Astrid Viciano | Die Formel des Widerstands: Wie Kernphysiker mithalfen, die Atombombe der Nazis zu verhindern

In the organizer's words:

Shortly before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the young scientist Wolfgang Gentner and his French colleague Frédéric Joliot-Curie meet at the Institut du Radium in Paris. It was a time of groundbreaking discoveries in physics, from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie. Gentner researches artificial radioactivity together with Curie's daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric. Experiments that would earn the Joliot-Curies the Nobel Prize.

In 1940, Gentner returned to Paris on behalf of the German uranium project. He was to supervise Joliot-Curies' research and provide the Nazis with important findings for the construction of the atomic bomb. However, his French colleague begins to work undercover for the Resistance and his laboratory becomes the center of the resistance. Gentner seemingly cooperates with the Nazis, constantly coming up with new pretexts to prevent the Germans from entering the laboratory and to secure the release of French resistance fighters from the clutches of the Waffen SS - a double game in which Gentner risks everything and saves the lives of his friends several times over.

Astrid Viciano presents a new biography of Wolfgang Gentner, the long-time director of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, and sheds light on a dark period in which science was suspected of being contaminated during the Third Reich - as exciting as a thriller!

Astrid Viciano studied medicine in Regensburg, Würzburg and Zaragoza, and also completed a Master's degree in Specialized Journalism at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. She has worked as a medical journalist for more than 20 years and was an editor at Focus and Die Zeit, at stern and most recently at Wissen am Wochenende of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Since 2019, she has been the managing editor of Medien-Doktor GESUNDHEIT at the Chair of Science Journalism. Her work has already received several awards, most recently the Holtzbrinck Prize for Business Journalism and the Journalism Prize of the German Neurological Society.

Price information:

Normal € 9.90 / Reduced € 6.90 / Members € 4.90 // Surcharge at the Box Office