Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  In truth, he is livid. A few days later, he takes up his pen and writes an article, returning fire with fire. To Weyland and Gehrcke he directs withering sarcasm, referring to his opponents as the Anti-Relativity Company Ltd. Such men are hardly worth responding to, Einstein claims: why waste the ink? Their arguments–if any can be perceived–are nonsense. They themselves are nonentities. Einstein also turns his anger on Lenard–who wasn’t even there–proclaiming him a good experimental physicist but having produced nothing of worth in the theoretical domain. Such men must be driven by hatred, or envy, or some combination of the two. ‘If I were a German nationalist with or without a swastika, instead of a Jew’, Einstein writes, they would have nothing to rail against, these poor fools. Would I be treated so badly in Britain or in Holland, he asks?

  A flood of letters urges him not to leave Germany. (His friend and colleague Fritz Haber begs that this swastika-wearing ‘entente of mediocrity cannot appear to counterbalance the shared respect all serious scientists have for you’ and promises to look into Einstein’s salary again–a serious matter for a man who has to pay alimony to an ex-wife with two children in expensive Switzerland.) Friends warn against further intemperate articles, suggesting Einstein leave to others the dirty work of defending relativity against such lowlifes. ‘Don’t let yourself get cross!’ a friend urges him. ‘Stay the holy man in the temple–and stay in Germany.’

  ‘This world is a curious madhouse’, Albert writes to a friend, where ‘coachmen and waiters debate the correctness of the theory of relativity’, and where their convictions on the subject seem to depend on their politics more than anything else. He challenges his detractors to a proper scientific debate, at a conference of physicists in a few weeks’ time.

  WALL STREET, NEW YORK: Men and women are knocked off their feet when the bomb explodes outside the offices of J. P. Morgan, the most famous finance house in America. A sheet of flame stretches from one sidewalk to the other. The sound of broken glass tumbling onto the road below reminds one man of Niagara Falls. A young financier who works on the unregulated, creative fringes of the market–father of a three-year-old boy called John Fitzgerald Kennedy–is knocked to the ground by a wave of hot air.

  The streets fill with the smell of blood and burned rubber and acid and dust. Papers flutter in the air. Body parts are everywhere: hands on window ledges, feet still inside warm shoes. War veterans take care of the wounded with makeshift tourniquets. The stock market shuts. A ripple of fear resonates out from Wall Street around the world. ‘Bodies are rent asunder and crushed to pulp’, reports the Philadelphia Enquirer.

  And yet, by the next morning, the scene has been cleared. Bloodstains have been removed with bleach. The stock market reopens earlier than expected. There are rumours that Mitchell Palmer is planning a fresh raid against radicals. But the public mood is weary of such panics now. While commiserating with the families of the victims, the Wall Street Journal warns against any political overreaction. ‘The relations between capital and labor will not be changed,’ the paper says in its first comment on the attack: ‘not even for the worse as regards labor.’ Stocks surge when trading begins again. Capitalism is more resilient than expected.

  BAKU, AZERBAIJAN: ‘Don’t you know how Baku is pronounced in American?’ John Reed asks. ‘It’s pronounced oil!’

  The Comintern launches its latest front in the oil town in the Caucasus where Stalin perfected his bank-robbing techniques in the last days of the empire. The purpose of the gathering is to spread the word of Moscow to the peoples of the east. The British have only just left Baku. Reed travels there across typhus-ravaged southern Russia. He is not given a choice: ‘Comintern has made a decision. Obey.’ He takes it as punishment for the difficulties he caused in Moscow. His wife Louise is expected to arrive from America within weeks. Jack is not well. But he cannot refuse. A special train is laid on. All requirements are taken care of.

  The conference takes place mostly at night, when the heat of the day has begun to wear off. Speeches have to be translated and retranslated from English to Russian, Russian to Turkish or Turkish to Persian–and then into Urdu, Pashto, Kalmyk and a dozen other languages. (To speed things up the organisers resort to asking the two thousand delegates to huddle in linguistic groups so interpretation can take place simultaneously.) A band keeps playing the Internationale, sometimes striking up several times in a single speech. The delegates cheer, often at the wrong time, waving their swords and rifles in the air. British and French speakers attack their countries’ imperialism. Don’t expect anything better from American capitalists, Reed warns: ‘No, comrades, Uncle Sam is not one ever to give anybody something for nothing.’

