The Principle Read online

  You’re standing on a street corner in Leipzig, you’re quite motionless, and yet you’re being swept up, at an indeterminate speed, a speed almost nonexistent and almost infinite, in a movement you fear will carry you away forever and which is starting now, just when the whole world is fading before your eyes. You see through the cold stones of the buildings, you see through the bodies of the passersby, not what they conceal, but what they are, ruins as shaky as a stage set, bathed in phosphorus light, a heap of dusty rubble, lying in the shelter of tall, pointless walls, in a terrible chaos of white-hot stones, collapsed floors, melted silverware, and metal beams twisted like broken bones, and amid these ruins hurry corpses who only keep moving through the winter morning because they think they’re alive, nobody having yet informed them that they are long dead, and doomed like the whole world to the inescapable punishment of unreality: they’re no longer even corpses but simulacra, lost souls refused even the charity of damnation. You should feel mortally sad but you can’t, you’re nothing but a pure, disembodied gaze contemplating the disaster and you can no longer remember who you are, or even if you were once somebody.

  Please let me help you.

  Your name is Werner Karl Heisenberg.

  You’re thirty-five years old and, among other essential things, you’re a physicist.

  Tonight, you’re expected at the house of some friends to play the piano part in a Beethoven trio.

  The mirror held up to you by the proximity of your fellow men, those lost souls who persist in a parody of life, seems to you much harder to bear than solitude and you would prefer not to go.

  Out of loyalty, weariness, or politeness, you’ll go anyway.

  There you’ll make the acquaintance of Fräulein Elisabeth Schumacher, whose gaze as she watches you playing will remind you, along with the music of Beethoven, that reality can’t be entirely abolished, even by decree, any more than can the distinction between lies and truth, which is still preserved somewhere, out of the reach of men. Nothing will ever seem to you as real as that gaze, which you won’t even need to return in order to feel your hands come back to life on the keyboard and your heart fill with the trust you thought was lost. You’re so tired of dealing with ghosts. It’s high time you let them go.

  You remember now: your name is Werner Heisenberg, you’re thirty-five years old, and this evening you will meet your wife. But for the moment, you’re standing on a street corner in Leipzig, and the world that’s entirely fading away before your eyes is one, I’m sorry to tell you, that you will never see again.

