondence with Mrs Rhys-Evans to see if there were any other documents she might have on hand that dealt with the captured scientists. And thus Frayn and Burke set out on a strange and occasionally journey where one forgery followed another and another. Neither was willing to let go of his side of the story, but as the correspondence continued they both became so immersed in the fiction that the whole thing nearly ended in an exhausted stalemate. In the end, Frayn actually had to be told that the whole thing was a hoax.

The Copenhagen Papers is an account of the whole joke from inception to discovery — the truth was revealed by a sympathetic friend who thought that the joke had gone too far. The book is meant to be an exploration of some of the themes touched on in Copenhagen the play: the uncertainty of history and historical evidence, the ambiguous nature of language, the questions that are raised every time we learn something new about the past and how it may have shaped the future…or in this case, the present. Frayn and Burke clearly seem to have come to an understanding over this incident, enough to write a book about it and treat it fairly dispassionately. And even if my historian side almost can’t help but writhe a little to read about a deliberate forging of historical documents for a joke, The Copenhagen Papers is an intriguing exploration of what it means to be present at the creation of ‘history’.

The Whig Interpretation of History by Herbert Butterfield

A good old classic for the ‘metahistory’ tag today.

The Whig Interpretation of History by Herbert Butterfield

When I first began to spend my time doing serious historical research, I often came across the word ‘whiggish’ used in a negative sense to describe a historical thesis or set of ideas. Since I had no idea why the word was being used in a negative sense — or for that matter, what it actually meant — I did a little poking around and found that all the signs pointed to Herbert Butterfield’s book The Whig Interpretation of History.

Butterfield’s book is a criticism of the ‘progressive’ kind of historian who sees in the past a definite and predetermined path to the present. A possible example would be a historian of the Reformation who claims that Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door in order to create Protestantism and ultimately freedom of religion for all, while also claiming that those who opposed Luther’s declaration were backwards, blinkered reactionaries who were deliberately standing in the way of reform and Enlightenment. Whig history is the history of ‘inevitable’ success, the history that judges the past by the standards of the present and reads into history a confirmation of the existing status quo. The reason why Butterfield chose the term ‘Whig’ for his classification of this kind of history is that he noticed that the most blatant promoters of this kind of fallacious historical approach saw the 19th-century Whig gentleman — the Protestant, progressive, anti-slavery and pro-reform gentleman — as the pinnacle of virtue and the natural outcome of the progression of history. Yet Whig history might well describe any modern triumphalist narrative of history…such as the kind that is often found in books about the history of how the West ‘won’ the Cold War.

My edition of this book is an old secondhand copy, Butterfield’s original text and nothing else. I think that a more comprehensive edition of this book might be improved if a short introductory essay was added to give some more perspective on which specific historians or historical theses Butterfield might have been condemning most strongly at the time. (Perhaps it’s because I felt as if I was reading Butterfield’s criticism in a vacuum — at the time, I had very little idea of who or what he was talking about.) But the book is definitely one of the classics of the historiography, the history of writing history, and as such is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in what I tend to call metahistory.

Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

Vaguely buried under work here at the moment — a more complete update on InaDWriMo progress will follow once I’ve managed to clear a few things off my to-do list.

Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

For all that the title of this book begins with ‘Wittgenstein’, this book isn’t your typical philosophy book. It’s part philosophy, part biography, and part historical mystery. The focus of the book is an incident that allegedly took place at Cambridge University on 25 October 1946, when a philosophical discussion held in a set of college rooms turned into an open argument between two of the great twentieth-century philosophers — Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to some versions of the story, an agitated Wittgenstein actually picked up a fireplace poker and brandished it, openly threatening Popper with it, only to throw the poker down and storm out of the room, bringing an end to the confrontation.

One of the more intriguing things about this incident is that almost none of the eyewitnesses to the argument (there were more than two dozen people present for the discussion, I believe) seem to agree about what actually happened. Did Wittgenstein really threaten Popper with the poker? Did he merely wave it about, using it to gesticulate and getting a little too excited? Did Popper exaggerate the story afterwards to make Wittgenstein seem mentally unbalanced? And what prompted the argument, anyway? In Wittgenstein’s Poker, Edmonds and Eidinow examine this incident and try to make sense of a mass of conflicting information to determine what might’ve transpired.

