Where was the real J Robert Oppenheimer from?
In the summer of 2023, Oppenheimer stormed cinemas, achieving unprecedented success for a three-hour biopic. What’s more, a three-hour biopic about a nuclear physicist that takes place mostly in government briefing rooms, chambers of public office, university lecture halls and science laboratories.
Throughout the movie, despite its labyrinthine narrative structure, the one constant is J Robert Oppenheimer himself, whose identity lead actor Cillian Murphy assumes so immersively as to be unrecognisable in manner and facial features from any previous performance he’s given. While performing as Oppenheimer, Murphy adopts a somewhat unusual, clipped and slightly German-sounding accent, which comes remarkably close to the speaking voice of the real scientist available to us through archival footage.
This accent and the character’s Germanic surname lead us to assume that Oppenheimer came from Germany. This is true, in a sense, as he studied for his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen in the heart of Germany under Professor Max Born.
It was in Göttingen that he met and worked alongside researchers who would go on to become some of the leading theoretical physicists of the day. His cohort included future Manhattan Project colleagues Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, as well as the scientist who later headed the Nazi nuclear weapons programme in Germany, Werner Heisenberg.
So did he flee the Nazis?
Teller and Born, who were both of Jewish descent, fled Germany due to the rise Nazism in the early 1930s. While Teller established himself in the United States and became a major architect of the hydrogen bomb, Born was repatriated to the UK and spent the rest of his career teaching at the University of Edinburgh.
But Oppenheimer was a different story. He’d already left Germany several years before Adolf Hitler came to power of his own accord, resettling in the US after obtaining a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley.
That was after spells as a guest lecturer at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, which explains a scene in Oppenheimer where he speaks Dutch to a group of students and the ETH Institute in Zurich. These experiences, coupled with his time in Germany, might explain why Oppenheimer’s English accent was inflected with a certain Germanic intonation.
But where was Oppenheimer born?
That’s far from the whole story, though. Oppenheimer was fully American, having been born and raised in Manhattan. Yet he spoke English with a German accent from childhood. His father Julius Seligmann Oppenheimer was German, and only migrated to New York as a teenager. German was his first language and he didn’t speak English fluently.
And so, the first language that Oppenheimer learned to speak was actually German, at home with his father. He was effectively bilingual, and picked up English with a German accent not only from his father, but from his mother, whose English was inflected with the Yiddish of her family background.
Oppenheimer was American by birth and upbringing and lived most of his life in the country. But he was German and Jewish by descent. This mixture explains the accent we hear Murphy perform.
Ultimately, this great scientist was a man of the world whose obsessive drive for learning took him to centres of learning across Europe and North America. This is one central reason why he was plagued by the idea that his greatest invention might threaten the existence of humanity as a whole.
