PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY: At Wilson’s alma mater a Marx Brothers comedy is enacted. When Albert Einstein is invited to stand up, he sits down. When he is invited to sit down, he stands up. When he is to be awarded his doctoral gowns, he turns the wrong way. Things go more smoothly that afternoon when Albert gives a lecture, in German, about the theory of relativity.
The triumphal tour continues to Boston (where Einstein is asked for the speed of sound and tells the impertinent journalist to look it up in a book), to Chicago (where he lectures at the university) and to Cleveland (where the entire city seems to shut down to greet the great physicist). One place not on Albert’s itinerary is Dearborn, Michigan, where Henry Ford’s Independent–now nearly one year into its anti-Semitic campaign–devotes an entire page to suggesting that the theory of relativity actually derives from the earlier work of a scientist known only as ‘Kinertia’. (This week’s cover reads: ‘Is Einstein a Plagiarist? Jew admits Bolshevism’.)
‘America is interesting,’ Albert writes on the journey home, ‘more easily aroused to enthusiasm than other countries I have unsettled with my presence.’ He has been made to feel like a ‘prize ox’: yanked this way and that by his minders, slapped on the back by all and sundry and shown off. ‘But now it is finished’, he writes, ‘and what remains is a wonderful sense of having done something truly good and having worked for the “Jewish matter” steadfastly in the face of opposition from Jews and non-Jews.’
Even his friend Fritz Haber admits the trip has not been quite the disaster he feared. It may have even done something for German–American friendship.
MUNICH: In May, the Bavarian premier–a patrician conservative with an authoritarian streak–calls in various NSDAP representatives for a meeting, to see if they can work together in preventing the kind of instability seen elsewhere in Germany from spreading to Bavaria.
Afterwards a student who has taken up the Nazi cause sends a letter to the premier, offering personal testimony of Adolf Hitler’s character and learning. His understanding of history is ‘way beyond the average’, the student claims. His simple upbringing gives him a ‘rare sensitivity for the public mood, keen political instincts and tremendous strength of will’–precisely what patrician politicians lack. Hitler’s true political philosophy, the student explains, is straightforward national solidarity, underpinned by ‘pragmatic, honest socialism’ and the liberation of the masses from ‘foreign race leaders’. (There is no mention of anti-Semitism, the Aryan race or anti-capitalism.) Oh, and he is also a good Catholic: ‘Your Excellency can place total trust in him’.
ROME–IRELAND: A Papal letter is published about the war in Ireland, drafted by Irish priests. ‘We do not perceive how the bitter strife can profit either of the parties,’ it reads, ‘when property and homes are being ruthlessly and disgracefully laid waste, when villages and farmsteads are being set aflame, when neither sacred places nor sacred persons are spared, when on both sides a war resulting in the death of unarmed people, even of women and children, is carried on.’ The British authorities are furious, claiming the letter treats the forces of order and disorder the same way.
In Ireland two days later, a general election held by the British authorities reconfirms the virtual political monopoly of Sinn Féin in the south, and the strength of Unionism in the north. A day after that, against Michael Collins’s advice, a spectacular attack of the kind de Valera likes is launched. The Custom House in Dublin–the centre of British financial administration and a symbol of London’s rule–is occupied by a hundred-strong force of the local IRA. Petrol is spread through the building and set alight. Ireland’s administrative records go up in smoke.
In military terms, the attack is an awful failure. The building itself is soon reoccupied. A large contingent of IRA men are captured by the Black and Tans. Collins’s Dublin IRA is decimated. In de Valera’s terms, none of this matters: headlines have been made and a symbol has been destroyed. Irish republican determination is reasserted. Britain’s war is shown once more to be unwinnable. ‘Truly the hills of Ireland could be levelled to the ground and all her children driven out upon the seas of the world before England can conquer us’, Michael Collins writes a few weeks later to the woman he loves, Kitty Kiernan. But must all Ireland become a wasteland before peace can return?
