Abstract
This erudite and subtle work by Cathryn Carson provides a new understanding of the public role played by the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg in postwar West German culture and politics. In addition to building up a new research system after the war, Heisenberg became the public embodiment of science for the country's media and intellectuals and the focus for reflection and debate about the cultural value of science. Carson brilliantly weaves Heisenberg's biography into the intellectual scene of postwar Germany. She shows how Heisenberg was central to the assessment of the cultural meaning of science, figuring in a set of questions that carried particular weight in the German context. Carson uncovers the complex ways in which the intellectual and cultural ideal of Bildung, or self‐cultivation, deeply informed Heisenberg's outlook throughout his life and continued to set the stakes of intellectual debates about science into the 1960s. Although Bildung was already in crisis by the early twentieth century, the legacy of this valuation of knowledge in terms of individual self‐formation can be seen in the ways in which German intellectuals challenged science on its relationship to subjective meaning. When they questioned science, philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Jürgen Habermas were implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, referring to Heisenberg.
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