Einstein's Genius Club

by Feldman, Burton, Williams, Katherine

  For six long years, Einstein toiled at the Patent Office by day and revolutionized physics by night. He clarified his “relativity principle” and extended his work on Brownian motion, publishing paper after paper. Yet when he applied to the University of Bern, he was rebuffed—he had not submitted a proper thesis. Finally, having resisted the demeaning requirement (he had sent a collection of papers, to no avail), he buckled down and cranked out the requisite work. He was hired immediately, and in the spring of 1908 he began to teach. A full-time appointment at the University of Zurich followed in 1909. By this time, his fame had spread. He began to lecture widely and was invited to speak at the first Solvay Conference in Brussels. In 1911, he accepted an appointment at the University of Prague. He and Mileva now had two sons, Albert and Eduard. The move to Prague was financially rewarding. The family could now afford a maid. But Mileva was increasingly isolated and depressed. Einstein's science came first, and now his science had catapulted him into the world's eye. In 1913, Einstein was offered a prestigious position, requiring no teaching, as a member of the Prussian Academy in Berlin. It was an offer he could not refuse. To Mileva's dismay, the family moved again.

  Once they arrived in Berlin, Einstein wished only to work. Mileva protested, but to no avail. Indeed, he had fallen out of love with her years before. Einstein later said that “she was cool and suspicious toward anyone who, in some way or other, came close to me.”13 In 1903, he had faced down his family's angry disapproval of his marriage to Mileva by being “stubborn as a mule.”14 Now, just as stubbornly, he meant to be free.

  In truth, Einstein had motives beyond his career when he accepted the Berlin position. On a visit to Berlin in 1912, he had met his cousin Elsa for the first time since childhood, and their acquaintance intensified during a visit the following year. Elsa, who would become his second wife, took to the task of protecting Einstein and, with some limited success, grooming him. The move to Berlin, so distasteful for Mileva, made Einstein's new life with Elsa possible.

  Mileva had barely settled into a Berlin apartment with the children when Einstein sent her a “memorandum” setting harsh conditions: She must not expect him to see her while at home, nor expect affection of any kind; she could speak to him only when he asked and must answer at once when spoken to. To add to Mileva's misery, Berlin was now the home of Einstein's mother, Pauline. Even Einstein sympathized with Mileva's fears of Pauline: “She feels persecuted,” he wrote to Elsa. “Well, there's some truth in it.”15 Not surprisingly, Mileva very soon returned to Zurich. Michele Besso and other friends tried to calm the waters, but to no avail. Then began long negotiations for a divorce.

  Einstein always possessed a sharply realistic sense of what was necessary. Thus, even during World War I, when all around him were diverted by the tragedy of war and when his family life was disintegrating, he was still able to concentrate. After eight years of work on the general theory of relativity, he made one last great dash in the second half of 1915. Without question, he juggled the distractions by compartmentalizing himself. He brought his full attention to his work, while somehow coping with (or evading) his tumultuous life. He waged battles on different fronts, each of which clamored for his presence. But he remained inwardly centered.

  His ability to focus, to the exclusion of all distractions, was legendary. In 1911, when Einstein was in Prague, he spent evenings at the salon of Bertha Fanta along with a group of young Jews interested in philosophy and literature. There he met the young Franz Kafka and Kafka's close friend Max Brod, also a novelist. (Brod later secured his place in literary history by refusing Kafka's dying request to destroy the latter's unpublished manuscripts, among them The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.) Brod was then at work on a novel about the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, later published as Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott (The Redemption of Tycho Brahe). It was an allegory of scientific genius, based loosely on historical fact. Brahe's careful measurements of planetary movement in the two decades before 1600 made it possible for his assistant Johannes Kepler to find the true laws of planetary motion by 1610—measurements Newton later used in his epochal theory of gravitation. Kepler dared to assert that planets move around the sun in ellipses.

  Brod took Einstein as his model for Kepler. In the novel, Kepler's genius relies on his gift of “retaining the essential and rejecting everything else or perfecting it.”