VIENNA: Sigmund Freud receives an unexpected birthday present: a sculpture of his head. He is horrified. ‘A ghastly threatening bronze doppelgänger’, he calls it. When he sat for the sculpture the year before, Freud had assumed it was for an admirer.
MOSCOW: The impatient revolutionary is furious. ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ he writes to the Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky. On his watch Mayakovsky has been allowed to publish a new poem, entitled 150,000,000 (in reference to the population of Soviet Russia and its brother republics):
Today
we rush Russia
into paradise
through the rainbow coloured chinks in sunsets
Go, go
go, go, go, go
go, go!
Letsgoletsgo!
Through the white guard of snows!
‘It is nonsense, stupidity, double-eyed stupidity and affectation’, Lenin rages. It should be printed, in a far smaller print run than proposed, ‘for libraries and cranks’.
Instead of faith
In our soul
we’ve got steam
and electricity.
No beggars here!
We’ll pocket the wealth of all worlds!
If it’s old, kill it.
Use their skulls as ashtrays!
Everything
will be a joy
to our eyes–
the eyes of overgrown children!
Lunacharsky should be ‘flogged for his futurism’, Lenin writes a touch histrionically–to Lunacharsky. (The Commissar of Enlightenment defends himself by noting that the poem was very popular when it was read out in public.)
Mayakovsky imagines the people of Russia, personified as Ivan, arising like a whirlwind of revolutionary fervour, and throwing themselves into battle against a wealthy, powerful, imaginary America, bristling with skyscrapers and airships.
That’s not the afternoon sun in your eyes,
But Wilson’s gigantic top hat
rising up like Sukharev tower.
He spits dynamite
and belches,
red all over
As Ivan and Woodrow begin their final struggle for supremacy, inanimate objects suddenly come alive. Man, machine and nature meld into one. Hunger, disease and even ideas are weaponised.
Wilson’s sabre screamed.
From Ivan’s shoulder,
downward
People,
buildings,
battleships,
horses,
all clambered through the narrow incision.
They came out singing,
all in music.
‘Can’t we stop this?’ Vladimir asks a senior official responsible for cultural affairs. The impatient revolutionary is in the midst of trying to get America to trade with Soviet Russia. Poems like this will not help.
It must not be allowed to happen again. ‘Let’s agree that these futurists are to be published not more than twice a year and not more than 1,500 copies’, Lenin writes. He proposes a pincer movement, asking if reliable anti-futurists can be found to drown out Mayakovsky on the poetic front while demanding a progress report on his request for a new Russian dictionary from Pushkin onwards so as to put language itself back on an even keel. ‘Is it being done?’ the impatient revolutionary writes. ‘What precisely? Find out and send me exact details.’
PARIS: Six months after being ceremoniously buried under the Arc de Triomphe, and two months after his poor showing on the pages of Littérature, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier appears in Paris: he is a character witness in a theatrical mock trial organised by André Breton. To the horror of French nationalists in the audience, the Unknown Soldier, played by
one of Breton’s friends, appears dressed in German army uniform and gas mask. The nationalists break into a rousing rendition of the Marseillaise in protest.
The figure in the dock–represented in proceedings as a stuffed dummy–is Maurice Barrès, a French nationalist author, activist and friend of Gabriele D’Annunzio. On the political right, Barrès is seen as a heroic, inspiring figure–an unflinching critic of anything German, the author of several novels about the grounding of national identity in blood and soil. Charles de Gaulle is an avid reader. To André and those like him, the days when Barrès could be considered an appropriate mentor to young French writers are gone. He now epitomises a bygone era and a failed generation: those self-satisfied nationalist bastards who led France into war and seem to think that they have the moral right to dictate the peace.
For André, the stakes are high. He intends the trial to be a serious affair, not just a spectacle. In the weeks before the trial he even takes to studying formal court procedure. Though the Dadaists have to be involved in the preparations–they are still his tribe, after all–André is very much the man in charge.
