This book is not a biography, but rather a rich and compelling investigation of the evolving perceptions of science and scientists in the pre-1968 Federal Republic. By focusing on Werner Heisenberg, West Germany's most prominent physicist, it offers new insight into the early decades of postwar reconstruction and the roles played by intellectuals—ranging from Martin Heidegger to Helmut Schelsky and Jürgen Habermas—in a coalescing public sphere.

Heisenberg has, of course, been a controversial figure. In Heisenberg's War (1994), journalist Thomas Powers revived the immediate postwar image of Heisenberg's possibly subversive role in the Third Reich's quest for a nuclear weapon. In the drama Copenhagen (1998), Michael Frayn presented a complex character in a morality play about uncertain human and political relationships. Historians such as David Cassidy, Paul Lawrence Rose, and Mark Walker have extensively interrogated Heisenberg's contributions to the nuclear project during the Nazi years, and science editor Philip Ball has encapsulated the prevailing dark view of the scientist's role in the very title of his book Serving the Reich (2014). But there is more to the story.

How, then, are we to understand Heisenberg? His biography and philosophy are usually approached separately. Cathryn Carson deftly integrates the two by addressing the profoundly historicizing element in Heisenberg's thinking. Context matters, especially when people make world-historical claims about the massive ramifications of science in their lives. By expanding our vision to include the postwar era, Carson reminds us that there was much more to Heisenberg's life than the Nazi years—in fact, thirty more years, nearly all of which he spent in the public limelight. Her work complements Cassidy's biographies Uncertainty (1991) and Beyond Uncertainty (2010), both of which slight the postwar years. She directly confronts the controversy over the nuclear project, but is concerned less with what Heisenberg did in the Third Reich than what he did about the Third Reich after the war. What did he learn from his experiences?

Carson approaches such questions through a topical organization. The book opens with six highly readable chapters that present chronologically his scientific career. A historian of science trained in physics, Carson lucidly presents nearly without equations the development of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's arc of work, emphasizing above all the philosophical issues involved. She stresses his “performances” in the postwar era, presenting a particularly intriguing analysis of his role at the 1953 Munich symposium organized by Martin Heidegger to showcase his own thoughts on “Die Frage nach der Technik.” The real issues for Heisenberg throughout were not causality and indeterminism, calculation and intuitiveness, or even wave-particle duality: “The driving concern was . . . the very possibility and character of science” (63), which may have operated “over a kind of groundless abyss” (87).

In the next five chapters, Carson takes us through science policy as a revealing way in which to track the development of the Federal Republic's institutions and Heisenberg's own political thinking. He advocated a science policy, guided by scientists as rational actors who accepted Germany's greatly diminished political and cultural influence in the world. This was a disturbing and difficult task for those, such as Heisenberg, with a deeply imbued faith in the Bildungsbürgertum ideals of earlier decades. Carson details Heisenberg's multiple roles in the emerging research system and the “technology debate” sparked, in part, by Helmut Schelsky's claim about science as mere instrumentalism and his advocacy of a technocratic model of politics in an atomic age. Carson adroitly takes readers through policy and funding contests in the Max Planck Society, while delineating tensions between government figures and scientists over control of science and its uses.

One pivotal chapter focuses on the 1957 Göttingen Manifesto, which opposed Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss's plans to pursue nuclear weapons, and the 1961 Tübingen Memorandum. The latter constituted an important, “sweeping critique” (335) of the inability of West German politicians to address difficult truths, particularly the loss of the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line. These positions directly affected Jürgen Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), which sought to connect social critique with scientists' reflections on their disciplines' epistemic principles. Carson's themes include the ever-expanding scale of research projects, tension between mass politics and expert advice, as well as the lingering preference among scientists such as Heisenberg for nonpartisanship (Überparteilichkeit).

The role of the Third Reich in German life and German lives had to be confronted in the postwar era. Carson's next three chapters about “Speaking of the Third Reich” address Heisenberg's conflicting accounts of his actions and the controversies surrounding those narratives. She highlights the ambiguities of his best-selling memoirs, depicting them as a contribution to the post-1968 public sphere, since they treated the Nazi years as an integral part of Heisenberg's life rather than as a mere interlude. His memoirs have been criticized as a set of artificial “dialogues” that failed to capture any actual historical moments. Carson sees them differently. In her view, he was an astute composer of language attempting to be precise about the shifting intersubjectivities of social relations. Science itself is a succession of dialogues, across time and within circles of practitioners. Ultimately, she categorizes his memoirs as a step toward dealing with the legacies of the Third Reich, but limited by their inability to address the Holocaust, their unsatisfying abstraction, and their refusal to say things directly.

In the final chapter and epilogue, Carson argues that, for their own purposes, Heidegger, Schelsky, Habermas, and others effectively created caricatures of Heisenberg and his ideas. She suggests, furthermore, that all of them missed an important point: Heisenberg had learned from the Nazi years that rationality (while desirable) and instrumentalism (while unavoidable) are insufficient. Public engagement and assessment of science had become a necessity for him, for Heisenberg knew as well as his critics how much was at stake. Carson's research is consistently careful and prodigious, and her masterful study is thoughtful, measured, and meticulous throughout, but never timid.