Q & A with author Jan Eliasberg and San Diego Writers Festival

SDWF: Tell us about your inspiration for HANNAH’S WAR. What were the novel’s origins? 
JE: I was in the microfiche room of the New York Public Library doing research for another book—a highly autobiographical story it seems every novelist must write, get out of her system and (ideally) never publish. I was reading the issue of the New York Times published on the day America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and one seemingly innocuous paragraph caught my eye: “The key component that allowed the Allies to develop the bomb was brought to the Allies by a ‘female, ‘non-Aryan’ physicist.” Who was the woman? What was her story? And why isn’t her face staring out of every science textbook? 

I became possessed, on a mission to find this mysterious woman. 

SDWF: The main character in the novel, Hannah, was based on Dr. Lise Meitner, a brilliant and unsung physicist. How did you first come to learn about Dr. Meitner? 
JE: It wasn’t that difficult to find information about Dr. Meitner, once I discovered that this “female, non-Aryan physicist” existed. Meitner was the first female professor and only female department head at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s. Her primary focus was radioactivity and nuclear physics. Meitner and her long-term scientific partner, Otto Hahn, first discovered the nuclear fission of uranium; the results of their experiments were published in early 1939. Interestingly, as I dug deeper, I discovered that it was actually Meitner, not Hahn, who first understood the fission process. Meitner and Hahn’s research into fission helped to pioneer nuclear reactors for the next generation of electricity, as well as making possible the development of nuclear weapons during World War Two. 

Meitner’s name was deliberately left off the published scientific papers because the work would immediately have been disparaged and dismissed as “Jewish Physics.” Because of the Nazi’s Nuremburg Laws, in addition to losing official credit for her discoveries, she also lost her prestigious positions and nearly lost her life. On the verge of the greatest discovery of a lifetime, all the protections her colleagues promised her evaporated immediately after Hitler annexed Austria; she fled to Sweden within hours of being transported to the camps. 

Then the research became even more interesting: in 1944 the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission was awarded to Otto Hahn. In Meitner’s diaries, she writes about sitting in the audience at the Nobel Ceremony, hoping that Hahn would mention her name, which he did not. Her disappointment was palpable, but it was accompanied by a kind of resignation, and a self-deprecating justification of Hahn’s omission. 

SDWF: Why did Meitner’s story resonate with you personally? 

JE: Her story struck a deep chord in me; as a female director, I know how often women’s contributions have been hijacked by men; whether it’s Polly Platt’s work with directors Peter Bogdanavich and James Brooks; Watson and Crick’s omission of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of the Double Helix; or the daily experience of thousands of women who have a terrific idea in a meeting only to be ignored and have to watch in silence as men repeat their idea and are given the credit for it. 

I also understand on a visceral level how even brilliant, courageous women accept their erasure from history because fighting it would be too painful, overwhelming, or enraging. So somewhere along the line, I decided to fight Meitner’s erasure from history for her—because she hadn’t had the ability to do so herself. 

SDWF: What sort of research went into the novel? 
JE: Ruth Lewin Sime’s ground-breaking non-fiction book LISE MEITNER: A Life in Physics, along with Meitner’s Letters and Diaries, were the building blocks for Hannah Weiss’s story. I realized very quickly, however, that I was not going to write a simple biopic about Lise Meitner. 

I had become entranced by my research and envisioning of the utterly improbable, pressure-cooker world of Los Alamos, New Mexico where scientists were racing against time to crack the heart of the atom before the Nazis. An intense working environment of six thousand scientists, an incubator of geniuses, some of whom had literally escaped death by leaving Germany. By night they were indulging in debauched revelry to escape from the high stress of intense work, the moral ambiguities of their goal, and the uncertainty of life in a time of war. 

I’d never read about Los Alamos in a work of fiction; had never seen it portrayed on film or television (although there was, in fact, a short-lived but excellent series called MANHATTAN, 2014 – 2015, that you can now find on Netflix) it seemed like an ideal setting for all the things that interested me: compelling characters in a complex emotional drama, on an epic canvas of moral, political, and social resonance; people whose lives are swept up in one of history’s most brutal moments. 

With nuclear proliferation once again on the front pages, the story of Los Alamos seemed timelier than ever; the ideal moment to explore not only the science, engineering, and history of the bomb, but also the political and moral controversies that have shadowed it. 