Wittgenstein’s Poker delves deep into the personal and professional histories of Popper and Wittgenstein to illuminate their similarities and differences, and it shows how the clash was really operating on several levels. The argument was a debate about philosophy, but it had its roots in the social backgrounds of Popper and Wittgenstein (the former came from a struggling middle-class family, while the latter was of aristocratic lineage) as well as similar experiences (both had fled Austria to escape the Nazis). And the fundamental differences between Popper and Wittgenstein’s philosophy would certainly have given them enough to argue about…but not, perhaps, to the point where fire-irons ought to have been involved. The various stories on what happened with the poker are part and parcel of this clash, and each of the accounts has something to say about why these two men would’ve reacted so strongly to each other during what was supposed to have been a scholarly, civilised discussion.

Before I read this book, my only knowledge of Wittgenstein and Popper was a generally vague sense of their philosophical writings — I was slightly more aware of Wittgenstein than Popper, but what I could have told you about either of them would’ve filled something very small. Edmonds and Eidinow have written one of those books that truly piques the reader’s curiosity (or at least it piqued mine) on in a subject that might’ve otherwise remained an odd anecdote in the history books. Wittgenstein’s Poker is one of those books that I keep coming back to whenever I’ve a need to remind myself that even odd anecdotes can have a deeper historical meaning.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

I wasn’t planning to post another Umberto Eco book review so soon, but with new material coming out on this book’s primary subject, I simply couldn’t resist.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

When you’re an editor at an Italian publishing house that’s essentially a glorified vanity press specialising in occult and esoteric literature, you’re bound to read some (or rather, many) manuscripts that would be best filed under the term ‘crackpot.’ Whether the subject at hand happens to be those pesky Freemasons who keep poisoning the wells, or incontrovertible proof that the Knights Templar are alive, well, and plotting with the Soviets, the BBC, and a reincarnated Joseph of Arimathea to find the Holy Grail and take over the world…well, even conspiracy theories can get boring if you read enough of them. So three editors — an academic researcher named Causabon, an eccentric writer named Belbo, and a numerology enthusiast named Diotavelli — decide to have a little fun with what is otherwise a fairly dull job.

Their plan (which they later refer to as ‘the Plan’) is very simple. They will pull random ideas and statements from their piles of crackpot manuscripts and start to weave them together as carefully as possible. Belbo even has a computer program that is capable of shuffling the ideas around in random patterns, which the three men can then use to keep coming up with increasingly fantastical connections between seemingly unrelated incidents. The basic idea behind the Plan is to rewrite world history as one massive conspiracy theory, involving the Knights Templar and a mysterious power source greater than an entire atomic arsenal. It’s a game, and an intellectual challenge, and a way to stave off the boredom of their work. But when the Plan they create out of nowhere soon starts to take on a life of its own, the three men get increasingly caught up in the nonsensical story they’ve bashed together. And they will soon discover that there are more than a few people out there who are eager to believe in the greatest conspiracy theory of all time — and will do anything to ensure that the Plan comes to fruition.

Foucault’s Pendulum, first and foremost, isn’t a reference to philosopher Michel Foucault. It’s a reference to the physics experiment designed by French physicist Léon Foucault; specifically, the one located at the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris. That said, the book does for the suspense thriller what Eco’s The Name of the Rose did for the period detective story: it faithfully follows all of the standard elements of the genre while simultaneously giving you a crash course in world history, classical and occult literature, crosscultural studies, and heaven knows what else besides. It’s by no means an easy book to read — I freely admit that there were entire chapters where names and literary references were completely lost on me and I had to piece together the characters’ train of thought as best I could — but Eco does a fine job explaining the crucial plot points and information in a way that doesn’t make it sound as if he’s talking down to the readers. And while I didn’t find the characters as engaging as those in The Name of the Rose, they’re still carefully drawn and interesting to follow. The story takes time to unfold and set up, and the Plan isn’t introduced until almost two-thirds of the way through the book, but the build-up is absolutely necessary to give the reader a sense of place in the story and a slightly more distanced perspective on the madness that brings the plot to its conclusion.