Led by Tzara, the hard-core Dadaists find André’s earnestness laughable. What is justice, anyhow? A Dadaist should ridicule convention, not attempt to repurpose it in the service of one’s pet cause. Tzara uses his time in the witness box as an opportunity to make a mockery of proceedings and put in his own performance. In answer to the question of whether he served in the war, he responds sarcastically in the affirmative: at the ‘Verdun of Dadaism’. He ends his testimony with a Dadaist song:
The song of an elevator,
Which had Dada in its heart
Tired out its motor part
That had Dada in his heart
Tzara rather enjoys himself. Breton fumes. (Barrès is condemned in absentia to twenty years’ hard labour.)
SAINT-CYR, FRANCE: Around the same time that the Unknown Soldier is being dressed up as a German in André’s theatre of the absurd, the new history professor at France’s officer training school at Saint-Cyr strides into the academy’s lecture hall. He is wearing full dress uniform, complete with cap, gloves and a sabre hanging at his side. Before starting his lecture Charles de Gaulle ceremoniously removes the sword and cap. The gloves stay on.
The lecture lasts for two hours. Towards the end of his peroration, the young French captain–now married with a child on the way–comes to the subject of the battle of Verdun. ‘Soldiers, stand up!’ he roars. The officer cadets of Saint-Cyr rise as one, and salute in silence. This is what France needs more of, de Gaulle reflects: respect, order, leadership, military ideals.
ROME: After the embarrassment of 1919, the triumph of 1921. At the end of spring, Mussolini arrives in the capital as the leading light of a small phalanx of Fascist deputies elected to the Italian parliament as part of a more mainstream coalition (which the Fascists immediately dump). He takes up residence in a hotel not far from the Piazza di Spagna.
CROTON-ON-HUDSON, UNITED STATES: Clare Sheridan drops by the artists’ colony at Croton-on-Hudson in upstate New York. The smell of summer is in the air. Clare notices one rather neglected-looking cottage. Some irises are growing nearby. She recognises the names on the post box: Reed, Bryant. Louise is not in. For just an instant, Clare is back in Moscow, amidst the excitement of a society making itself anew. America is less enthralling.
SUMMER
SMYRNA–ISTANBUL: The blonde-haired Greek King Constantine (his father was a Dane) lands at the port of Smyrna, the first Christian King to set foot in Anatolia since the Crusades. The entire Greek nation has been mobilised for this final fight. Troops are shipped over by the thousand. Kemal must be finished off. The summer campaign will be decisive. It is a heady gamble.
In Istanbul, foreign diplomats enjoy after-dinner dances on terraces overlooking the Bosphorus. There are only two topics of conversation: how far the British will back the Greeks, and whether the Bolsheviks will turn up to spoil the party.
MOSCOW: Vladimir does a quick calculation. Basic electrification will take 10 years, which will require 370 million days of work. That is, 37 million days a year. There are 1.5 million soldiers in the Red Army. 37 divided by 1.5 makes 24. That’s it! ‘24 working days, i.e. two days a month.’ That is all that is required from the Red Army to electrify the entire country as planned. Lenin asks that his back-of-the-envelope calculation be circulated widely. If only others would take the job as seriously as him.
There are still Bolsheviks ideologically unhappy with Lenin’s policy of granting concessions to foreign capitalists and reintroducing elements of the market into the Russian economy. Vladimir makes no apologies. The peasants need ‘a push’ so they will grow more food, he argues at a special conference called to make the case for the new direction. As he speaks, central Russia is in full-blown famine conditions, with no buffer from previous years because of requisitioning.
Nor will the retreat from full-on economic socialisation, the kind of communism that used to make Vladimir’s pulse race, last for just a year or two. Without quite putting a figure on it, he admits that the new direction will have to last for a ‘long time’. ‘The disintegration of the capitalist world is steadily progressing’, of course, just as he always said–this is a matter of historical inevitability, a scientific fact established by Marx–but no one can deny that a sort of ‘temporary, unstable equilibrium has been established’ in the capitalist world. It is most unfortunate. But one must face up to it. ‘Of course, if revolution occurs in Europe naturally we’ll change the policy’, Lenin promises, but ‘we can make no conjectures on that score’.