I read Freeman Dyson whose lyrical and luminous prose captured the elegance and musicality of science as no other writer. Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize winning doorstopper of a book THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB became my dog-eared Bible. Michael Frayn’s play COPENHAGEN introduced me to the enigmatic Dr. Werner Heisenberg, the Head of Research for the German’s Atomic Bomb Program. Thomas Powers HEISENBERG’S WAR revealed the secret history of the German bomb. 

SDWF: You are an award-winning writer and director. How did your background in TV and film help you as a fiction writer in shaping HANNAH’S WAR? 
JE: In a film or television show, story structure is a stern taskmaster; if a cinematic story doesn’t have the correct structure, no amount of beautiful narrative, fabulous dialogue, or brilliant characterization can salvage it. Most screenwriters spend months “breaking story,” before they write a single line. All the story engines must be activated in the first ten pages; all the beats of conflict, tension, and rising action must be in place, all the plot twists must come at the right moments to maintain the viewer’s interest, and must feel simultaneously both surprising and inevitable; the characters must hit their lowest points at the end of the second act, and tying up all the loose ends of story and character must happen (quickly) in the third act. 

Having analyzed and directed fifty productions at Yale Drama School (many by the masters (Shakespeare; Ibsen; Brecht; and the Greeks), having directed more than sixty hours of episodic television and either written or directed dozens of films, my instinct for story structure had become innate. There’s no danger of falling in love with your darlings when you’re sitting in the editing room watching a scene that doesn’t advance the story—you cut it…simple as that. So, I was quite ruthless about the structure and pacing of the story. I think that’s why people have called the book a page turner. 

Directing film has also taught me to think visually. I often think of film as a kind of visual poetry, in which each shot must convey story and emotion. If a location slug line in a script reads: EXT.  DAY  LOS ALAMOS the director must determine exactly what will be in the frame: are the colors warm or cool? is the light soft or hard? Are the characters walking together or separately? Are the characters dwarfed by the mountains around them, or are they in harmony with the landscape? Does one character dominate or are they on equal footing. In film, everything in the frame carries meaning—if the camera doesn’t see it, it doesn’t exist for the audience. I took a similar approach to writing the novel; I tried to envision everything. I’d often shut my eyes so I could see a scene or moment unfolding in my imagination, then I’d find the words to describe what I saw. In writing classes someone always repeats the old adage: “show don’t tell,” as a director, all you do is show because film is a visual medium—so that made my transition to writing fiction not only fluid, but also fun. 

Working in film and television also gives you an instinctual sense of what good dialogue is—you learn how to fold exposition into dialogue so it’s never on the nose or dull. When your characters are speaking, they should be trying to get something from one another, or make a power play. When writing dialogue, I always ask myself what the character wants—and then I figure out how my specific character would go about asking for what he or she wants. HINT: it’s never, or rarely, by asking directly. 

SDWF: What about this story made it better suited to the novel as a form, rather than a screenplay or even a work of historical non-fiction? 
JE: Novels have historically been excellent homes for complex and compelling women: Anna Karenina; Emma Bovary; Jane Eyre; Becky Sharp; Mrs. Dalloway; Shug Avery or, more recently, Katniss Everdeen or Lisbeth Salander. Films, at least since the heyday of the nineteen thirties, have been far less interested in women’s stories. Hollywood still believes that absurd canard, “Women’s stories don’t sell,” even though it’s been disproven too many times to count. I’d encountered that problem personally with my screenplay about the W.A.S.P. —the Women Air Service Pilots in World War Two. Even with a great script and with Cameron Diaz and Nicole Kidman attached, no one would make the movie. From TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH; BRIDGES OF TOKO-RI, THE BLUE MAX, PEARL HARBOR, Hollywood couldn’t make enough movies about male pilots. They’d even made several versions of the story of The Tuskegee Airmen, but no movie or television series—to this day—has been made about the W.A.S.P. Given Hollywood’s track record, I was nervous —and appropriately so—to write a film with a female physicist in the lead. 

As far as a work of historical non-fiction, documentary isn’t my bailiwick; it’s a form of storytelling I deeply admire but have never been drawn to create. This story seemed to demand to be told in a novel. 

