This paper focuses upon the debut novel of the East German mathematician and author, Helga Königsdorf (1938–2014). Respektloser Umgang (1986, translated into English as Fission, 2000) explores the boundaries of illusion and reality in a series of encounters between the narrator – bearing strong biographical similarities to Königsdorf – and Lise Meitner, the Austrian-Swedish physicist who collaborated with Otto Hahn and others on the discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s and 1940s. I examine how Königsdorf exploits various processes of recovery in challenging the ‘standard story’ of societal and personal narratives, both to reinstate an important historical figure marginalised by exile and gender, and to raise more fundamental questions, emerging in part from that reinstatement, of individual and collective responsibility and agency.