  In his latest swerve towards whoever may be able to help him realise his ambitions, a proclamation by Enver Pasha is read out at the conference. (He has too many enemies to be allowed to speak in person.) He apologises for his support of German imperialism during the war, saying he now hates the Germans as much as the British: ‘If we fell into a false situation, that was our bad luck.’ Had Soviet Russia existed in 1914 he would have fought by Lenin’s side, Enver insists. A British spy files a report to London on proceedings.

  The Bolsheviks have been defeated at the gates of Warsaw. Moscow now wants to open a new front. The war has expanded Europe’s colonial empires but it has also weakened them. National liberation movements such as Mustafa Kemal’s, or the Muslim Khalifat campaign in India, are growing. Even if these movements are not strictly speaking socialist, let alone proletarian, this must be exploited. Marxist theory must adapt.

  In Baku, the words of the Communist Manifesto are updated: ‘workers of all lands and oppressed peoples of the whole world, unite!’ A new holy war is called for: not under the green flag of Islam, but under the Red banner of Communism: ‘Sweep away with fierce will the evil shamelessness of buying and selling!’ There are only two centres of power in the modern world, a Chechen from Grozny explains: ‘the centre of bourgeois domination, Versailles, and the centre of proletarian struggle, Red Moscow.’ ‘Blow up Europe!’ runs one slogan. Effigies of the French, British and American leaders are burned on the streets. The Hungarian Béla Kun conjures up a picture of the delegates meeting next year and swapping stories on how they overthrew the colonisers.

  THE HAGUE: An early evening in late summer. A group of revellers walk arm in arm along the beach by the Dutch capital, singing snippets from Carmen.

  Next morning, a more serious tone is adopted at the first psychoanalytic congress since the war. Freud, returning to his pet subject, talks about dreams. A German colleague gives a rambling presentation on how various illnesses of the eye–a bleeding retina, myopia and the like–are simply the body’s way of reflecting the mind’s attempt to suppress hidden desires. There are no soldiers attending the congress as there were in Budapest in 1918. Instead, there is a welcome smattering of foreigners: a few Americans, some British, one delegate from Poland. Not quite full peacetime conditions, perhaps, but a sign that psychoanalysis is to be spared the opprobrium of too close an association with defeated Germany and Austria. There was some discussion of holding the congress in Berlin. Too soon, wiser voices counselled.

  For the emaciated visitors from German-speaking Europe, Holland is a paradise. Anna Freud spends the pocket money her father has given her on bananas. At lunch one day she worries about the consequences of the rich food on her father’s health.

  ‘I hope you are eating sparingly,’ Anna writes on a note passed under the table.

  ‘I am only making an exception for champagne, which is not wine’, Freud replies jauntily.

  ‘Do you eat pineapple?’ Anna asks in another note.

  He does.

  It is not possible for the Freuds to make it to England. Sigmund sends the briefest of apologies to Sam. Instead they are conducted on a whistle-stop tour of Holland, including a canoe trip on the waterways of the Zeeland region.

  KISLOVODSK, RUSSIA: On the other side of the Caucasus from Baku, Inessa f
eels herself a ‘living corpse’.

  She thinks of dear Vladimir Ilyich. But she is tired, ‘as if having given up all my strength, all my passion to V. I. and the work, all the springs of love have dried up in me, all my sympathy for people’. She catches herself. Of course, ‘personal relationships are nothing compared to the needs of the struggle’.

  She plays the piano for guests after dinner one night. The security situation in the Caucasus is getting worse again. They are told they will have to leave.

  AUTUMN

  VIENNA: A woman opens the door of her apartment. A strange man stands in the doorway. There is no initial flicker of recognition. She has not seen him since she was a child. She did not know whether he was dead or alive. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, he has turned up. To Paula Hitler’s delight, Adolf takes his sister out shopping.

  He leaves again. They promise to stay in touch.

  BAD NAUHEIM, GERMANY: The cream of Germany’s scientists gather in a spa resort to discuss the matter troubling the peace of German science: Einstein’s relativity.

