Otto's Inferno a Play by Jim Lawry for Manhattan
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OTTO'S INFERNO A PLAY BY JIM LAWRY FOR MANHATTAN THEATER CLUB DECEMBER, 2013 James Lawry Box 268 Inverness, Ca 94937 [email protected] 415-663-8004 OTTO'S INFERNO A Play By Jim Lawry For ABBEY THEATER December, 2013. [email protected] OTTO'S INFERNO PREFACE How did Otto's Inferno begin? I was born in San Francisco in 1940. At seventeen I met a victim of Hiroshima and wrote a poem about her. In the sixties after living in Scotland and Germany I learned of the Allied Gomorrah raids on Germany in 1945 when at the close of the war, heavy bombings destroyed mostly civilian populations in an already devastated country. Misuse of overwhelming power has since become a major theme in my writing. The British Gomorrah raids on Hamburg are the subject of my play, Dropped. HIROSHIMA Saturdays we fished together on Crissey Pier. She was Japanese or Chinese, maybe Korean. I was too young to know. I loved her. Loved how she threw out her crab net, how she sang, how she looked at me, how she watched the sea. We walked home together Past the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a gift to San Francisco on an ancient Potter's field. "I think I want to have you." (MORE) 2. HIROSHIMA (CONT'D) "I should like that. But my breasts? I've had surgery." "Why?" "Hiroshima." "I'm sorry." We walked home through the Cypresses, the Eucalyptus. Potters field again. Slow. She didn't fish the next Saturday. Or the Saturday after that. One Saturday I found in my tackle box- (I'd been absent for an hour to walk on the beach near Fort Point)- A saucer, blue, white, Imari. Small. Forget-me Nots, On nested fish-hooks. *** In Otto's Inferno my fisher-woman became Hiroshima. I imagine holding her, and her pale gray eyes telling me of the many men she had known as a hot springs geisha. "Oh, men always wanted to kill me." "Oh, had I known what I do now, I would have wished to die back then." HIROSHIMA Now after so many years I still feel the sufferings of Hiroshima's extraordinary soul. OTTO HAHN Otto Hahn, my main character, received his doctorate in 1901, served at the front in WWI as a chemical warfare specialist and headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's radiochemistry section in Berlin. Otto Hahn is a highly private and complex character. In 1944, Hahn receives the Nobel Prize for chemistry, but the prize was kept secret because Germans in (MORE) 3. OTTO HAHN (CONT'D) wartime could not accept Nobel Prizes. Otto is reticent and complex. In accepting the prize much later he denied the work Lise Meitner had done and claimed the prize for himself. In postwar Germany, Otto Hahn became the most revered elder statesman of what had once been Europe's proudest scientific establishment. LISE MEITNER Lise Meitner worked as Otto Hahn's assistant and was an excellent scientist. All her life Lise gave Hahn the credit he only half deserved. Lise said, "Hahn and Strassmann were able to discover nuclear fission by exceptionally good chemistry, fantastically good chemistry, which was way ahead of what anyone else was capable of at that time. The Americans learned to do it later. But at that time, in 1938, Hahn and Strassmann were really the only ones who could do it, because they were such good chemists." Lise was politically aware but never an activist. Open, incapable of deceit, Lise never put friendship or profession to military use as it would betray her friends and values. "I will have nothing to do with a bomb," Lise had said. Lise did not join the Allies nor share the outlook of her German friends. She waited for the end of the war in anxious isolation. WERNER HEISENBERG Werner Heisenberg, one of the greatest German theoretical physicists and not a Nazi, had to confront Goebbels who had decided a nuclear weapon could be built rapidly enough to win the war. Heisenberg's view was that "the technical prerequisites for production would take years to develop if adequately supported." (MORE) 4. WERNER HEISENBERG (CONT'D) Heisenberg believed nuclear energy to be a technology of great promise for the future of Germany. Heisenberg became the de facto director of the Nuclear Program and Director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Physics at the University of Berlin. His appointment did not please everybody. THE LABORATORY On 13 July, 1938, Lise Meitner emigrated to Stockholm, while Hahn continued to work in Berlin with Fritz Strassmann, a pre-war aide to Hahn. Late in 1938 using an organic Barium salt in their samples they found isotopes of an alkaline earth metal. Finding this Group 2 alkaline earth metal did not logically fit