  His patience never failed; he held all in readiness for the one mysterious moment, in which from near and far his “laws” should rise up before his eyes. Until then… he accepted everything as purely provisional…. He had given his allegiance to no theory, trembled for nothing, and longed for nothing; he readily rejected his own earlier convictions, for any new discovery might overturn all previous result.16

  Certainly Brod studied Einstein closely during those Prague evenings. In Einstein he must have seen the “certain rigor and ruthlessness” he ascribed to Kepler.17 When the novel was published in 1915, Einstein read it “with great interest,” though with no certain memory of Brod himself. Others noticed the likeness: The German chemist Walther Nernst told Einstein: “This Kepler… that's you.”18

  In counterbalance to Einstein's “rigor and ruthlessness” was his sense of humor. Sometimes it came across as kindly, as when he wrote a child: “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.”19 But his humor was often darker, more biting. To the World Disarmament Conference of 1932, he offered this caustic message: “As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a 3-year-old child.”20 Yet he remained cheerful. In 1915, he met the French pacifist and writer Romain Rolland in the safety of neutral Switzerland. The Kaiser was ruled by industrialists and mad generals, Einstein reported, and everyone in Germany looked forward to victory. Still, Einstein seemed “vivacious and serene” to Rolland:

  [H]e cannot help giving his most serious thoughts a jocular form…. Einstein is incredibly free in his judgments on Germany…. No German enjoys that freedom. Anyone else but he would have suffered from a sense of isolation in his thinking during this frightful year. Not he. He laughs….21

  In the face of isolation and hopelessness, Einstein mustered not only humor but fortitude, just as he would later through his long, lonely quest for a unified theory. Indeed, isolation seemed to suit him, on many levels. Most exiles regret having to leave their homeland. But Einstein considered his stateless state a blessing rather than a curse. When he became world famous, various nations tried to claim his allegiance. In 1919, he observed, wryly, in the London Times:

  By an application of the theory of relativity to the tastes of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!22

  “LIKE A DROP OF OIL ON WATER”

  Einstein moved to Berlin just six months before the outbreak of World War I. Max Planck, whom Einstein revered, and Walther Nernst had come to Zurich in the summer of 1913 to discuss terms—or, as Einstein put it, they came looking for a “prize laying hen.”23 For a young man of thirty-four, the offer was generous: a triple appointment to the Prussian Academy of Science, the University of Berlin, and, as director, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society was founded in 1911 with the goal of developing German science. Its research institutes in chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine were financed partly by the government, partly by wealthy businessmen. Inevitably, science became handmaiden to industrial and military aims, even before the Nazi takeover. Funding was plentiful and expectations ran high. By the time Einstein accepted his appointment, Berlin was arguably the center of the scientific world, though no match for the glamor and culture of Paris, Vienna, or London.24 The Prussian Academy, by contrast, hearkens back to 1700, when Gottleib Liebni
tz became its first president under Frederick, King of Prussia. Only two positions were fully salaried, and Einstein was offered one of them. Despite his childhood memories of rigid, militaristic German schools, he accepted. As his first public duty, he delivered an inaugural address on “Leibniz Day,” July 2, 1914. One month later, war was declared.

  Einstein was unusual in his revulsion toward the war. Even the respected and sober Max Planck took up the cause, encouraging students to enlist (the nearsighted Planck was exempt). As a Swiss citizen, Einstein was tacitly excused from rabble-rousing German nationalism. Nor did his reputation suffer particularly when he signed on to a petition by Georg Friedrich Nicolai, a renowned physician, protesting the war. Nicolai's reputation was ruined; Einstein was deemed eccentric. Having returned to Berlin as an outsider, he remained so politically. His professional and collegial relationships did not suffer. He was on friendly terms with the warmongers who surrounded him. He would not let the war and politics distract him.

