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CHAPTER 1

Position 1: Heligoland

You were twenty-three years old, and it was there, on that desolate island where no flower grows, that you were first granted the opportunity to look over God's shoulder. There was no miracle, of course, or even, to be honest, anything remotely resembling God's shoulder, but to give an account of what happened that night, our only choice, as you know better than anyone, is between metaphor and silence. For you, there was first silence, then the blinding light of an exhilaration more precious than happiness.

You couldn't sleep.

You waited, sitting there at the top of a rocky outcrop, for the sun to rise over the North Sea.

And that's how I imagine you today, your heart pounding in the night on the island of Heligoland, so alive that I could almost join you there, you whose name, lost in the grayness of an endless bibliography among so many other German names, was at first, as far as I was concerned, only that of a strange, incomprehensible principle.

For three years, in Munich, Copenhagen, and Göttingen, you'd been wrestling with problems so fearsomely complicated that even the innocent, optimistic young man you were then had sometimes, like his comrades in misfortune, to curse the day when he'd had the preposterous idea of meddling in atomic physics. Your experiments kept yielding ever more results that were not only incompatible with the most established tenets of classical physics but scandalously contradictory, results that were absurd and yet irrefutable, making it impossible to form as much as a slightly sensible image of what was happening inside an atom, or even any image at all. But on the island of Heligoland, where you'd come, your face disfigured by allergies, to protect yourself from pollen, and perhaps from despair, you discovered that the blessed time of images was gone forever, just as the time of childhood must always be: you looked over God's shoulder and saw, through the thin material surface of things, the place where their materiality dissolves. In that secret place, which isn't even a place, contradictions are abolished, along with images and their familiar flesh; no vestige remains there that the language of men can describe, no distant reflection, but only the pale form of mathematics, silent and formidable, the purity of symmetries, the abstract splendor of the eternal matrix, all that inconceivable beauty that had always been there, waiting to reveal itself to you.

Without your faith in beauty, you might never have found the strength to lead your mind, as you'd been leading it without respite for three years, to the extreme limits where the exercise of thought becomes physically painful, and your faith was so profound that neither the war, nor the humiliation of defeat, nor the blood-soaked convulsions of abortive revolutions had been able to shake it. The first time you saw your father in uniform, when you were twelve years old, the metal spike on his helmet must have reminded you of the terrifying plumes of Achaean heroes, and when, just before leaving, he bent to kiss his two boys, your brother Erwin and you, Werner, didn't you quiver at the epic breath of History that had transformed Professor August Heisenberg, before your very eyes, into a warrior? In the station, the farewells, the songs, the tears, and the flowers expressed something higher than a rough or innocent joy, the certainty of sharing a common destiny, which demanded of every man that he take the risk of sacrificing his life to it, because it was from that destiny that any individual life drew its value and its meaning, the thrilling sense of being nothing now but the physical part of a magnificent spiritual whole, and as you watched your father and your two cousins leave, you may have regretted the fact that you were too young to go with them. But the first of your cousins died, and when the second one came back on leave, you didn't recognize him.

Did you guess then what it costs sometimes to look over God's shoulder?

For God, whatever that metaphor designates, is also the master of horror, and there is an exhilaration in horror, more powerful perhaps than the exhilaration of beauty. It's the exhilaration that seizes men when they're surrounded by severed limbs, the stench of corpses fusing with the earth, clusters of worms oozing from wounds like living dough, the red eyes of rats nestling in the darkness of open chests, but even more when they realize the depth of the abysses they've unwittingly harbored inside themselves.

We reach out our hand to our rifle in the darkness of the trenches and we recognize it as an archaic gesture, infinitely older than History, a savage, primordial gesture whose essence hasn't been altered by the shells, the gas attacks, the tanks, the planes, and all the monstrous efforts of modernity, because nothing will ever alter it.

We run until we're breathless, we fall headfirst and watch our own blood gush out, we watch anxiously for white traces of brain matter to appear, but there's only blood, and Lieutenant Jünger gets up again and continues running, his heart overflowing with the intoxication of a hunter, waiting for the ecstasy of that moment when the face of the enemy will rise up from the earth in all its nakedness, when the struggle will finally commence, the loving, mortal struggle so long desired, from which we shall not get up again.

The exhilaration of horror sometimes resembles that of beauty. We're part of a whole that's much greater than we might imagine, greater than the mediocrity of our dreams of comfort and peace, greater than the warring nations, so disproportionately great that the grip in which it holds men can only be maintained by breaking them. The excitement, the intoxication subsides all at once, the veil is torn asunder, and all that is left is to keep running, screaming in terror like an animal, fleeing the ugliness of death, fleeing also what we've become, searching for a refuge that exists nowhere, and Lieutenant Jünger is shaking all over by the time he gets back to the German trenches; tears in his eyes, he writes in his notebook: when, oh, when will this damned war be over?