  Everything has been done to prevent a riot. Armed police guard the building where the discussion is to take place. Only registered participants–some five hundred of them–are allowed inside Bathhouse Number 8. A mathematician and a physicist jointly check people’s credentials. There is to be no trolling by unscientific outsiders. Politics is banned. Most of the discussion of relativity is taken up with presentations–four hours in total–full of mathematical formulae, counted on to suppress (or exhaust) the kind of emotions that were on display in the Berlin outrage, and to put things on a purely scientific plane.

  Philipp Lenard, the victim of Einstein’s acid pen, and nearly a generation older than him, is quite courteous when his turn to speak eventually comes around. His objections to relativity, he says, are those of a simple scientist appealing to common sense. But he is not given much time to make his case. Einstein, equally polite, is brief and to the point. The chairman of the meeting calls an end to the debate after just fifteen minutes: ‘Since the relativity theory unfortunately has not yet made it possible to extend the absolute time interval that is available for the meeting, our session must be adjourned.’ Lenard believes he has been cut short, dismayed that the anti-relativists have been smothered by procedure. Though he has undoubtedly won the encounter, Einstein feels uncomfortable at the course of events. At dinner that evening, after a calming walk in the park, Einstein and his party avoid the other physicists. His wife Elsa is confined to bed with nervous exhaustion.

  Albert spends the next two weeks relaxing in the hills around Stuttgart with his boys, Hans-Albert and Eduard. ‘Best greetings from the most romantic point of our expedition’, he writes on a postcard to an old friend. ‘Here even consciousness hasn’t made an appearance yet–so it seems.’ When Einstein is not talking with his sons, or dozing, or calculating how many rapidly depreciating German marks he must earn to send to Mileva in Switzerland, his mind wanders towards a new idea quite unconnected with physics. The experiences of war and economic crisis, he writes to a colleague, ‘have made minds so malleable that a real statesman could achieve grand things: I am thinking of a union of European states’.

  NALCHIK, RUSSIA–MOSCOW: Two romantics of the revolution, Inessa Armand and John Reed, die within days of each other in the autumn of 1920, one from cholera and the other from typhus. Or is it from disappointment? The disappointment that their beloved revolution, now that it has been realised, is not quite everything they imagined. The reality is never as bright as the dream.

  Inessa is evacuated from her Caucasian sanatorium, and contracts cholera somewhere in southern Russia as she tries to escape the disease-ravaged, bandit-ridden regions of the borderlands of the Soviet Republic, sleeping in her railway car and being shunted this way and that as the security situation demands. Her body is taken back to Moscow in a zinc-lined coffin. Vladimir and Nadya greet it at the station. Lenin walks bare-headed behind the funeral cortège. He is distraught.

  Jack makes it back from Baku to Moscow where his wife Louise is waiting for him. They go to the ballet. He introduces her to Lenin and Trotsky. But he is not himself. The doctors cannot figure it out. Eventually they diagnose typhus. (Some blame a watermelon picked up en route from Baku in a market in Dagestan, not far from where Inessa died.) In the end, Jack is delirious. He is caught in a trap, he says. The Harvard revolutionary dies in a Moscow hospital.

  Reed’s coffin stands on display for several days surrounded by flowers and palm fronds and the slogans of the revolution he loved. ‘The leaders die, but the cause goes on’, reads one in gold lettering. Under a thin and freezing rain, his body is buried in the Kremlin wall. There are speeches in several languages. Louise collapses. ‘John was a real American’, she tells a reporter later. He would have wanted to be buried at home.

  VIENNA: The luxuries of Holland seem a world away. A new parcel from Manchester arrives. Chocolate. Freud greedily unwraps it. He places a tiny piece inside his mouth to let it melt slowly. Quite suddenly a taste of mouldy cheese overwhelms the sweetness. Freud writes a stern letter to Sam advising sackcloth to wrap things up next time. And to send meat extract, coffee and cinnamon.

  Sam sends a comic poem about Freud and Jung that he found in an old copy of Punch magazine lying around in his dentist’s waiting room. Sigmund is not amused. He is quite indifferent to ‘popularity in itself’. But he pronounces the poem ‘silly’. Freud is angry the editors of Punch do not properly understand who he is. He reminds Sam that his name can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in ‘the supplement to it of the year 1913’.