  The movement that sweeps you away may not have received its first impulse in Leipzig in 1937 but, without your being aware of it, so imperceptible was its incredible speed at the time, many years earlier, in 1922, in the very same place —there’s no doubt as to the position, which is determined with all the required precision. You’d taken a room in a shabby hotel, the only one you could afford, in order to attend, on the advice of Sommerfeld, who’d paid for the trip, a lecture by Einstein, whom you didn’t yet know. I can imagine how happy you were at the thought that the mysteries of the theory of general relativity, about which all you knew was what Wolfgang Pauli had consented to explain, would soon be expounded to you out of the very mouth of its creator, who might agree, provided Sommerfeld introduced you, to answer in detail and in person the countless questions you wanted to ask. Such joy can only go hand in hand with extreme vulnerability, and I also imagine the pain of your disillusion when, on reading the pamphlet a student stuffed into your hands at the entrance to the lecture hall, you abruptly learned two depressing facts: the first, that science was not a inviolable sanctuary, forever preserved from the stains of ideology and politics; and the second, equally regrettable although infinitely less tragic, that winning the Nobel Prize wasn’t a lasting guarantee against idiocy. In 1905, the Nobel Prize had indeed been awarded to Philipp Lenard, the author of the pamphlet, in which, without the slightest restraint, he poured out a torrent of abuse against Einstein, whose theory of relativity expressed the quintessence of an appalling, typically Jewish physics, which everywhere bore the pernicious marks of a typically Jewish hostility to common sense, as well as a typically Jewish taste for unfounded theoretical speculations, sterile paradoxes, and the use of sufficiently obscure mathematics as to lead innocent, good-natured Aryans astray. Such a tissue of nonsense and absurdity only owed its fame to the efforts of international Jewry, which had done everything possible to proclaim the deceptive merits of the theory, thus offering irrefutable proof of its limitless power as well as its contempt for truth and reality. Because it was his love of truth and reality that the author of the pamphlet claimed was behind his struggle to preserve what he called German physics from the Jewish corruption infecting it—this same man so blinded by hatred and fear as to have become incapable of perceiving the world in any light other than that of his own obsessions; this same man who was now perfectly satisfied with the reassuring sophism—typical, not of Jews, but of idiots—according to which, since anything that is absurd is incomprehensible, anything we are incapable of understanding must be absurd. It was enough to make you laugh, and also to make you tremble. You did neither. As far as you were concerned, it was quite simply inconceivable that a man of science should demean himself like that and, in so doing, risk demeaning everything he should have been protecting. You were too distraught to laugh and too naive to tremble, you simply couldn’t believe that things so manifestly rooted in such complete unreality could have any significant effect other than in the murky depths of a sick mind, and basically, fifteen years later you still couldn’t believe it, even though it had become obvious that the movement that had just received its first impulse, or, at least let you glimpse the existence of its long underground course, was having an effect everywhere. Starting in 1933, Jewish scientists, dismissed from universities, deprived of resources overnight without any consideration being given to their value, the blood they had shed for Germany, or simple humanity, had emigrated to England, Ireland, Switzerland, the United States, much to the indifference—the incredible indifference—of their colleagues, who’d mostly refused to sign petitions supporting them, out of conviction, cowardice, or, worse still, mere opportunism, rejoicing that an unexpected stroke of luck had in one fell swoop freed so many posts that their mediocrity had previously forbidden them from aspiring to. Was this the sanctuary of science? Was it this? You envisaged resigning, and, rather than see unreality blight the whole world, as must finally have happened that morning in January 1937, on a street corner in Leipzig, you constantly asked yourself if you shouldn’t leave too, as Schrödinger had done, and stop your presence from lending credence to a disgraceful situation, and it’s in the little town on the shores of the Mediterranean where I spend the summer of 1995 that echoes of your torment reach me.

  We try to understand things on the basis of our own experience because that’s all we have, and of course it’s quite insufficient, we understand nothing, or we misunderstand, or only understand what’s not essential, but what does it matter?

  As you know perfectly well, that’s the only way we can learn what understanding really means.

  In 1995, the world around me doesn’t fade away, it doesn’t show me its entrails filled with ruins, it doesn’t threaten to dissolve from one moment to the next into the nothingness of unreality, but I find it hard to be part of it. In the autumn of the previous year, the army had freed me from the military service I’d constantly put off, getting one deferment after another, convinced that I’d escape it, until the infallibility of the bureaucracy shattered my mad hopes and sent me to rot for ten months in an isolated cavalry camp on a vast damp gray plain, where I divided my time between fatigue duties, useless administrative tasks, reading your books, and a state of paralysis, and now I had no job and nowhere to go. My father asked me to come and stay with him, surrounded by people I know only because I rubbed shoulders with them during the vacations, people whose tirel
ess, ceremonious compassion seemed to have no other purpose than to keep me at a distance. It doesn’t upset me, I let them repeat how sorry they are about the woman they no longer call anything other than “your poor mother”—although none of them agreed to meet her when it was still possible. Nothing about my past life is of any concern to me. All I’ve kept are your books. I’ve stopped reading them, but I take them everywhere with me; that summer, they get covered with dust next to my bed, in the filthy closet under the stairs that I share with my cousin, to whom my father, tired of the sight of my apathy, has entrusted me for the season so that I can help him in running his restaurant up there on the ramparts overlooking the harbor of an old fortified town that the scourge of tourism has degraded to a seaside resort. Every night, when we close, my cousin hands me an unreasonable amount of money, not without first taking the trouble to call it, with great tact, my “wages,” in order to spare me the shame of having to admit to myself that I’m receiving charity, although it’s so obvious I’m forced to admit it to myself, without the slightest shame, to be honest—my help consisting of spending my evenings slumped in a large leather club armchair near the cash register, where, drinking everything I can get my hands on, I dream of the novel I will soon write. It will be about a character whose speed and position cannot be determined precisely, who sometimes feels his body spread through the little streets of a town just like this one, covering all the surfaces until other people’s eyes force him to materialize at a specific point, and the question of whether he’s suffering from an unknown mental disorder or experiencing an unbelievable reality is meant to remain open. But I don’t write, I spend my days sleeping and my nights imagining myself following my cousin into all the cabarets and nightclubs in the town, waiting for an endlessly postponed apparition, whereas in truth I’m following in your footsteps, all the way to Berlin in 1933, when you come out after seeing Max Planck, whose wisdom should have freed you from your torment or, at least, assuaged it—that torment so profound that the echoes of it still reach me.

