The immediate occasion for world notice was an eclipse of the sun. Einstein had presented a paper to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on November 25, 1915, “The field equations of gravitation,” in which, he reported happily, “finally the general theory of relativity is closed as a logical structure.”616 The paper stands as his first finished statement of the general theory. It was susceptible of proof. It explained mysterious anomalies in the orbit of Mercury—that confirmed prediction was the one which left Einstein feeling something had snapped in him. The general theory also predicted that starlight would be deflected, when it passed a massive body like the sun, through an angle equal to twice the value Newtonian theory predicts. The Great War delayed measurement of the Einstein value. A total eclipse of the sun (which would block the sun’s glare and make the stars beyond it visible) due on May 29, 1919, offered the first postwar occasion. The British, not the Germans, followed through. Cambridge astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington led an expedition to Principe Island, off the West African coast; the Greenwich Observatory sent another expedition to Sobral, inland from the coast of northern Brazil. A joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House in London on November 6, under a portrait of Newton, confirmed the stunning results: the Einstein value, not the Newton value, held good. “One of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought,” J. J. Thomson told the assembled worthies. “It is not the discovery of an outlying island but of a whole continent of new scientific ideas.”617
That was news. The Times headlined it REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE and the word spread. From that day forward Einstein was a marked man.
It rankled German chauvinists, including rightist students and some physicists, that the eyes of the world should turn to a Jew who had declared himself a pacifist during the bloodiest of nationalistic wars and who spoke out for internationalism now. When Einstein prepared to offer a series of popular lectures in the University of Berlin’s largest hall—everyone was lecturing on relativity that winter—students complained of the expense for coal and electricity.618 The student body president challenged Einstein to hire his own hall. He ignored the insult and spoke in the university hall as scheduled, but at least one of his lectures, in February, was disrupted.619
He was challenged more seriously the following August by an organization assembled under obscure leadership and extravagant but clandestine financing that called itself the Committee of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Scholarship. The 1905 Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, seeing relativity hailed and Einstein come to fame, retreated into a vindictive anti-Semitism and lent his respectability to the Committee, which attacked relativity theory as a Jewish corruption and Einstein as a tasteless self-promoter. The organization held a well-attended public meeting in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 20. Einstein went to listen—one speaker, as Leopold Infeld recalled, “said that uproar about the theory of relativity was hostile to the German spirit”—and stayed to scorn the crackpot talk with laughter and satiric applause.620
The criticism nevertheless stung. Einstein mistakenly thought the majority of his German colleagues subscribed to it.621 Rashly he struck off an uncharacteristically defensive statement. It appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt three days after the Philharmonic Hall meeting. “My Answer to the Antirelativity Theory Company Ltd.”622 shocked his friends, but it presciently identified the deeper issues of the Committee attack. “I have good reason to believe that motives other than a desire to search for truth are at the bottom of their enterprise,” Einstein wrote. And parenthetically, leaving his implications unstated in elision: “(Were I a German national, with or without swastika, instead of a Jew of liberal, international disposition, then . . .).” A month later his sense of humor had returned; he asked Max Born not to be too hard on him: “Everyone has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time . . . and this I have done with my article.”623 But before then he had seriously considered leaving Germany.
It would not be the first time. Einstein had renounced German citizenship and departed the country once before, at the extraordinary age of sixteen. That earlier rejection, which he reversed two decades later, prepared him for the final one, after the Weimar interlude, when Adolf Hitler came to power.