with the other elements they'd found. Hahn initially suspected this metal to be Radium that was created by splitting two alpha-particles from the Uranium nucleus. The idea of getting Barium after removing about 100 nucleons from Uranium was "not considered." After Hahn visited Bohr in Copenhagen, he and Strassman performed the "radium-barium- mesothorium fractionation" that showed that the three isotope products behaved as Barium not Radium as they had expected. Hahn wrote to Lise in Stockholm: "We come to the awful conclusion that our Radium isotopes behave not like Radium, but like Barium. Perhaps you can suggest some fantastic explanation. We realize that Radium can't really burst into Barium." In her reply, Meitner also believed that Hahn's bursting of the uranium nucleus into Barium was very difficult for her to accept but that it might be possible. END OF THE RACE Up until 5:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945, physicists in the United States and Germany had been locked in a race to (MORE) 5. END OF THE RACE (CONT'D) unleash the devastating power released from the splitting of Uranium, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn had figured out. Earlier, the 130 thousand Americans working on the Manhattan Project finally ended the race and exploded a device in the middle of the New Mexican desert. Twenty miles away Richard Feynman ignored the official advice to use dark glasses while looking at the blast and figured that the windshield of his truck would protect his eyes from the radiation, and so became the first person to see the full flash of the explosion. Feynman watched the fireball silently turn from blinding white to yellow to orange before black smoke curled from the edges and grew to a cloud so dark it seemed to rip a hole out of the sky. A minute and a half later a tremendous bang broke the silence of the morning, stole his breath and shook him to the bone. ALSOS MISSION The ALSOS mission, part of the Manhattan Project, was formed after the Allied invasion of Italy in September,1943 to investigate the German nuclear project. ALSOS searched for personal and records to prevent their capture by the Soviet Union. Colonel. B. Pash of ALSOS, whom the Allies had ordered to round up the German scientists at the end of the war, narrowly missed Heisenberg who had set off the day before on a bicycle to be with his family in the mountains of Bavaria. FARM HALL Ten German scientists after capture were brought to England and interned in an old country estate named Farm Hall. They were given good provisions. (MORE) 6. FARM HALL (CONT'D) They had books, newspapers, a radio, a piano, and could use a small athletic field behind the house. Their complaints were that they were prisoners and that they could not communicate with their families back in Germany. At first they did not know why they were imprisoned but later assumed that it had something to do with their attempts to harness nuclear power. HIROSHIMA Shortly before eight o'clock on the evening of 6 August 1945 one of the British Officers, who were guarding the German scientists, joined his captives for dinner and told them what he had already mentioned to Otto Hahn. According to the six o'clock news the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A lively discussion ensued, and a few Germans expressed the opinion that if any part of the radio report could be trusted, then an atomic bomb referred to something other than nuclear weapons as the Germans had conceived them. The American atomic bomb has nothing to do with nuclear fission some said. A skeptical yet curious group of scientists impatiently awaited the nine o'clock news. The second broadcast shattered their disbelief, yet increased their confusion. Now the German scientists learned that uranium had been used to make a bomb as powerful as 20,000 tons of high explosives. Moreover, the interned scientists were told of the massive scale of the American and British nuclear power project. A hundred and twenty five thousand people helped build the factories, and sixty five thousand kept them running during the Manhattan Project. Little doubt now. At first Hahn was calm and pleased he hadn't helped create this monster. (MORE) 7. HIROSHIMA (CONT'D) Completely shattered Otto turns to the gathered physicists to say, "If the Americans have a Uranium bomb then you are all second raters, poor old Heisenberg." The superficial radio broadcasts frustrated Werner. They were so sketchy that he couldn't understand what went on inside the American atomic bomb even though he and the others had their own work to fall back on. Werner believed the news releases had been kept vague intentionally.