Beautiful Findings: Lise Meitner and the Science of Forgetting

Lise Meitner, often called “The Mother of the Atomic Bomb,” worked in Germany for over 30 years. When she arrived in Berlin from her native Vienna in 1907, she was among the first women to seek a place in science; when she fled for her life in 1938, she was one of the last academics with Jewish bloodlines not yet expelled. It is hard to imagine a more dramatic life in science, nor one more rife with moral dilemmas, than that of Lise Meitner; a more troubling, if long-lived, scientific partnership than that of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn; or a more tarnished chapter in the history of the Nobel Prize than the (repeated) dismissal of Lise Meitner's groundbreaking contributions to physics. Beautiful Findings follows her story from the time she flees Berlin to the end of her life, painstakingly reconstructing Meitner's "final chapter" and placing it in historical perspective. The play probes the darkest years of science and reveals how one remarkable female physicist rose to exceptional prominence, only to end her career a prominent exception.

Format: Full-length play

Character breakdown:

Lisa Meitner: Austrian physicist, 59–65

Otto Hahn: German chemist, 59–65

Otto Robert Frisch: Austrian-English physicist, nephew of Meitner, 73 (34 when he collaborated with his aunt on the discovery of nuclear fission)

Dana Baron: American playwright, 23

Original or Prominent Production:
Theatre Huntsville, Alabama (livestream); Premier the Play (audio) September 10, 2024.

Original Language: English

Production Rights Holder:

Germaine Shames

Experience(s) Chronicled: Women and the Holocaust | Reactions to the Holocaust | Rescue | European Jewry Before the Holocaust | Perpetrators, Bystanders and Collaborators | Survivors and Subsequent Generations | Escape