Hannah’s War is a book that I have read and re-read twice with deep interest. It is an intense and electric novel that sizzles with wartime drama, deception, the race to achieve scientific breakthoughs, moral dilemmas, and the transformative power of love.
Jan Eliasberg’s novel hurtles urgently back and forth between Germany and New Mexico. Set in the 1930s and 1940s it portrays the intensity of physics and chemistry research during World War II--in Germany and in the US, where scientists led by Fermi and Oppenheimer choreographed research to find a weapon to defeat Germany and Japan.
The main character, Hannah Weiss, is a brilliant Jewish physicist, a strikingly beautiful woman and a dedicated scientist under great duress in Germany where her male colleagues minimize and co-opt her research. Later, as part of Oppenheimer’s team, she is investigated as a spy by the US government. The heat in the book is palpable whether it shows Hannah’s passion for research, her mostly hidden love for her research associate at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, or her fierce devotion to her cousin and uncle living in Germany. At Los Alamos, Jack Delaney, the man assigned to investigate her, initiates a cat and mouse interrogation that, as it unwinds, reveals unexpected discoveries.
The settings for the novel become like characters in the book, where relationships and action occur. Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s downstairs lab is where Hannah spends hours deciphering nuclear physics. A map of it would reveal escape routes; the auditorium is the setting for its gradual takeover by Nazis and the scientists loyal to them. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, a boy’s school is repurposed to be a hastily constructed series of labs and housing. Oppenheimer and his scientists conduct feverish research to keep Germany from obtaining the bomb. Hannah inhabits both of these spaces in succession, pursuing her research with her colleagues.
The collaboration of Hannah and other Kaiser Wilhelm scientists begins in the 1930s and continues as the Nazis gain power. For Hannah and some of her colleagues, pure research is the point-- pursuit of knowledge is key. For others, knowledge becomes property of the Nazis. Hannah departs Germany before her brilliant solutions help the Third Reich. One of her German colleagues collaborates with her to keep what they know out of the hands of the Nazi scientists.
Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist at Los Alamos, NM who is conducting experiments for the US government to create a bomb to end the war, also knows the heady thrill pursuing pure science, but agonizes about the morality of successful experiments: splitting the atom has unimaginable destructive power.
This issue marks the difference between history and fiction. Hannah’s War is fiction that draws on the accomplishments of Lise Meitner, the brilliant Jewish Austrian physicist who pioneered splitting of uranium with her nephew and Otto Hahn, her research partner. Eliasberg wants to highlight in fiction, via Hannah, Meitner’s contributions to the development of nuclear fission as an example of brilliant women scientists who have been passed over by their male colleagues. Both Meitner and Weiss stayed in Germany almost too long and managed to escape. But unlike Meitner, who refused to work on the bomb or to find safe harbor in the United States (she went to Sweden), Hannah Weiss, who left Germany when her Jewish background made it impossible to remain, did come to the US. She first worked with Fermi in Chicago and then with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. There she realized the horrible potential of nuclear fission, as did her male colleagues. But they persisted because their work for the US Government required a solution.
The author uses several literary techniques, all effective, to tell her story: terse confidential field notes, interior monologues, and third-person narration. All move the novel along at a break neck pace, making it impossible to put down. Timing is everything in this book. Details are chosen carefully and economically. The reader can visualize places, events, and conversations because of Eliasberg’s compact descriptions.
Jan Eliasberg’s skill in portraying different personalities gives them a life that stays with the reader long after the book is closed. This is a lovely, tough, satisfying novel.
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