1. “An ideal is perhaps best appraised by the sacrifices/victims it demands.” The aphorism makes its point by the double-entendre of “Opfer,” meaning both sacrifices and victims. Source: gutezitate.com
2. Anna Maria Hirsch-Heisenberg, ed., Meine liebe Li!-Der Briefwechsel Werner & Elisabeth Heisenberg 1937-1946 (St.Pölten: Residenz Verlag, 2011), 224
3. My Dear Li-Correspondence 1937-1946-Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg, trans. Irene Heisenberg. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 194.
4. Traduttore traditore (the translator is a traitor). This Italian bon mot tells us that no translation can convey exactly the meaning of the original text. I have chosen to use my own translation of the crucial Heisenberg letter and not the published translation (Hirsch-Heisenberg, My Dear Li (ref. 2)), because I perceive a different meaning in a few places. For example, the phrase “Ich verstehe mich im Grunde nicht mit ihm” I translate as “Basically there is no understanding between us,” whereas the published translation version says “I am fundamentally not agreeing with him.”
5. Weizsäcker was full professor of theoretical physics at the Nazified Kampf-Universität in Strasbourg; Maria Westphal was a friend of Elisabeth Heisenberg’s, living in Freiburg.