Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

The German people increasingly cast around for scapegoats. They blamed internationalists and pacifists who had forced a surrender in the war. They blamed the French and English for imposing what was in fact an onerous peace. And, no surprise, they blamed the Jews. So Germany in the 1920s was not a good place or time to be an internationalist, pacifist, intellectual Jew.

The milestone that marked the passage of German anti-Semitism from being a nasty undercurrent to a public danger was the assassination of Walther Rathenau. From a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin (his father founded AEG, an electricity firm that competed with that of Einstein’s father and then became a huge corporation), he served as a senior official in the war ministry, then reconstruction minister and finally foreign minister.

Einstein had read Rathenau’s politics book in 1917, and over dinner told him, “I saw with astonishment and joy how extensive a meeting of minds there is between our outlooks on life.” Rathenau returned the compliment by reading Einstein’s popular explanation of relativity. “I do not say it comes easily to me, but certainly relatively easily,” he joked. Then he peppered Einstein with some very insightful questions: “How does a gyroscope know that it is rotating? How does it distinguish the direction in space toward which it does not want to be tilted?” 62

Although they became close friends, there was one issue that divided them. Rathenau opposed Zionism and thought, mistakenly, that Jews like himself could reduce anti-Semitism by thoroughly assimilating as good Germans.

In the hope that Rathenau could warm to the Zionist cause, Einstein introduced him to Weizmann and Blumenfeld. They met for discussions, both at Einstein’s apartment and at Rathenau’s grand manor in Berlin’s Grunewald, but Rathenau remained unmoved. 63The best course, he thought, was for Jews to take public roles and become part of Germany’s power structure.

Blumenfeld argued that it was wrong for a Jew to presume to run the foreign affairs of another people, but Rathenau kept insisting that he was a German. It was an attitude that was “all too typical of assimilated German Jews,” said Weizmann, who was contemptuous of German Jews who tried to assimilate, and especially of those courtiers who became what he dismissed as Kaiserjuden. “They seemed to have no idea that they were sitting on a volcano.” 64

As foreign minister in 1922, Rathenau supported German compliance with the Treaty of Versailles and negotiated the Treaty of Rappallo with the Soviet Union, which caused him to be among the first to be labeled by the fledgling Nazi Party as a member of a Jewish-communist conspiracy. On the morning of June 24, 1922, some young nationalists pulled alongside the open car in which Rathenau was riding to work, sprayed him with machine-gun fire, lobbed in a hand grenade, and then sped away.

Einstein was devastated by the brutal assassination, and most of Germany mourned. Schools, universities, and theaters were closed out of respect on the day of his funeral. A million people, Einstein included, paid tribute in front of the Parliament building.

But not everyone felt sympathy. Adolf Hitler called the killers German heroes. Likewise, at the University of Heidelberg, Einstein’s antagonist Philipp Lenard decided to defy the day of mourning and give his regular lecture. A number of students showed up to cheer him, but a group of passing workers were so enraged that they dragged the professor from the class and were about to drop him in the Neckar River when police intervened. 65

For Einstein, the assassination of Rathenau provided a bitter lesson: assimilation did not bring safety. “I regretted the fact that he became a government minister,” Einstein wrote in a tribute he sent to a German magazine. “In view of the attitude that large numbers of educated Germans have towards Jews, I have always thought that the proper conduct of the Jews in public life should be one of proud reserve.” 66

Police warned Einstein that he might be next. His name appeared on the target lists prepared by Nazi sympathizers. He should leave Berlin, officials said, or at least avoid any public lectures.

Einstein moved temporarily to Kiel, took a leave of absence from his teaching duties, and wrote to Planck, backing out of the speech he was scheduled to give to the annual convention of German scientists. Lenard and Gehrcke had led a group of nineteen scientists who published a “Declaration of Protest” aimed at barring him from that convention, and Einstein realized that his fame had come back to haunt him. “The newspapers have mentioned my name too often, thus mobilizing the rabble against me,” he explained in his note of apology to Planck. 67

The months after Rathenau’s assassination were “nerve-wracking,” Einstein lamented to his friend Maurice Solovine. “I am always on the alert.” 68To Marie Curie he confided that he would probably quit his positions in Berlin and find someplace else to live. She urged him to stay and fight instead: “I think that your friend Rathenau would have encouraged you to make an effort.” 69

One option he considered briefly was a move to Kiel, on Germany’s Baltic coast, to work at an engineering firm there run by a friend. He had already developed for the firm a new design for a navigational gyroscope, which it patented in 1922 and for which he was paid 20,000 marks in cash.

The firm’s owner was surprised but thrilled when Einstein suggested that he might be willing to move there, buy a villa, and become an engineer rather than a theoretical physicist. “The prospect of a downright normal human existence in quietude, combined with the welcome chance of practical work in the factory, delights me,” Einstein said. “Plus the wonderful scenery, sailing—enviable!”

But he quickly abandoned the idea, blaming it on Elsa’s “horror” of any change. Elsa, for her part, pointed out, no doubt correctly, that it was really Einstein’s own decision.“This business of quietude is an illusion,” she wrote. 70

Why didn’t he leave Berlin? He had lived there for eight years, longer than anywhere since running away from Munich as a schoolboy. Anti-Semitism was rising, the economy collapsing, and Kiel was certainly not his only option. The light from his star was causing his friends in both Leiden and Zurich to try repeatedly to recruit him with lucrative job offers.

His inertia is hard to explain, but it is indicative of a change that became evident in both his personal life and his scientific work during the 1920s. He had once been a restless rebel who hopped from job to job, insight to insight, resisting anything that smacked of restraint. He had been repelled by conventional respectability. But now he personified it. From being a romantic youth who fancied himself a footloose bohemian he had settled, with but a few stabs at ironic detachment, into a bourgeois life with a doting hausfrau and a richly wallpapered home filled with heavy Biedermeier furniture. He was no longer restless. He was comfortable.

Despite his qualms about publicity and resolve to lie low, it was not in Einstein’s nature to shy away from saying what he thought. Nor was he always able to resist demands that he play a public role. Thus he showed up at a huge pacifist rally in a Berlin public park on August 1, just five weeks after Rathenau’s assassination. Although he did not speak, he agreed to be paraded around the rally in a car. 71

Earlier that year, he had joined the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which sought to promote a pacifist spirit among scholars, and he had persuaded Marie Curie to join as well. Its name and mission was sure to inflame German nationalists. So in the wake of the Rathenau assassination, Einstein declared that he wished to resign. “The situation here is that a Jew would do well to exercise restraint as regards his participation in political affairs,” he wrote a League official. “In addition, I must say that I have no desire to represent people who would certainly not choose me as their representative.” 72