  But Planck didn’t free you. He had lost hope. Hitler was in the grip of an absurd, morbid hatred that had completely cut him off from reality. Disaster was inevitable and nothing could prevent it, not even sacrifice. For those who, like you, weren’t Jewish and didn’t support the regime, there were only two alternatives: to emigrate or to remain in Germany. Any university in the world would of course be only too pleased to welcome you, and you would have no difficulty in emigrating. But since you aren’t forced to, Planck has suggested you stay in Germany and create what he calls “islands of stability,” from which it might be possible, after the disaster, to rebuild what has already started to be destroyed and would by then be even more so. No choice was the right one, he understood that.

  To leave would be to allow Philipp Lenard, Johannes Stark, and all the sick minds for whom science bore the traces of its racial origins to take over the universities and impose their own madness on them.

  To remain is to condemn oneself to inevitable compromises, like the one to which Planck himself will have to agree a year later, giving the Nazi salute at an inauguration ceremony, making three attempts, as if his old hand, shaking with humiliation, had become as heavy as lead.

  You’re now walking alone on the streets of Berlin and, even though you will still hesitate for some years, you may have just decided, without even realizing it, that, in spite of the inevitable compromises, in spite of the appeals constantly addressed to you from all sides, in spite of the entreaties that will soon be followed by suspicion, you won’t leave, because you want to build one of those “islands of stability”—but how could such islands survive when the movement that’s sweeping you along and in which you struggle in vain is so chaotic that the very idea of stability has lost all meaning? How could they survive beneath a surge of such monstrous violence that even an infinitely more radical pessimism than Max Planck’s could not have foreseen it? Would Max Planck himself have given the same counsel of resignation if he could have known that on the death of his youngest son, Erwin, hanged in 1945 after the failure of the plot against Hitler, despair would lead him almost to rebel, for the first time in such a long life, against a God he had always faithfully served and who, in return, had protected him from death only to leave him the privilege of burying all his children? It’s so easy for me to assert, against the naivety of Planck’s pessimism, and the naivety of your own torments, the one superiority I have, the contingent but unquestionable superiority conferred on me by my date of birth. If you’d been able to enjoy that paltry superiority, even for one moment, you might not have made the same decision. But that’s by no means certain, since nothing was able to shake it, not even the ever more specific and threatening attacks against you.

  You’re a traitor, a follower of Bohr and Einstein, an ally of the Jews, a Jew yourself, when it comes down to it, of a kind that’s all the more pernicious and malign in that the blood flowing in your veins is unquestionably Aryan, because it’s your soul that’s thoroughly corrupt, you’re “the guardian of the spirit of Einstein,” a “white Jew” who Johannes Stark, in the SS newspaper, suggests should be eliminated or sent without further delay to a concentration camp, as an elementary preventive measure, to protect the young from his morbid influence—and those who think they’re insulting you in this way confess in spite of themselves that, above and beyond its racial meaning, the word “Jew” simply serves to put together in the same metaphysical category everything that escapes them, everything that makes them sick with fear because they don’t understand it.

  But you don’t leave.

