by Donald Hunt
Hanz stood motionless and stared. The tiny red face turned from side to side and her fussing quickly turned to wails loud enough to wake the neighbors. He looked at Marlene, who was pale but smiling and asking to hold her daughter. He felt the relief flood over him like the tears falling across his face and excused himself to step outside where he stood breathing in the night air and basking in what he believed was a miracle. The following day, Hans and Marlene named their new miracle, Anna Marlene Eichenwald.
Hanz looked at Anna and smiled as they turned into the café. Anna smiled back absently, lost in her dreams of the future. Neither she nor her parents could have known the truth. It was the summer of 1914, and this was Berlin.
A massive river of people pushed through the streets, ushering in what would become turmoil of historic proportion. The Archduke Franz-Ferdinand had been assassinated. The Hapsburg heir to the Austrian throne was dead at the hands of a Serbian national. As in most political assignations the reasons were unclear, and a volatile situation was now becoming an explosion.
Berlin was now a city of some four million people, a giant that had grown out of the marsh lands surrounding a once small Slavic settlement that cropped up during the middle Ages. Berlin had been given her name from the Slavonic words birl, meaning swamp, and Collin, a neighboring settlement. Conquered by Napoleon in 1806, the city was beset by revolution for the next 50 years. But by 1871, she had become the capital of the fledgling German empire.
On July 25, 1914, the Berliner Tageblatt and Berliner Morganpost, the city’s two major newspapers, were both filled with reports of Serbia’s refusal to comply with the Austrian-Hungarian ultimatum. The bourgeois seemed to come out of every corner of the city, furiously debating the consequences of a Balkan war with the German Reich. As Sunday dawned, the crowds continued to pour into the center of town. Some 10,000 made their way to the Schloss, the palace of Wilhelm II, emperor of all the Volk. In a patriotic frenzy, they were singing, “Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles,” and the Austrian national anthem. Some marched together, some walked arm in arm. All made their way back down Unterden Linden to the Bismarck monument in front of the Reichstag. There was a sense of patriotic union, of common purpose.
That Sunday morning, there was also a collective sense of the inevitable….there would be war. Alliances were forming quickly. By early that afternoon youth clubs known as the Wandervogel were leading parades to the palace. Similar demonstrations began taking place in the outlying areas of Berlin and spread across the country. Patriotic revelers were banding together in Hamburg and Munich, in Cologne and in Mannheim. Hanover was no different. In every region, the populace was erupting in spontaneous and zealous support for the German cause. As the week passed, the idea of peace was being abandoned. The crowds were growing in size, their demonstrations becoming more robust. German pride was at its peak.
On August 1, 300,000 Berliners gathered in front of the palace, a testament to their readiness to defend the Fatherland. In those last days before the war, the fervor seeped from the streets into the German Foreign Office. A reckless diplomacy was being formulated inside those walls.
Hanz and Marlene had seen the beginning of this zealotry in the crowds pushing through Berlin on that Sunday morning in July. They had watched the throng as outsiders. The Eichenwalds had lived in Berlin for only two years, having left Munich when Hans received his appointment as instructor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
Hanz was a gentle, soft spoken man, an imposing figure who stood 6’4.” He was handsome, with an angular face and thinning black hair. Despite his height, Hans was a modest, quiet man and for the most part, went unnoticed.
The Eichenwald family was of Jewish descent, and had a long established history in the community of Wasserburg in Southern Bavaria. The community sat on the edge of the Inn River, about 100 kilometers from the Austrian border. Hanz’s father had been a chemist. He had handed down to his son, an easy grasp of science and an idyllic childhood. Hanz played with his friends, attended a Yeshiva school, and was embraced by a loving family and community. While Bavaria was predominantly Catholic, in Wasserburg the Jews retained their own distinction and held to their own heritage while blending seamlessly within the community.
By the time he was ten, it was clear that Hanz was intellectually gifted. Observant and verbal, Hans confounded even his father, asking incessant questions and offering insights beyond his years. He seemed to question everything and had a particular interest in astronomy. “How is the moon able to hang in the heavens?” he asked his father one day.
“Gravity,” his father replied, a bit taken aback.
“And what is gravity?” Hans asked.
Soon after, Herr Eichenwald visited a secondhand bookstore in Munich and bought his son a biography of Sir Isaac Newton. Hanz pored over the pages, devouring the content, fascinated by Newton’s description of the concept of universal gravitational force. He learned that Newton and his colleagues developed the mathematics now known as calculus. Hanz marveled at the man’s oft-quoted coda:
“This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being…”
The more he read, the more Hanz identified with this seventeenth century genius. He spent countless hours contemplating the mysteries described, and was awed by the movement of celestial bodies in time and space. The gravitational power that kept the earth orbiting regularly about the sun, also held its atmosphere in place while it hurled around the sun at unthinkable speed. Newton wrote accurate equations describing the force of gravity. But when asked to explain exactly what gravity was, Newton simply said, “I do not know.”
