University Players COPENHAGEN

• Theater

The Tony Award-winning play by Michael Frayn, dir. by Marlon Hoffmann

Limit number of seats, only 65 available online!

Why did he visit? What did they discuss? And where, exactly, did they even walk? The 1941 visit of German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg to Nazi-occupied Denmark to meet his former mentor and colleague Niels Bohr, then potentially connected to the Allied nuclear program, has sparked endless debate. Was the intention personal, patriotic, or both? Did politics get in the way of physics or physics in the way of politics?

Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen stages an imagined afterlife encounter between Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and Werner Heisenberg. The play unravels the personal and political tensions between the two physicists, who found themselves on different sides in WW2. Heisenberg, working for the German atomic program, confronts Bohr over the moral implications of nuclear research. As they circle their 1941 encounter from multiple angles, the play explores themes of memory, uncertainty, and the weight of scientific discovery.

Grounded in global military history — ultimately, it was the U.S. nuclear program that led to the deployment of an atomic bomb with its dreadful consequences — the play addresses a tension between science and ethics that resonates today. Debates around AI and quantum computing echo the play’s core questions: What do we owe each other when knowledge itself can be a weapon, a salvation, a commodity? And can we ever truly know the consequences of our discoveries — or ourselves?

Co-produced by Verein der Förderer und Freunde der Physik an der Universität Hamburg e.V.