SDWF: At the core of HANNAH’S WAR, the plot is driven by high-level scientific concepts and processes, physics especially. How did you go about portraying those elements in a way that’s true to the science but still understandable to readers with little to no scientific background? 
JE: I was helped by the fact that I had little or no scientific background when I began my work, so I had to take extremely abstract ideas and distill them to their essence and then create metaphors or images that I, a layperson, could understand. Jack Delaney, the military investigator, was himself a scientific novice, so he became a guide for the reader. Jack could realistically ask the kinds of basic questions the reader might want to ask. 

I was always on the lookout for analogies and metaphors. When I discovered that virtually all scientists and mathematicians play music, for example, it opened a world of possibilities, and a way of discussing science that could appeal to people who love music but hate numbers. When Niels Bohr was stuck on a scientific problem, he really did sit down at the piano and ask, “What would Mozart do?” That immediately became part of a scene. 

SDWF: What sort of unique perspective does Hannah bring to research as one of the only women in her field? How does it influence her approach to scientific inquiry? How does she use her gender to her advantage? 
JE: I’m not sure that Hannah ever consciously used her gender to her advantage in terms of scientific inquiry. But I believe gender worked to Hannah’s advantage in several ways: 

A female scientist in the 1920 and 1930s in Germany had to be ten times as brilliant, and a hundred times as tenacious, as a man in order to land any position at all in the scientific sphere. Someone like Lise Meitner possessed extraordinary gifts—but those gifts might have remained untapped had she not also had dogged determination, willfulness, and tenacity. She brought all of that to her work. 

I would posit, based on my own experience, that being an outsider—a woman in a male world—requires you to be more rigorous; to check and double check your work because you know you can’t afford to make a mistake. You also bring a different perspective to the work. Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” I’ve found that people who are entrenched in institutions often value institutional knowledge more than imagination because thinking outside the box tends to challenge or upend traditional institutions. In that sense, Hannah, as a woman and an outsider, may bring more imagination, and therefore more out of the box thinking and questioning to the work. 

I was quite taken by a quote of Meitner’s; she said this near the end of her life: “Those blessed with a brilliant mind and a gift for science have a higher duty that comes before discovery, a duty to humanity. Science can be used for good or evil; so, it’s incumbent upon scientists to ensure that their work makes the world a better place.” Making the world a better place seemed like the concern of someone with an incredibly strong moral compass—someone who places a kind of selfless care for humanity in an almost maternal way above the more ego-driven concern for cash and prizes, credit and legacy. 

SDWF: While Hannah’s character was based on a real person, the novel is a high-stakes mystery and a great love story. How did you balance truth and fiction? 
JE: To some extent I’m in the Mark Twain camp on the question of the hierarchy of fiction and fact: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” The fiction that I love might be inspired by historical figures and events, but it is rarely slavishly devoted to the facts about those figures and events. 

Count Laszlo von Almasy, the Hungarian explorer and hero of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” was in fact a bungling, gay, Nazi intelligence officer who, according to his MI5 file, was “very ugly and shabbily dressed, with a fat and pendulous nose, drooping shoulders and a nervous tic.” 

One of the most important themes of Ondaatje’s book is the essential unknowability of the past and the necessity of writing our own histories in the face of that unknowingness. I knew that I was looking at this piece of history through the lens of a female scientist, and through my own lens as a female writer and storyteller. I felt that gave me the license to fill in the “unknowable” with my own imagination. I had my own litmus test, which was to ask myself, based on the research: “Is this possible? Is this plausible?” 

The high stakes mystery part didn’t really take that much invention or balancing on my part—the Manhattan Project , in reality, was driven by the scientists’ belief that the Germans at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had gotten an enormous head start in creating the atomic bomb because the discovery of nuclear fission had been made there, and because KWI had—before the rise of Hitler—been the home of the greatest scientists in the world. 

Einstein, Szilard; Teller; Bethe; Meitner, the galaxy of émigré scientists driven by Hitler from Germany and Eastern Europe, knew first-hand what Hitler was capable of doing, and therefore were fueled by enormous personal passion and fear to contribute whatever they could to developing the bomb for the Allies. The race to build the bomb was about as high stakes a situation as a writer could find; I didn’t have to create it; I just had to imagine what it was like to live it. 

SDWF: Given the dramatic backdrop of HANNAH’S WAR how did you approach the competing ethical and moral questions the characters face—questions about scientific discovery, discrimination of various kinds, nationalism and patriotism, whether any war is truly just, and personal loyalty and love? 