Germany had been united in empire for only eight years when Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879. He grew up in Munich. He was slow to speak, but he was not, as legend has it, slow in his studies; he consistently earned the highest or next-highest marks in mathematics and Latin in school and Gymnasium. At four or five the “miracle” of a compass his father showed him excited him so much, he remembered, that he “trembled and grew cold.” It seemed to him then that “there had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden.”624 He would look for the something which objects hid, though his particular genius was to discover that there was nothing behind them to hide; that objects, as matter and as energy, were all; that even space and time were not the invisible matrices of the material world but its attributes. “If you will not take the answer too seriously,” he told a clamorous crowd of reporters in New York in 1921 who asked him for a short explanation of relativity, “and consider it only as a kind of joke, then I can explain it as follows. It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left. According to the relativity theory, however, time and space disappear together with the things.”625
The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion—Judaism—and came back bitterly disillusioned: “Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true. . . . The consequence was a positively fanatic free-thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a sceptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment.”626
His father stumbled in business, not for the first time.627 The family moved across the Alps to Milan to start again, but Albert stayed behind in a boardinghouse to complete his Gymnasium work. He was probably expelled from the Gymnasium before he could quit. He acquired a doctor’s certificate claiming nervous disorders. It was not only the autocracy of his German school that he despised. “Politically,” he wrote later, “I hated Germany from my youth.”628 He had thought of renouncing his citizenship while his family was still in Munich, as a rebellious adolescent of fifteen. That began a long family debate. He won it after he moved from Milan to Zurich to try again to finish his schooling; his father wrote the German authorities on his behalf. Einstein renounced his German citizenship officially on January 28, 1896. The Swiss took him aboard in 1901. He liked their doughty democracy and was prepared to serve in their militia but was found medically unfit (because of flat feet and varicose veins); but one reason he quit Germany was to avoid the duty of Prussian conscription, Kadavergehorsamkeit, the obedience of the corpse.629
The boy and the young man rebelled to protect the child within—the “victorious child,” Erik Erikson has it in Einstein’s case, the child with its uninhibited creativity preserved into adulthood.630 Einstein grazes the point in a letter to James Franck:
I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.631
“Relativity” was a misnomer. Einstein worked his way to a new physics by demanding consistency and greater objectivity of the old. If the speed of light is a constant, then something else must serve as the elastic betwee
n two systems at motion in relation to one another—even if that something else is time. If a body gives off an amount E of energy its mass minutely diminishes. But if energy has mass, then mass must have energy: the two must be equivalent: E = mc2, E/c2 = m.632 (I.e., an amount of energy E in joules is equal to an amount of mass m in kilograms multiplied by the square of the speed of light, an enormous number, 3 × 108 meters per second times 3 × 108 m/s = 9 × 1016 or 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules per kilogram. Dividing E by c2 demonstrates how large an amount of energy is contained within even a small mass.)
Einstein came to that beautiful, harrowing equivalency in 1907, in a long paper published in the Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik. “It is possible,” he wrote there, “that radioactive processes may become known in which a considerably larger percentage of the mass of the initial atom is converted into radiations of various kinds than is the case for radium.”633 Like Soddy and Rutherford earlier in England, he saw the lesson of radium that there was vast energy stored in matter, though he was not at all sure that it could be released, even experimentally. “The line of thought is amusing and fascinating,” he confided to a friend at the time, “but I wonder if the dear Lord laughs about it and has led me around by the nose.”634 He had his Ph.D. then from the University of Zurich and Max Planck had begun to correspond with him, but he had not yet left the patent office where he worked as a technical expert from 1902 to 1909, the years of his first great burst of papers including those on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and special relativity.
He habilitated as a Privatdozent at the University of Bern in 1908 but held on to the patent-office job for another year for security. Finally in October 1909, after receiving his first honorary doctorate, he moved up to associate professor at the University of Zurich. A full professorship enticed him to isolated Prague—he was married now, with a wife and two sons to support—but happily the Polytechnic in Zurich drew him back a year later with a matching offer. The academic hesitations measure how radically new was his work. It was 1913 before Max Planck, Fritz Haber and a muster of German notables, recognizing the waste, offered him a triple appointment in Berlin: a research position under the aegis of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a research professorship at the university and the directorship of the planned Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. After the Germans left, Einstein quipped to his assistant, Otto Stern, that they were “like men looking for a rare postage stamp.”635
He arrived in Berlin in April 1914. In the war years, separated from his first wife and living alone, he completed the general theory. To Max Born that “great work of art” was “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition, and mathematical skill” even though “its connections with experience were slender.”636 Einstein’s crowning achievement ameliorated for him the universal madness of the war:
I begin to feel comfortable amid the present insane tumult, in conscious detachment from all things which preoccupy the crazy community. Why should one not be able to live contentedly as a member of the service personnel in the lunatic asylum? After all, one respects the lunatics as the people for whom the building in which one lives exists. Up to a point, you can make your own choice of institution—though the distinction between them is smaller than you think in your younger years.637
Einstein raised funds for the Zionist cause of a Hebrew university in Palestine on a first trip to the United States, with Chaim Weizmann, in April and May 1921. He had seen the crowds of Eastern Jews stumbling into Berlin in the wake of war and revolution, watched the German incitement against them and decided to take their part. His guide to Zionist thinking was the eloquent spokesman and organizer Kurt Blumenfeld, who also served in that capacity to the young Hannah Arendt. It was Blumenfeld who convinced him to accompany Weizmann to America—his relations with the forceful, single minded Weizmann, Einstein told Abraham Pais once, “were, as Freud would say, ambivalent.”638 He lectured on relativity at Columbia, the City College of New York and Princeton, met Fiorello La Guardia and President Warren G. Harding, conceived “a new theory of eternity” sitting through formal speeches at the annual dinner of the National Academy of Sciences and spoke to crowds of enthusiastic American Jews.639
Back home he wrote that he “first discovered the Jewish people” in America. “I have seen any number of Jews, but the Jewish people I have never met either in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany. This Jewish people which I found in America came from Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe generally. These men and women still retain a healthy national feeling; it has not yet been destroyed by the process of atomization and dispersion.”640 The statement implicitly criticizes the Jews of Germany, whose “undignified assimilationist cravings and strivings,” Einstein wrote elsewhere, had “always . . . annoyed” him.641 Blumenfeld propounded a radical, post-assimilatory Zionism and had taught him well. A decade later Hannah Arendt would write that “in a society on the whole hostile to Jews . . . it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating to anti-Semitism also.”642 Einstein specialized in driving assumptions to their logical conclusions: clearly he had arrived at a similar understanding of the “Jewish question.”