In the hungry Tambov region of the Volga, Misha–defeated at Warsaw, victorious at Kronstadt–is sent to suppress the most dangerous of the Soviet Republic’s home-grown peasant rebellions, still burning across Moscow’s empire. The papers call the rebels ‘bandits’, but they are tens of thousands strong. In some places they have been in charge since last summer. They have even introduced conscription. Further from the prying eyes of the world than Kronstadt, Moscow does not shrink from harsh measures to eliminate the threat. Concentration camps are set up. Thousands are shot without trial. Whole villages are relocated. The Red Army threatens to use poison gas against its enemies. ‘Massive terror’ becomes policy. Lenin tells Trotsky to ensure such measures are properly enforced.
The rebels are put down. The hunger spreads.
WASHINGTON DC: Normalcy in action. The new President, Warren Harding, signs into law radical measures to restrict immigration into the United States. The Congressman whose name is attached to the law hails it as vital to stop the entry of those infected with what US diplomatic cables refer to as the ‘perverted ideas’ so prevalent in Europe. America must not let in ‘economic parasites’, with Bolshevist tendencies and deteriorated morality. (By this, the Congressman means Eastern Europeans and Jews.)
The new immigration restrictions are based on the national origins of the American population, as recorded in the census of 1910. For each hundred citizens of German origin in 1910, for example, only three will now be allowed to settle in the United States every year. The choice of the 1910 census is significant, before the latest wave of Italians, Eastern Europeans and Jews. In effect, the restrictions are an attempt to both slow total inward migration to the United States and prevent the make-up of the American population from shifting further away from the preponderance of those with north European roots.
The annual allowance from different countries based on the 1910 census is then divided by twelve to give the monthly maximum. For example, no more than twenty-two will be allowed in from Albania each month, sixty-nine from Syria or three from Fiume. In an attempt to game the system, ships laden with migrants now wait offshore and dash into harbour on the first of the month to make sure their passengers disembark before the quota is exhausted. The days when America was an open door to those fleeing Europe is over. America’s relationship with the world has changed.
BERLIN–RÜGEN: Stop pre
ss. Twenty German newspapers report a startling new discovery derived from Einstein’s relativity. Dancing couples waltzing in the direction of the earth’s rotation will grow thinner over time. If they waltz in the opposite direction, they will grow fatter. ‘According to this new theory, nothing else will be possible than for the dancing couples to pair up by weight’, the newspapers report. ‘It is to be feared that many a love affair will be disrupted by these unexpected effects of the theory of relativity.’
Einstein himself is to be found on the Baltic coast, near the island of Rügen, with his two sons–aged seventeen and eleven now–and a maid. They travel third class, and take rooms above a bakery. They go sailing together. The mind of the former patent-office employee is bursting with ideas for the practical application of science–for a new type of gyroscope or a new kind of refrigerator.
Over the summer Albert gets himself into trouble when he makes some rather reckless remarks to a Dutch journalist, venturing the opinion that women are the real rulers of America and that the men are nothing but ‘toy dogs’ working as their slaves. American science is something of a joke, Einstein declares. As for the American public’s obsession with relativity: ‘I believe quite positively it is the mysteriousness of what they cannot understand which places them under a magic spell.’ The work of several weeks is undone in a few minutes. There is a flood of angry letters to the New York Times.
A German-American in Mexico addresses an anonymous letter direct to Professor Einstein, Berlin University. ‘The sooner you, accursed Jew, vanish with all the other German Jewish professors to Jerusalem,’ it reads, ‘the better for Germany and German students.’ (Another person in Mexico who reads about Einstein’s faux pas, though with hardly the same reaction, is Clare Sheridan, who spends several weeks there over the summer, meeting the country’s power-brokers, talking about Lenin and Trotsky, and attempting to bully the Mexican President into having his bust done.)
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