In his Memoirs, Newton had provided a self-portrait of his contributions to the world.
“I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
The concepts Newton laid out had a powerful influence on young Hanz and sparked the beginning of his journey into the world of science and physics. He studied at the University of Munich, where he came under the influence of another great mind, the renowned physicist, Max Plank. It was Plank who had helped Hanz secure the appointment at the Institute. Young Eichenwald had distinguished himself in several areas, and under Plank’s influence, had developed his principle field of interest in quantum physics. This was to Hanz, an entirely new way of looking at the subatomic world. The word quantum came from Plank’s discovery in 1900 that energy exists in small discreet bundles called quanta. Quantum mechanics deals with the world of the very small. Thus, the quantum ‘club’ of physicists was a small one, as the theories were radically new and even to most physicists were beyond comprehension.
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum theory,” one of Hans’ colleagues remarked one afternoon.
The only thing predictable about atoms and subatomic particles is that they are unpredictable. This, to classical physicists, was heresy because they worked in a world of predictable order, and they had become comfortable with that constant.
Like his father, Hanz was modest and quiet, but his demeanor belied his inner passions. He cared deeply for his family, his Jewish heritage and his country. Marlene hailed from Ulm, on the Danube, nestled in the foothills of the Swabian Alps. In 1805, this had been the scene of the Austrian’s defeat by Napoleon. Ulm would later be noted as the birthplace of Albert Einstein.
Marlene’s family had moved to Wasserburg when she was 12-years old. Within a year, she had attracted the attention of young Hanz, who was four years her senior. When he first saw her, he saw an angel. Petite, with strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, Marlene had a delicate beauty and an engaging smile. Their courtship began as a platonic friendship and escalated slo
wly to long walks and holding hands. One evening as they walked together, they came to the simultaneous realization that they were in love.
As wonderful a realization as it was at the time, the love affair between Hanz and Marlene immediately presented itself as a crisis. Hanz had met the love of his life and at the same time had received acceptance to the University of Munich. Making a choice between Munich and Marlene never dawned on him. He wanted both, and without a second thought, he asked Marlene’s father for her hand in marriage. The proposal was accepted. Once blessed by her family, Hanz and Marlene were also blessed by their community, all of whom were eager to participate in a traditional Jewish wedding celebration.
The date for their wedding held special significance for Hanz. It was to be just after Passover. In ancient times, the Jewish calendar was based on the lunar phases of the moon. A full moon occurred in the midst of the 28-day monthly cycle. The Passover celebration begins on the evening of a full moon, the first full moon of spring. It had been the moon’s orbit around the earth that had sparked Hanz’s quest for knowledge of physics. He had learned since, that the moon is held in orbit by the gravity of the earth, while conversely the gravity of the moon prevents the earth from spinning at an accelerated rate that would create constant gale force winds on its surface….such a delicate balance.
According to Scripture, the Hebrew nation had been delivered from bondage in Egypt some 3,500 years earlier. This deliverance had been accomplished by the marking of each Hebrew home with the blood of a male lamb. The Biblical account promised that the judgment of God would pass over the homes of each Jewish family, thus protecting the firstborn in each household. But this would not be so for the firstborn of each Egyptian family. The firstborn would be killed by the terrible tenth plague. The anguish forced Pharaoh to release the Jews from their Egyptian masters. It was the blood of a lamb that delivered the Jews from slavery. Some 1,400 years later, the blood of the Lamb would serve as the basis for Christianity.
The moon held great significance for Hanz…..the gravitational balance and order of the solar system, and his marriage to Marlene.
While having breakfast in the Kranzler Café that Sunday morning, Marlene and Anna ate and watched, their eyes constantly turning to the window and the crowds multiplying in the streets. They were witnessing the transition of German nationalism to a cultural rebirth. The sense of national purpose seemed to pull everyone together in a unity that would otherwise have been impossible with so many diverse political factions.
Hans was a patriotic man but not politically active. Germany had always been a splintered society. There was a working class and a middle class. There were socialists and conservatives, Protestants, Catholics and Jews. In the days that followed this quiet Sunday morning, the August days of this political transformation, a national unification process was begun. It was a process that would ultimately plunge the nation into war.
His patriotism was tempered with the reality of the true nature of war. He would not be taken into the military, and for this, Marlene was grateful. As an intellectual, he was aware of the existence of anti-Semitism. But from his own personal experience, he had not been confronted with it. The prejudice against his race and culture notwithstanding, Hanz could not have foreseen the diabolic events that would be triggered by these August days.
* * *
While political turmoil was growing daily, another significant event was occurring simultaneously in the scientific community. It began at the Solvay Physics Congress of 1911 in Brussels. Albert Einstein was in attendance, as was Max Plank and Walter Nernst, twin pillars of the German scientific community. Both men were deeply impressed with Einstein’s ability. Their task was the recruitment of staff for a new series of research institutes in Berlin to be known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Wissenschaften – the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science. These men made initial contact with Einstein about the KWI at the Congress in Brussels.