  The dutiful nephew scans the British newspapers for more positive mentions of his uncle.

  MOSCOW: History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The day after John Reed’s untimely death, a new Western visitor is ushered into the presence of Bolshevik greatness. The visitor is Clare Sheridan, an adventurous Englishwoman in her thirties with two children, whose husband was killed in the war. Winston Churchill is her cousin, a fact she does not need to be prompted to reveal. Clare has taken up sculpture since her husband’s death and discovered a talent for it. (She has already done Winston; the person she would really like to do is D’Annunzio.)

  It is sculpture which has brought Clare to Moscow. Sculpture and adventure. ‘Artists are the most privileged class’ in Soviet Russia, she was told in London. Lenin and Trotsky will sit for her, she is promised. The offer of such a commission is not easily refused. So Clare braves a ferry across the Baltic to the new independent republic of Estonia, and then a train east. She crosses the front line where White troops fought their last engagement with the Reds after failing to take Petrograd last year. The war has moved on now, and so has the world. London is abuzz with talk of trade deals with the Bolsheviks, in spite of the war with Poland. Of the White armies which once threatened Lenin’s regime, only Wrangel’s forces are left, holding out in southern Russia.

  Clare finds that promises made in London by a Soviet representative intent on seducing her do not match reality in Moscow. The schedule of the impatient revolutionary this autumn does not easily accommodate a few hours of sitting for a sculpture. The Warsaw catastrophe hangs over a disputatious Communist Party conference in Moscow. Only a redacted version of Vladimir’s speech can be published in Pravda. ‘I absolutely in no way in the slightest pretend to knowing military science’, he admits. The invasion of Poland was an error, some say. Lenin holds up his hands: what would you have done? Private tensions spill out into the open. Trotsky blames Stalin for holding back troops at the crucial moment; the question of who actually supported the timing of the revolution in 1917 is dragged up again. There is criticism that the party apparatus is getting too strong, too centralised. A week later Vladimir gives a rambling speech to a Communist youth congress. ‘The generation of people who are now at the age of fifty cannot expect to see a communist society’, he admits, ‘but the generation of those who are now fifteen will see a c
ommunist society, and will itself build this society.’ The period of construction will be long.

  While Clare waits for the call from the Kremlin, she is put up in a guesthouse for foreign dignitaries alongside an American capitalist seeking concessions from the Bolshevik regime and the popular British writer H. G. Wells, who has already been honoured with an interview with Lenin during which the Bolshevik leader talks mostly about his latest scheme for Russia’s electrification. (Wells is given a film of the Baku conference to take back home with him.) Clare finds herself an observer rather than a participant. There are awkward encounters. At the ballet, a minor official asks how she can wear a red star on her lapel and bourgeois white gloves. Clare responds winsomely that what truly matters is what is in one’s heart. The apparatchik is unmoved. The days go by. Clare sees Trotsky from a distance. She meets John Reed before he falls ill. Once, she is mistaken for Sylvia Pankhurst. But there is no hot water to take a bath and no newspapers from home. She starts to become a little lonely.

  Finally, things start to move. A studio in the Kremlin is assigned to her. A sack of clay is delivered (later a carpet from Turkestan and a gaudy sofa) so she can prepare herself to sculpt the Bolshevik leader. The good and the great start dropping by. Word gets around the Bolshevik village. Soon everyone wants to be sculpted by the English lady: the Comintern chief, the Cheka boss, Béla Kun (whom Clare finds repulsive). Finally, she is taken to see the impatient revolutionary. Vladimir is hard to sculpt, as he cannot keep still. He harangues Clare over her cousin Winston, whom he accuses of being the acme of Western capitalism. But she is delighted when he hands her some British newspapers–several weeks old–which have been piling up on his desk. She is particularly interested in news from Ireland, where her father has a large estate.

  It is war commissar Trotsky who sweeps Clare Sheridan off her feet. For starters, he speaks French. While setting up and trying to figure out how best to rearrange the furniture in his office for the sitting, she finds herself looking at him for a little too long.