He was now not only the most famous scientist in the world but also a known spokesman for Jewish causes. In Berlin on June 24, 1922, right-wing extremists gunned down Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s first Foreign Minister, a physical chemist and industrialist friend of Einstein and a highly visible Jew. It appeared that Einstein might be next. “I am supposed to belong to that group of persons whom the people are planning to assassinate,” he wrote Max Planck. “I have been informed independently by serious persons that it would be dangerous for me in the near future to stay in Berlin or, for that matter, to appear anywhere in public in Germany.”643 He lived privately until October, then left with his second wife, Elsa, on a long trip to the Far East and Japan, receiving notice of his Nobel Prize en route. He spent twelve days in Palestine on the way back and stopped over in Spain. By the time he returned to Berlin, German preoccupation with politics had temporarily retreated behind preoccupation with the Dadaistic mark, then soaring toward 54,000 to the dollar.644 Einstein went on with his work, including the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator pump and his first efforts toward a unified field theory, but began frequently to travel abroad.
* * *
The anti-Semitism Einstein found strong in Berlin in December 1919 was rampant in Munich. Pale, thin, thirty-year-old Adolf Hitler sat down that month at the single battered table in the cramped office of the German Workers Party, formerly a taproom, to draft his party’s platform. A grotesque wood carving served as inspiration. It would follow its master into history; a touring Australian academic encountered it again in 1936:
I was being shown round a famous collection of [Nazi] Party relics in Munich. The curator was a mild old man, a student of the old German academic class.645 After showing me everything, he led, almost with bated breath, to his pièce de résistance. He produced a small sculptured wooden gibbet from which was suspended a brutally realistic figure of a dangling Jew. This piece of humourless sadism, he said, decorated the table at which Hitler founded the Party, seventeen years ago.
His pale blue eyes shining, Hitler read out the twenty-five points of his party’s program the following February in the Festsaal of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus before nearly two thousand people, the largest crowd the little German Workers Party had yet attracted. “These points of ours,” he had shouted in triumph the day he finished drafting them, “are going to rival Luther’s placard on the doors of Wittenberg!” All or part of six of them applied specifically to Jews: that Jews were not countrymen “of German blood” and therefore could not be citizens; that only citizens could hold public office or publish German-language newspapers; that no more nonGermans might immigrate into the country and that all non-Germans admitted since the beginning of the Great War should be expelled.646 The twenty-five points were never offi
cially declared the program of the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi Party, which the German Workers Party evolved to, but their power was felt nevertheless.
The Beer Hall Putsch on November 8, 1923, delivered Hitler to a comfortable, sunlit cell in Landsberg prison, where he dictated his personal and political testament to his bashful acolyte Rudolf Hess. Mein Kampf has much to say about the Jews. Across the nearly seven hundred pages of its two volumes it refers to Jewry more frequently than to any other subject except Marxism—and Hitler considered Marxism a Jewish invention and a Jewish “weapon.”647
Jews, the future Chancellor of Germany declares in Mein Kampf, are “no lovers of water.”648 He “often grew sick to my stomach from [their] smell.” Their dress is “unclean,” their appearance “generally unheroic.” “A foreign people,” they have “definite racial characteristics”; they are “inferior being[s],” “vampires” with “poison fangs,” “yellow fist[s]” and “repulsive traits.” “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”