  In fact, he had no preparation for political activism. His adult life had been spent almost entirely on the sidelines in neutral Switzerland. His political education, such as it was, had consisted of listening to his socialist friends in heated conversation in Prague cafés. He was casually sympathetic. Nor had he been he an avowed pacifist before the war, though his contempt for German authoritarianism and exaltation of martial glory ran deep. He did not even like to play chess: too much naked competitiveness.25

  To his surprise, his Berlin colleagues had suddenly transformed into superpatriots. Nor were they content to sit on the sidelines. On October 4, what became known as the “paper war” (Krieg der Geister) was launched with the infamous “Appeal to the Cultured World,” drafted in October 1914 by the writer Ludwig Fulda.26 The appeal was signed by ninety-three of Germany's most prominent scholars and artists; fifteen were scientists, including Planck, Fritz Haber, and Emil Fischer. The appeal condemned “enemies trying to befoul Germany's pure cause” in a struggle “forced” on it. It denied that Germany's invasion of Belgium was illegal and insisted that no violence had been visited on Belgian citizens. In a dramatic flourish worthy of Fulda's profession, it invoked the “legacy of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant.”27

  As a Swiss national, Einstein was not asked to sign. But a growing sense of dismay led him to action. A few days later, he signed Nicolai's countermanifesto, “An Appeal to Europeans.” Its premise was the international and transnational nature of science. It urged an end to the war without assigning blame. Nothing came of their international appeal. Only Einstein, Nicolai, an astronomer, Wilhelm Forster, and a Dr. Otto Beck could be persuaded to sign. Rather than publish immediately, Nicolai incorporated it into a study of war, which he published in Zurich in 1916.

  In late 1914, Einstein joined the New Fatherland League (Bund Neues Vaterland), a liberal group trying to bridge war differences in Europe. They had connections in the German foreign office, but trouble arose when a statement of their peace views—signed among others by Einstein—was published in foreign newspapers in 1915. That same year, the League started distributing illegal writings by English pacifists—Bertrand Russell among them—and smuggling letters to pacifists in jail. The government finally shut down the League's offices, interrogated its officials, sent two female secretaries to jail, and forbade all other members to communicate with each other.28

  In October 1915, the Berlin Goethe Society asked Einstein to write something for a “patriotic commemorative album.” He submitted a three-page essay, “My Opinion of the War.” The original essay spoke of the “sad circumstances of the present” and his hope that a European federation would rule out future wars. But it also denounced patriotism as a shrine to “bestial hatred and mass murder” and mockingly described a citizen's “affliction with a state to be a business affair, somewhat akin to one's relationship to life insurance.”29 The editors refused to print remarks so openly offensive to the Fatherland, and several paragraphs were excised. It says much about muzzled speech in Germany that Einstein's short essay was heavily censored by an organization bearing the name of Goethe.

  Einstein was probably on the government's watch list of pacifists from the start of the war.30 In 1915, he was elected to the council of the Central Organization for a Durable Peace and attended its closed-door session, the scholarly purpose of which was to make recommendations to diplomats about postwar matters.31

  The organization was hardly inflammatory or dangerous. Still, the German police investigated with pedantic thoroughness. Their reports included the name of the Berlin newspaper he subscribed to and a complaint that he had not always filled out the proper forms required to travel around Germany.32

  Even though he was a Swiss citizen and a neutral, Einstein's antiwar stand might have led to his expulsion from Germany and from membership in the Prussian Academy. Dr. Nicolai, who drafted and signed the “Appeal to Europeans,” was a German citizen, a professor at the University of Berlin, and on active duty as an office physician with the Army. But his outspoken pacifism played havoc with his life. He was “degraded to private and made a hospital orderly.”33 Einstein was far more prominent, yet he was never rebuked or even warned. The German authorities must have considered him annoying but relatively harmless.