  In memory of the time when her husband and your grandfather worked together in a high school in Munich, Himmler’s mother agrees to receive yours, and promises that her little Heinrich, who’s so kind and affectionate that, in spite of being overburdened with obligations, he never forgets to send her flowers for her birthday, will be sure to make good the injustice done to you—because, she asks, the anxiety in her voice betraying a fear that her question isn’t merely rhetorical, there isn’t anything leading him astray, is there? Himmler orders an investigation, as a result of which you make regular visits to Gestapo headquarters, trying to retain your self-control as you go in, scrupulously applying the order, pinned up everywhere on the walls, to take a deep breath, haunted by the anxiety that you might suddenly look at the men questioning you with the eyes of a victim, which they won’t be able to resist, eyes full of terror, supplication, disgust, defiance, renunciation, eyes that can always be recognized, whatever they express, because they’re the eyes of the century. But you’re allowed to leave, and you find yourself back out on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, relieved and shaking. After a few months, Himmler writes to Heydrich that your death is not desirable. You may be useful. You’ve earned the right to teach physics as you wish, as long as you don’t mention any Jewish names.

  Were you so determined to build an “island of stability”? Did the need for that seem so great that you had to end up reproaching Schrödinger for having shirked it by emigrating? Wasn’t your stubbornness rather a matter, under it all, of self-esteem, or even of blind, excessive pride? Unless you obeyed that mysterious emotion that I’m incapable of feeling even though I recall seeing it at work. My cousin sometimes seemed to give way beneath an enormous weight that threatened to overwhelm him, and he had to escape, maybe the heat and the constant summer rush, maybe migraine, the memory of sordid nights, or something darker the nature of which I didn’t know. He would take me to the mountains to have coffee on the terrace of a lodge in an old herdsmen’s village that a hiking trail passes through. We’d stay there for a while, surrounded by cool ferns and tall shady pines, but his mood would remain glum and he wouldn’t say a word. We’d get back in his car and go back to town and suddenly, when we least expected it, we’d turn a corner and see the sea. We towered over the landscape, as if suspended in the clear air above the twisting road that plunged through the forest toward the dazzl
ing bay stretching a thousand meters below us. My cousin would open his eyes wide at the sight of this view he’d known since his childhood but seemed to discover each time as if it was the first. He’d make an incredulous grimace, start to smile, and give me little punches on my thigh, saying, fucking hell, man, look at that!—unable to express any more clearly the feeling that was overwhelming him, instantaneously restoring his taste for life, in which it wasn’t difficult to see a curious form of love whose object was not another human being, but a quite specific little part of the vast inert world, whose incomparable power I too had to acknowledge, even though I myself was unable to feel it. You of course weren’t an uncouth creature like my cousin, you were much more accustomed than he was to confronting the indescribable, but I think you were prey to a similar love, a definitive love, much more powerful than pride, threats, or dreams, a love that, when it came down to it, whatever Planck may have said, left you no alternative. Because of that love, leaving behind you the friends who begged you one last time not to go back to Germany, you’ll leave the United States on an almost empty liner and go back to a now inevitable war, but for the moment, you’re in your house in Urfeld, maybe in 1938.

  You still think there exists another, painful alternative, and your hesitations make you suffer more than ever.

  But you lift your eyes to the Walchensee stretching before you, in mist or in bright sunlight, it doesn’t matter, and you also greet with an incredulous grimace the power of the love that submerges you, before turning to Elisabeth, squeezing her hands in yours as hard as you can, and saying what it now strikes you you’ve always known.

  My God, how beautiful it is! I’ll never be able to leave.

  Standing in front of the mirror in his room, Captain Ernst Jünger looks harshly at the Wehrmacht officer facing him, and sees in him nothing but a mocking travesty of his youth. Everything strikes him as being both familiar and curiously misplaced. As quickly as the years pass, they can’t be wiped out. They remain, and give the pomp of the uniform he was once so proud to wear an unpleasant tinge of inauthenticity, as if it’s been given back to him in the somewhat undignified form of a theatrical costume, tailor-made for a role he’s too old to play, and has no desire to play anyway, in a drama he knows well because he was once highly successful in it but whose plot is so unsuited to you that, on you, the same uniform looks like a frankly ridiculous disguise. Rather than think about it, you’ve tried to consider the training sessions as an opportunity to exercise in the open air. When war is declared, instead of being called up, as you expected, to join a mountain infantry regiment, you are summoned, along with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, to an office in Berlin where it won’t take you long to realize that you’re soon going to run a greater risk than that of dying in the uniform of a stage soldier.