The Institutes were being constructed at Dahlem, near the end of the new underground from Berlin. The first buildings were to be for physics and electrochemistry, headed by Fritz Haber. The Physics Institute, along with the others, would benefit from the magnetic scientific atmosphere of the German capital. It was believed that there would be few if any obstacles in attracting Einstein. But one possible problem was the fact that he had renounced his German citizenship 15 years earlier and was now a Swiss citizen. This was high drama. The two giants of the German scientific community were now traveling to Zurich to tempt young Einstein back to the Fatherland. They spent a number of hours pleading their case, but at the time, Einstein was not willing to give them a decision.
The two men took an excursion by train to await his verdict. They knew it was not unusual for Einstein to tweak the nose of authority, and he liked games. Einstein had explained that they would know his decision when they saw him. He would be holding a white rose if his answer was no, a red one if his answer was yes. As Einstein approached the men on the train platform, he was carrying a red rose.
Plank and Nernst returned to Berlin to prepare their draft presentation to the Ministry of Education. They proposed that Einstein serve as the director of the Institute for Physics with a salary much in excess of his present one in Zurich. They also asked that he receive appointment as full professor at the University of Berlin, where he would be given free rein to devote as much or as little time as he wished to his lecture schedule, and as much time as he wished on his research.
The draft was approved by the academy and the proposal was submitted to the government on July 28, 1913. On November 20th, the Kaiser approved the appointment, which Einstein formally accepted on December 7th. His acceptance was significant in several ways. First, there was the matter of timing. Einstein was scheduled to formally take up his duties on April 1, 1914. This was a benchmark for anyone, and for Einstein, it was achieved before his 35th birthday. But he was a pacifist, and would not have made this move if Germany were already in the midst of armed conflict.
A second significant aspect was the fact that Einstein’s lecture schedule allowed him to devote his time to completing his Theory of General Relativity. And third, had he not immigrated back to Germany, he would not have been a target of the anti-Semites, and likely would not have moved to the U.S. in 1933. Einstein’s presence in the U.S. in 1939 enabled him to use his enormous intellect and influence to encourage the effort which led to the development of the A-bomb which ultimately forced the surrender of Japan in 1945.
Hanz Eichenwald and his colleagues were brilliant in their own right, but like other scientists of their time, they stood outside the depth of Einstein’s genius. But his genius was a gift few truly understood. After Einstein graduated from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he was refused jobs in academic institutions throughout Europe. Eventually, he found employment as a patent examiner in Bern, Switzerland. Working in obscurity, he devoted all his ‘off time’ to physics. In 1905, he published a number of papers that literally redefined reality. Collectively, these publications dealt with the nature of time, space, light, mass and energy.. In one of the publications, he proposed that light was actually composed of tiny particles called ‘photons,’ a concept known as photoelectric effect. For this, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize. This was the only paper he felt was truly revolutionary. But in fact, it was his observations about relativity, the measurement of phenomena relative to one another, which changed the world’s understanding of the universe.
Einstein was once asked by reporters to comment on the subject.
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute,” he quipped. “But when you sit on a hot stove for only a minute, you think its two hours. That’s relativity.”
Most of the men in the institute were engrossed in trying to understand Einstein’s reality. They knew that the speed of light had been established by Maxwell’s equations
as 186,000 miles per second. Einstein’s work proved that nothing could exceed the speed of light. Out of the same equations came the understanding that velocity and time have an inverse relationship. As speed increases, time slows down. Finally, for any particle traveling at the speed of light, there is no passage of time. This leads to the conclusion that the only thing in the created universe that does not age is light. Relativity also established that energy and mass are interchangeable. Mass can be converted to energy and energy to mass, but neither can be created or destroyed. In a short time Einstein’s conversion formula of E=mc2 (energy = mass x speed of light squared) became known worldwide.
When Einstein continued to expand his theories of relativity, he was forced to deal with the universal laws of gravity as demonstrated by Newton. He eventually came to understand that gravity and time are also related. As the force of gravity increases, time slows. So a watch will run faster on the top of Mt. Everest than at sea level. His ideas became more and more complex, and his colleagues at the Institute continued to marvel.
Nothing in Einstein’s early history suggested dormant genius. In fact, he was slower than his peers in learning to speak, and he was socially withdrawn. His teachers and even his parents considered him a poor student and slow learner. When Einstein’s father inquired as to what profession his son should adopt, he was told it didn’t matter. Einstein, in the opinions of his teachers, would never succeed at anything.
His parents were Jewish but they were not religious. Since they didn’t practice Judaism, sending their son to school was a simple matter of enrolling him in the school closest to their home, which happened to be a Catholic school. His home life was a happy one, and he recalled being confronted with the fact that he was Jewish only as an adult.