Perhaps you vaguely glimpsed in the dazed expression that made your cousin unrecognizable when he came back from the front the existence of things it's best not to know about. Horror too may become an object of irresistible desire, as those who had experienced its exhilaration had learned, Lieutenant Jünger and your cousin, perhaps your father, even though he never talked about it — but you, how do you learn it?

The war was over.

Life went on painfully, with its anxieties, its countless bereavements, its hopes and resentments, but beauty became visible again and your eyes were able to recognize it, like the goddess, in the infinite diversity of its mortal forms, all of which you loved. Most men aren't so disgustingly lucky, I hope you were occasionally aware of that: they're sensitive only to one or two kinds of beauty, and so blind to all the others that they can't even conceive the possibility of them. For Professor Ferdinand von Lindemann, who'd agreed to see you at the University of Munich, mathematics possessed the exclusive privilege of beauty and whoever envisaged studying it seriously, as you'd shyly told him you did, had to be convinced that this was an eternal, self-evident truth. Hardly surprising, then, that when, in a bold outburst of frankness, you confessed that you were reading a physics book, worse still, one with the terrible title Space-Time-Matter, he gave you a disgusted look, as if he'd suddenly discovered the stigmata of a loathsome disease on your body, and told you that you were forever lost to mathematics, while his dog, a nasty little runt hiding under his desk, to which, in the course of their long companionship, he'd mysteriously transmitted his sense of aesthetics, suddenly started barking as additional testimony to the extent of your ignominy. As far as von Lindemann was concerned, physicists, even potential physicists of eighteen, were unworthy of respect, not just because of their notoriously casual and shameful use of mathematics, but above all because they were damaged individuals, so corrupted by their regular contact with the world of the senses that they openly admitted their perverse interest in something as contemptible as matter.

If Professor von Lindemann hadn't reacted so viscerally, and had taken the time to question you, he would have had to admit that he'd been unfair to you because, deep down, you yourself never believed in matter. In your schoolbooks, the depiction of atoms as small, solid round bodies, joined to each other by obliging hooks, had immediately seemed to you a product of either naivety or deception, two unforgivable sins in the realm of knowledge. When Franz Ritter von Epp entered Munich at the head of the Württemberg Freikorps to crush the Bavarian Socialist Republic, you were lying on a roof, in the warm spring air, ignoring the fighting to read Plato, and you'd discovered how the demiurge creates the world by combining a small number of primitive geometrical forms. In spite of the repugnance you first felt for this unfounded assertion, expressed with all the arbitrary authority of a prophetic revelation and full of scorn for the patient work of reason, you'd been unable to forget it, and had ended up recognizing the triangles of the Timaeus, with a kind of dread, as the metaphorical expression of one of your deepest beliefs, which you'd never formulated and which you didn't even realize was so profoundly yours: what makes up the substance of the world is not material.

Did your dread abate or was it, on the contrary, brought to a peak when you understood how familiar this immaterial thing was to you? Wasn't it into its mysterious proximity that the transparency of mathematical forms, music, and poetry, the peaks of the Alps emerging into the sunlight from a chasm of mist, and all the numberless paths of beauty had always led you? It was an immaterial thing, and yet so tangible you couldn't possibly doubt its reality: it had banished the ghosts of war and revived your joy as you listened to Bach's D minor chaconne rise from a solo violin in the courtyard of Prunn Castle; it had lit up the ruins of Pappenheim over which darkness fell for you alone one summer night in 1920; and if you hadn't encountered it before, perhaps you wouldn't have recognized it on Heligoland, even though it was present everywhere, in the austere line of cliffs, in the monotonous swell of the surf, and above all, more dazzling than ever, in the matrices of the new quantum mechanics.

But nothing can be said about that presence, and it cannot be named.

Anyone who refuses to be resigned to silence can only express himself in metaphors.

In Göttingen in 1922, when Niels Bohr revealed to you, with infinite compassion, that your vocation as a physicist was also a poet's vocation, he didn't teach you anything you didn't already know.

But this is the situation: by expressing ourselves through metaphors, we condemn ourselves to imprecision, and, although we might refuse to admit it, there's always the risk of untruth. I wrote that on the island of Heligoland, a place so desolate that no flower grows there, you, Werner Heisenberg, at the age of twenty-three, looked over God's shoulder for the first time. But now I have to correct that.

It wasn't God's shoulder.

And it wasn't the first time.