  Yet for a pacifist, Einstein's record was decidedly wayward. His criticism of Germany was most strident during the first year of the war. From mid-1915 to the Armistice, he said little publicly. His salary was partly paid by the industrialist Leopold Koppel; the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which he nominally directed, did military research. Einstein did not protest. (In England, Russell solved a similar problem of conscience by giving away his stock in a munitions firm to a financially strapped and decidedly not pacifist

  T. S. Eliot.) Einstein remained friendly with colleagues like Fritz Haber, who introduced poison gas into the war, and with the industrialist Walther Rathenau. Nor did Einstein refuse to serve in May 1916, when he was elected president of the German Physical Society, a loudly patriotic group.34

  Surprisingly, Einstein even helped the German war effort by improving wing design for aircraft and gyrocompasses for U-boats. Of course, Germany in the First World War was not Nazi Germany; the Kaiser was a moral universe away from Hitler. Einstein, sooner than Russell, had also come to see the peace cause as a futile gesture against the prevailing “herd” mentality. The martial delusions of his fellow professors—bloodthirsty about the war but tender altruists at home—left him in mixed despair and amusement. As for the war itself, Einstein thought Germany and England both wrong, infected by an epidemic of lunacy.

  Einstein was inconsistent, but neither obtuse nor hypocritical. He did not delude himself. In 1916, he confessed to a friend:

  Admittedly, things are fine for me here and I float on the very “top,” but on my own and rather like a drop of oil on water, isolated by my attitude and concept of life.35

  “On my own” and “isolated”: What mattered to him was his work in physics. The rest—family, friends, love, worthy causes—could be attended to only if there were time and energy. He was, after all, a young man in the grip of a discovery as great as any in scientific history. In November 1915, after more than eight years of torturous work, he was able to present to the Prussian Academy the definitive general theory of relativity.

  ON THE PRECIPICE: BETWEEN THE WARS

  By late 1918, with the war in its final throes, German sailors mutinied, refusing to fight and seizing ships from their officers. Revolution spread through port cities inland, eventually reaching Berlin. Soldiers and laborers rioted in the streets. A general strike was called. On November, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann declared Germany a republic. Within hours, the Kaiser abdicated. Einstein, recovering from a debilitating ulcer, was elated by the prospect of a socialist and democratic government. Though he did not know it then, the most politically active part of his life had just begun.

  Ironically, his entrance into the political fray followed on the heels of an extraordi
nary scientific event. On November 6, 1919, the Royal Astronomical Society in London reported that Einstein's prediction of light “bending” as it passed the sun had been proven. Arthur Stanley Eddington's photographs of an eclipse, taken in Sobral, Brazil, confirmed Einstein's calculations. The theory of general relativity was heralded around the world. On November 7, headlines touted the new sage: “Revolution In Science. New Theory of Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.”36 Einstein was thrust into the public spotlight and into a career forever dictated by notoriety.

  The political value of his fame was obvious. The new German republic welcomed the left-liberal Einstein as a spokesman on its behalf. German scientists were typically conservative, yet the most illustrious scientist of all was ready to defend the shaky republic at home and abroad. He became the spokesman not only of the fledgling Weimar Republic, but of a passionate vision of internationalism.37 In the first months after the Armistice, he was optimistic about both. In a 1919 letter to Max Born's wife, Hedwig, he wrote: “I believe in the growth potential of the League of Nations…. I don't believe that human beings as such can really change, but I am convinced that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to put an end to anarchy in international relations, even if it were to mean sacrificing the independence of various countries.”38

  One other cause beckoned him: Zionism. Ironically, given his abhorrence of nationalism, Einstein embraced Zionism passionately, though not without reservation. Zionism soon mattered more to him than anything outside of science. It was a surprising turn of mind. Until he moved to Berlin in 1914, he had little interest in being Jewish. The Jews he met in Prague in 1911—Brod, Kafka, Hugo Bergmann—were committed Zionists, but they seem to have made little impression on him, at least in the short run: “I read the book [Brod's The Redemption of Tycho Brahe] with great interest,” he wrote to Hedwig Born in 1916. “Incidentally, I believe that I met him [Brod] in Prague. I think he belongs to a small circle there of philosophical and Zionist enthusiasts, which was loosely grouped around the university philosophers, a medieval-like band of unworldly people….”39 Einstein's Jewish colleagues in Berlin were another matter: Many had converted to Christianity to become as German as possible, often with an eye to career advancement. The proudly independent Einstein called this servile “mimicry.”