Fission

by Helga Königsdorf

"This apparition is Lise Meitner, the Jewish physicist who helped Otto Hahn discover atomic fission but was forced to flee Germany just before Kristallnacht. Confronting her is the novel's narrator, a mathematician born on the day of Meitner's flight. Like Meitner (and like author Helga Konigsdorf), she suffers from a degenerative disease. Under the influence of the medication crucial to her existence, the narrator is visited - and prodded into an examination of her own life choices - by her departed fellow scientist.". "Fission is a novel of a woman trying to come to terms with the limits of her life: the choices she has made and those she has been denied, the responsibilities and consequences of scientific discovery, the politics of action and inaction. Prompted by her encounters with Meitner, the narrator recalls her past in East Germany, comparing the privileges and prohibitions of living in a Communist country with the very different possibilities and restrictions that her visitor