Position 2: AWAY FROM HOME, IN A FIELD OF RUINS

I beg you, don't be ashamed. Not you. It wasn't Professor von Lindemann's little dog you were running away from in 1920, but the messenger, somewhat grotesque and repulsive as demonic creatures always are, that fate had chosen to call you sharply to order and put you back on the path that was yours, the path it wasn't up to you to choose even though you risked losing your soul there in a fool's bargain. In Arnold Sommerfeld's theoretical physics seminar, nobody barked angrily at you, nobody looked down on you, nobody tried to humiliate you. You had come home, where for a long time I myself was ashamed to follow you, since it was your fault that I experienced the worst humiliation of my life.

As far as I know, what comes first in the order of things is everything we have to learn. Traditions, laws, a whole history of mistakes and triumphs. The work of beloved masters, the living, the dead, those who want to survive in you, those who accept that you will surpass them. We must take our place in the patient construction of an infinite edifice, the common work of men, living and dead, hoping perhaps to leave, in our turn, something worthy of being learned. We must acquire enough strength to go into battle when fire threatens and we have to rebuild it anew, saving what can be saved.

But you began with the battle, in a field of ruins.

You began with the fire.

In the sphere you had chosen, nothing could be saved. All the attempts at rebuilding led to rickety, unsteady theoretical constructions that seemed straight out of the mystic visions of a madman, and yet it was impossible to cling to a past that had been reduced to ashes. Ever since Max Planck had discovered the universal action quantum, that ill-fated constant h that had, in a few years, contaminated the equations of physics with the malign speed of an ineradicable virus, nature seemed gripped by madness: small cracks fissured the old continuity of the flows of energy, light swarmed with strange granular entities, and at the same time, as if that weren't enough, matter began radiating wildly in a ghostlike halo of interferences. Borders that had once been thought inviolable blurred then shattered into pieces. Depending on the experimental framework to which it was subjected, the same phenomenon appeared now like a wave, now like a corpuscle, even though, of course, nothing in the world could be both one and the other, and the more time passed, the more obvious it became that this appalling duality wasn't in any way the exception but the rule, a rule that nobody could understand. All that remained was the depressing certainty that the atom wasn't a miniature solar system within which friendly electrons peacefully pursued their orbit around an easygoing nucleus: the atom transformed all dreams into nightmares, even the most venerable, the dreams of Leucippus and Democritus, the dreams of Anaxagoras and Lord Rutherford, it was a concentrate of nonsense and heresy, a swamp into which reason sank, and yet it was on this swamp that a new home had to be erected, one in which it would again be possible to live.

So the sacred transmission of knowledge, assuming there was still anything to transmit, had ceased to be a priority for Arnold Sommerfeld. In these exceptional circumstances, the students were no longer to be treated merely as novices but considered, if not as colleagues, at least as assistants whose forces, however faltering and indecisive, had to be mobilized to deal with the disaster. And so it was that Arnold Sommerfeld immediately entrusted you with a mass of experimental results, the word of the master of Delphi, who neither speaks nor hides his meaning, gathered in the laboratories by countless Pythias, a silent word, made up of abrupt scintillations, tiny droplets shining through the fog, spectral lines torn from the secret core of things, which it was your mission to explore in order to flush out the mathematical regularities from which the miracle of meaning might emerge — and then that would be the end of all this chaos, but in the meantime, Sommerfeld assured you, without the slightest trace of irony, that it was as enjoyable an exercise as doing crosswords, and to fill the gaps in your knowledge of physics, he would casually refer you to your fellow student Wolfgang Pauli.

No doubt friendship, if this was indeed friendship, is also an enigma. Pauli was extremely brilliant. Modesty not being his primary characteristic, he didn't stoop so low as to pretend he was unaware of his own value or to assume, even out of simple politeness, that others, starting with you, might not be totally devoid of it. He did concede, though, that in those days of ruins and fire, your complete ignorance of physics had to be considered an advantage: at least your mind wouldn't be cluttered with knowledge that had become pointless, which meant that one couldn't in all honesty rule out the tiny possibility that a new idea might germinate miraculously in that uncultivated soil. You sometimes wondered if he was being sincere or simply pulling your leg, because he didn't spare anybody, not even Sommerfeld, whose demeanor he impertinently compared to that of a retired colonel of hussars, and he had no qualms about shocking you with his irreverence. But at night, he would go to bed as late as possible in order to avoid the dreams that would haunt him all his life and that he hadn't yet begun to note down in order to submit them to the wisdom of Dr. Jung. He would wander all night between his desk and alarming dens of iniquity in which you would never set foot, roaming from one alleyway to another until exhaustion brought him back, as it does all of us, to the pitiless dreams from which no loving embrace can ever save us.

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Excerpted from "The Principle"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Actes Sud.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
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