Perhaps the most important point that Eco makes in this book about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theories (no matter how small at the outset) are by their very nature insidious, all too adept at getting under your skin and completely skewing your view of reality. Even the three editors are not immune to the power of conspiracy theories, even though they are fully aware that they’ve made the whole thing up as part of a silly game. As Causabon notes bitterly, on reflection, ‘I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.’ There’s a very clear warning in that comment, one that I definitely had to keep in mind as I read this book — and one which I have a feeling I’ll keep in mind for some time to come when looking at historical and literary connections.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward

More of what I tend to call ‘metahistory’, in this book review.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward

The history you learn in school is the history that tends to stick with you when you’re older. For most citizens of a country, the history taught by teachers and textbooks is all the history they will ever really study and all the history they will remember in the future — the foundation for a sense of national identity based on a common past. So naturally, governments tend to take a great interest in the history that ends up in schools. Some countries have national review boards that vet history textbooks for use in schools, or publish a specific list of approved books that must be used by teachers. Other countries simply cut out the middlemen and write the history textbooks themselves. So understandably, there are times when the teaching of history is an extremely touchy subject. It’s the basis of the ongoing Japanese history textbook controversy, and the concern that’s been aired in books such as James Lowen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me. The history that most Americans would consider purely ‘American History’ did not happen in a vacuum…so how do other countries view events that end up being taught in American classrooms?

In History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History, the editors have examined a slew of history textbooks from different countries and pulled passages that show different perspectives on historical events frequently found in American history books. In what context do British (and Canadian) textbooks place the American Revolution? Do children in other countries learn anything about the American Civil War? What is included or carefully omitted in different accounts of incidents surrounding the Boxer Rebellion or the beginning of World War I? And what passes for history in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea, where the government control over textbook publication is stricter than most anywhere else in the world? All of these historical events and many more are spread out across the pages of History Lessons, with multiple perspectives (where available) for each historical event or time period.

Comparative history fascinates me on so many levels, so I picked up this book expecting both entertainment and enlightenment — and that’s essentially what History Lessons provided. Nothing exactly earth-shattering, but certainly nothing boring or unworthy of note. (It would take too much room to post large chunks of the quotations that interested me most, but if anyone reading this is interested in specific events then I’m more than willing to do a little transcribing in comments.) Looking at how different countries write their history is an intriguing sliver of insight into someone else’s way of thinking. Something that might warrant an entire chapter in one history book gets only part of a paragraph in another book. It definitely prompted me to think back on the history I learned in school, and how I felt when I first learned that the things my teachers said were only a tiny (and blurry) part of a far greater picture. But even so, there were some passages that made me rather thankful that I didn’t grow up learning a history that had a very specific government agenda — History Lessons includes some extremely disturbing passages from actual North Korean junior and senior high school textbooks. (When the history textbooks actually use ‘bastards’ as the term most often employed when speaking of Americans and other enemies of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea…well, that takes revisionist history to an entirely new level.)

History Lessons doesn’t preach, really. It certainly doesn’t claim that all American history texts should be consigned to the shredder, or that other countries have a ‘better’ perspective on history that’s more worthy of study. But I would really like to see this book assigned to upper-level students in the United States, those taking high school or even introductory college level history classes. It’s a book I’d assign, if I ever taught a survey US history course. Even a handful of different perspectives can be worth any number of classroom hours slogging through names and dates and vocabulary lists. What’s the point of learning history if you don’t learn that your view of history is not necessarily the ‘right’ one?

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines

I still agree with the opinion about academic conflicts mentioned below. Very much so.

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines

Let me preface this book review with an opinion I’ve developed recently. In my opinion, conflicts in academia are only enjoyable (let alone interesting) when they’re witnessed thirdhand. They’re awful when you’re part of them, and very unpleasant when you’re dealing with the fallout from them, but seen from a distance (and especially after most of the participants are dead) they can be remarkably fascinating. It’s rather like watching an early nature documentary — only without the voiceover person’s nearly incomprehensible accent.

