Heller als tausend Sonnen

written on October 22, 2026, read 1986

My paternal grandparents had a guest room. It was a somewhat strange room. It was lower than all the other – in themselves rather high-ceilinged – rooms in the house. Three steps led up into it. Inside there was a bed, a sofa. And many, many books. Much of it wasn’t my thing: Johannes Mario Simmel (yes, really Simmel, not Schimmel – German for mould) in every shape and colour. Lots of really old books. The explanation for the steps and the height of the room was simple: beneath it lay the pantry cellar. It had a higher ceiling than the rest of the basement, which was little more than a crawl space – and so it stole a little of the height of the room above. The cellar always felt a little eerie to me. But that was where the preserving jars stood, with the delicious pears and the pumpkin with cinnamon sticks. I don’t really know where the books ended up later, when my grandmother (my grandfather had already passed away by then) moved into a care home. Some of them also belonged to my father, who had never taken them with him.

When I stayed with my grandparents during the holidays, I spent a lot of time in that room. Now and then I was even allowed to take a book home if I hadn’t managed to finish it by the end of the holidays. Since these were mostly my father’s books, they then stayed with me. Today’s entry is about one of those books. I must have been around 12 or 13 when I found it on my grandparents’ shelf.

It is “Heller als tausend Sonnen” by Robert Jungk, published in English as “Brighter than a Thousand Suns”. It is about the research that ultimately led to the development of the atomic and the hydrogen bomb, and about the Manhattan Project – the building of the atomic bomb in the USA. But it is also about the moral conflicts the scientists involved found themselves in, Oppenheimer above all.

Stories that have recently made it onto social media – for quite different reasons – can also be found in this book, such as the 1946 criticality accident involving the so-called “Demon Core”. Several people were irradiated during an experiment. Louis Slotin, who was conducting the experiment himself and whose quick action saved the lives of several others present,¹ died shortly afterwards. Nine months earlier there had been a similar accident in which Harry Daghlian² died. As far as I remember, however, the book does not connect that accident with the Demon Core.

Yes, I know that was pretty heavy fare for a teenager. But even back then I was rather cerebral, to put it very mildly.

As I only learned much later, this book is not without controversy: it was written at a time when much of what had happened in Germany during the war was still being played down. The German attempts to build an atomic weapon, and their failure – supposedly intended by the scientists – are therefore portrayed rather favourably. Eventually, people who had been involved, such as Werner Heisenberg³, distanced themselves from this portrayal.⁴

The copy I own today is no longer the one I took home back then. Despite the subject, I read the book again and again. Over time it fell apart and the binding broke. Somewhere around the age of 20, I lost track of its sorry remains.

Many years later, I was in an antiquarian bookshop in Heidelberg with my partner at the time. As I let my gaze wander on the ground floor, a mustard-yellow dust jacket caught my eye. And it was exactly that book (the same book, though not the very same copy) that I had taken home from my grandparents’ many years before. I bought it for my father, but apparently I had more memories attached to it than he did. Today the book stands on my shelf.

When I read it again in 2022, it had a completely different effect on me. As a teenager I had read it mostly out of scientific curiosity; now the inner conflicts of the scientists became far more important to me. I read the book from an entirely new perspective.

So this book – once again despite its subject – is linked to fond memories: of the room full of books at my grandparents’ and of a wonderful day in Heidelberg. The contrast between memories of browsing through books together and thoughts of the atomic bomb could hardly be greater.

PS: Like the copy I had back then, the one on my shelf is a Bertelsmann Lesering book club edition. It has no ISBN⁵; ISBN, publisher and links refer to modern editions. My copy is probably from 1962 – but I’m not sure about that either, because that information is missing from the book as well. In 2020 the book was republished by Rowohlt with a foreword by Robert Habeck.