JE: I’ve always believed that the greatest stories can be found at the ragged edges of the tears in the fabric of society. The beginning of the nuclear age seemed to qualify as such a ragged edge. 

I realized that I had an extraordinary opportunity to explore what happens when pure science, or the search for the truth, is militarized. I loved the irony of Hannah, doing her research in 1930s Berlin, realizing that her devotion to pure science will soon be appropriated by the overarching ambitions of the Third Reich. She has a ringside seat as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute becomes a military research and production arm of Hitler’s Reich; she realizes that her work—the passion of her life—is no longer in her hands. 

Placing at Los Alamos a scientist like Hannah, who has seen and experienced what happened in Hitler’s Germany, seemed like an extraordinary way to investigate the moral and political questions the scientists faced at Los Alamos—where they existed in an uneasy proximity and partnership with the U.S. military. Many of the scientists at Los Alamos raised ethical questions about how the bomb was to be used and that there were on-going petitions and meetings to discuss holding a demonstration of the bomb rather than dropping it on innocent people. Many scientists persisted with their protests until just days before the nuclear destruction of the two Japanese cities. 

J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, who was in many ways the “hero” of the atomic bomb program, and who believed (as is clear in my book) that the atomic bomb did need to be dropped and could not end the war if it were merely demonstrated, became an ardent spokesperson after the war for the idea of an Ethical Commission made up of scientists, politicians and military professionals to advise on how and whether the bomb should be used again. 

SDWF: What roles does anti-Semitism play in HANNAH’S WAR? 
JE: It was a given that HANNAH’S WAR would investigate anti-Semitism in Germany. But there have been hundreds of thousands of books written about the Holocaust and I was well-aware of how easy it would be to fall into simplistic tropes. What intrigued me was the fact that Lise Meitner did NOT leave Germany until 1938; she clung to her life in Berlin for as long as she possibly could and was encouraged to do so by most of her colleagues. So, I felt my task was to present life in Berlin through the eyes of someone who is trying not to see the obvious anti-Semitisms, not to ignore them or be in denial about them, but to always remain optimistic; Hannah and her Uncle Joshua are looking for reasons to stay. That allowed me to explore the obvious anti-Semitisms through a slightly different lens. 

Then, because Hannah brings the perspective of what she has seen and experienced in Germany with her to Los Alamos, it allowed me to look at the reality of anti-Semitism in the United States. The character of Jack was my way of doing that. 

As I was toying with different possible secrets that Jack might be carrying, I remembered being at Yale and learning about the historical link between Yale’s secret societies and the OSS (now the CIA). There’s an excellent film called The Good Shepherd, written by Eric Roth, a screenwriter friend, about the transition from the OSS to the CIA. The CIA was born out of the world of the American “aristocracy”—the moneyed, old families of America. Men of “good character” essentially meant privileged, entitled, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The idea of making Jack an interloper in that world was irresistible—and it felt like a wonderful way to explore anti-Semitism in America. 

Alas these issues of Anti-Semitism and anti-refugee sentiment have all too obvious parallels in America today. 

SDWF: The secondary female characters in the novel make very different personal and professional choices than Hannah. What does that say about gender roles during the 1930s and 1940s? How does that impact how we view Hannah? 

JE: I don’t think the word “choice” should be used in this context. Hannah Weiss, because of her sheer and indisputable brilliance, had a privileged position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and at Los Alamos; but she was one woman among men. 

A young woman like Karin Hoenig, Hannah’s lab assistant at KWI, didn’t have much of a choice in terms of what she did with her life; she had to do clerical work to earn money. But the Nazi’s obsessive focus on Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, and Church) took away any career choices she might have even imagined for herself. 

Things were slightly different in America because men were away at war and women were used to fill positions they wouldn’t otherwise have been encouraged or even allowed to take. We think of them as Rosie the Riveters, but they were pilots; mechanics; “computer girls,” as well. Alice Rivers would be in that category—I think of her as a girl from a small town in the mid-west, smart enough to be a glorified secretary, but still primarily interested in nabbing a husband. Ironically, the war gave her the freedom to be in the company of all these remarkable people and enjoy unheard of freedom. My guess, with someone feisty like Alice, is that she wouldn’t end up going back to the farm. 