That said, the Letters from Oxford are a collection of letters written by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to art historian and critic Bernard Berenson. Trevor-Roper was an Oxford don and former military intelligence officer who had made a pile of money with the publication of his best-selling book The Last Days of Hitler. His work on Hitler was only the prelude to his career as a historian — or rather, his career as a historian who thoroughly enjoyed attacking OTHER historians of his day and age in various published articles and letters. His correspondence with Berenson began shortly after the end of the war and continued until Berenson’s death in 1959, and Trevor-Roper’s letters to his friend and occasional host (Berenson lived in Italy, and opened the doors of his villa to an exclusive array of guests) provided what Berenson wanted most to hear: gossip, and plenty of it.

Setting aside the snippets of gossip that would probably only interest people who like reading about old scandals amongst the literati, Trevor-Roper’s Letters from Oxford contain two remarkable gems of correspondence: his farcical descriptions of Oxford University politics (not the party-political kind, but rather the kind that determines who gets the vacant Regius Professorship or other high-powered post) and a remarkably trenchant real-time analysis of the Suez crisis. It’s in these sections where Trevor-Roper’s skill with words and turns of phrase really comes through, and the art of good letter-writing shows itself most vividly. Reading other people’s letters generally doesn’t tend to be interesting — even the Letters from Oxford have their fair share of syncophantic bread-and-butter notes and an almost nonstop undercurrent of whinging over Trevor-Roper’s latest bete noire — but it’s a treat nonetheless to find a correspondence that manages to capture a vivid and occasionally intriguing picture of the foibles of the past.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

I once had the amazing good fortune to meet Cambridge historian David Reynolds, and I think I flummoxed him a little (in the good way) when I told him straight off that I was a great fan of his work. Britannia Overruled is a classic reference text for anyone interested in studying Anglo-American relations, and Rich Relations is an intriguing look at Anglo-American relations during the ‘American occupation of Britain’ in World War II. So perhaps in keeping with his Anglo-American theme, Reynolds’ book focuses on a true Anglo-American output — Winston Churchill — and more specifically, Churchill’s impressive six-volume history of the Second World War.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

One of the quotations often attributed to Churchill is the pithy and somewhat flippant declaration: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. Brave words from any politician, but in a sense Churchill really did write the history that would later lionise his name. After the Conservative Party’s massive defeat at the polls in 1945, Churchill was left as the Leader of a tiny Opposition and faced with the need to earn some kind of income to offset the extremely high tax rates that the Labour Party had recently imposed. With reams of personal papers at his disposal — as well as a number of highly sensitive government documents that just happened to have come with him when he left Downing Street — he set out to write a detailed history of the war that had just been won.

There’s been so much written about Winston Churchill from just about every possible angle, from admiring hagiographies to damnation with only the faintest of praise. Reynolds’ approach to this study of Churchill after the war is both novel and utterly fascinating. Churchill is as much a larger-than-life figure in this day and age as he was during his lifetime…and so there’s something terribly human about a Churchill who is desperate to cut a good deal with his publishers, hoping to secure an advance on his writing to prevent having to sell his beloved Chartwell, or a Churchill who is worried that he might (A) die or (B) win the next General Election (both of which seemed to be equally unwelcome possibilities) before he can finish the next volume of his book. It’s a side of Churchill that isn’t often seen, even by historians.

Reynolds writes with equally painstaking detail about the writing process, picking through multiple drafts and identifying selections that were cut out to avoid offending living politicians or relationships with Britain’s allies, or even to conceal vital state secrets such as the truth about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. It’s history at the nitty-gritty level, writing about the history of history being written — and in being written, how that history shapes people’s perceptions of the very immediate past and perpetuates that image into the future. It’s certainly not a surprise that the book won the 2004 Wolfson History Prize, because Reynolds proves that it is indeed possible to write a history book that can appeal to historians and ‘lay readers’ alike. As he says in his introduction, ‘…Churchill the historian has shaped our image of Churchill the Prime Minister’, and In Command of History deftly illustrates how successful Winston Churchill actually was in writing the history that would later be so kind to him.