Herald of
Culturology

Memory and history in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen: text and contexts

Popova I. Yu.

Abstract

The paper considers contradictions in the way memory and memoirs work in the play Copenhagen by the famous British author Michael Frayn. It exploits many well-known facts concerning the meeting-up of the physicists Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941, in Copenhagen, then occupied by Nazis. It interprets those facts, though, from the viewpoint of Frayn’s story and the time-layers provided both by the text and the contexts it triggered. What was the true purpose of the meeting?

Keywords

memories; physicists; atomic bomb; Nazi Germany; Copenhagen.

DOI: 10.31249/hoc/2022.04.03

Download text