Ulrike Deibner and Lotte Scheer are in a category all their own. 

One of the many things people either have forgotten, or don’t know, about the Weimar Republic is how open and free it actually was. The public discourse around same-sex love, and the political movement to win rights for it, arose – not in England or America — but in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and primarily in the city of Berlin. The brutal repression of gay people during the Nazi period is what erased this period of German LGBTQ history from international consciousness, and even from German memory. 

During the golden years of the Weimar Republic, lesbians and gay men achieved an intoxicating degree of visibility in popular culture. They could see themselves onscreen; they had their own newspaper in which they could advertise openly for hook-ups or companionship; and they had openly gay clubs in the very center of Berlin, which were not only tolerated but were also supported by Berlin’s Chief of Police. 

By 1938, however, the time of HANNAH’S WAR, Nazism was bringing Berlin’s gay idyll to a swift, savage end; hence Lotte’s need to flee Germany. 

And then there’s one of my very favorite characters, Sabine. I thought I had an incredible opportunity with her character to portray what was a real resistance movement among teenagers and students. In addition to Sophie Scholl (a name most people recognize) and the members of The White Rose, there was a group of teenagers aged 14 – 19 called the Edelweiss Pirates. 

Most of the Edelweiss Pirates’ time was spent in youthful rebellion: pouring sugar in the gas tank of Nazi officers’ cars, hurling bricks through the windows of munitions factories, and graffiti-ing messages like “Down with Hitler” and “Down with Nazi Brutality.” 

But, as they grew older, their actions became braver and bolder: hiding Jews or feeding them in their hiding places; planning attacks on the local Gestapo headquarters; shielding German deserters and escaped concentration and labor camp protestors and supplying adult resistance groups with explosives.

Anything that could weaken the Nazis’ morale was fair game to the teenaged Pirates. And many of them faced brutal punishments if they were caught—from to torturous prison sentences to public hangings. 

I wanted to show that aspect of youthful rebellion in Nazi Germany; it’s something that has to be remembered. Not all Germans were deniers or willing participants. 

SDWF: In writing HANNAH’S WAR, you shed an important light on the true story of Lise Meitner, the Austrian physicist who discovered nuclear fission. In recent years, there has been a push to recognize the important (often overlooked) work of female scientists and encourage young girls to work in the scientific field. What else can we do to inspire change? 
JE: Geena Davis’ institute on Gender in Media has shown us that role models in the media can make an enormous difference in girls and women’s perception of themselves and their options. There’s a hashtag now #IfYouSeeItYouCanBeIt; the power of seeing someone who looks like you (your gender, your skin color, your religion) in a position of power and influence – whether in politics, the arts, or STEM – has an extraordinary empowering effect and can lead to real world change. The “CSI effect,” named after the television show “CSI” which featured Marg Helgenberger as a top forensic scientist, upended the gender ratio in the forensic science field. As a result of that character in that one television show, women are now both the present and the future of forensic science. Men, who used to dominate, are in the minority. 

So telling stories that feature complex, interesting women in roles where they work, or have worked, in STEM fields is extremely important – whether it’s CSI; HIDDEN FIGURES; HANNAH’S WAR, or BOMBSHELL, the upcoming mini-series featuring Gal Gadot as Hedy LaMarr, who was an inventor credited with inventing Frequency Hopping, and Wi-Fi, this is an essential beginning. 

In addition to telling their stories, however, we must give overlooked women their due. Lise Meitner should be awarded the Nobel Prize; there’s no valid reason why the Nobel Committee can’t correct history and award her for the discovery of nuclear fission; her name should be next to, or before, Otto Hahn’s. Award the Nobel to Rosalind Franklin; add her name, and her contribution of Photo 51, to the prize for the molecular structure of DNA. Nice words and stories, no matter how fancy, aren’t enough; there must be concrete action, tangible, measurable change. 

Title VII outlines five major protected classes: race, color, religion, sex and national origin. It’s the law of the land and has been since The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet it isn’t being enforced. Hollywood, Wall Street, Fortune Five Hundred companies, the U.S. Soccer League have been, and are, in flagrant violation of Title VII. Putting on my other hat for a moment, my directing hat, it’s imperative that we be at 50/50 gender parity in terms of who’s directing movies, Movies and television are America’s biggest export and the most powerful purveyor of American stories around the world. 

SDWF: Thank you Jan!