Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

  Then he reached for his coat and hat. “Are you doing this to please yourselves,” he asked, “or are you acting on orders from above?” Without waiting for an answer, he left with Elsa in tow.

  Elsa let the papers know that Einstein had quit packing and had left Berlin for his cottage in Caputh. If he did not have a visa by noon the next day, he would cancel his trip to America. By late that night, the consulate issued a statement saying that it had reviewed the case and would issue a visa immediately.

  As the Times correctly reported, “He is not a Communist and has declined invitations to lecture in Russia because he did not want to give the impression that he was in sympathy with the Moscow regime.” What none of the papers reported, however, was that Einstein did agree to sign a declaration, requested by the consulate, that he was not a member of the Communist Party or any organization intent on overthrowing the U.S. government.18

  “Einstein Resumes Packing for America,” read the Times headline the next day. “From the deluge of cables reaching us last night,” Elsa told reporters,“we know Americans of all classes were deeply disturbed over the case.” Secretary of State Henry Stimson said that he regretted the incident, but he also noted that Einstein “was treated with every courtesy and consideration.” As they left Berlin by train for Bremer-haven to catch their ship, Einstein joked about the incident and said that all had turned out well in the end.19

  Pasadena, 1933

  When the Einsteins left Germany in December 1932, he still thought that he might be able to return, but he wasn’t sure. He wrote to his longtime friend Maurice Solovine, now publishing his works in Paris, to send copies “to me next April at my Caputh address.” Yet when they left Caputh, Einstein said to Elsa, as if with a premonition, “Take a very good look at it. You will never see it again.” With them on the steamer Oakland as it headed for California were thirty pieces of luggage, probably more than necessary for a three-month trip.20

  Thus it was awkward, and painfully ironic, that the one public duty Einstein was scheduled to perform in Pasadena was to give a speech to celebrate German-American friendship. To finance Einstein’s stay at Caltech, President Millikan had obtained a $7,000 grant from the Oberlaender Trust, a foundation that sought to promote cultural exchanges with Germany. The sole requirement was that Einstein would make “one broadcast which will be helpful to German-American relations.” Upon Einstein’s arrival, Millikan announced that Einstein was “coming to the United States on a mission of molding public opinion to better German-American relations,”21 a view that may have surprised Einstein, with his thirty pieces of luggage.

  Millikan usually preferred that his prize visitor avoid speaking on nonscientific matters. In fact, soon after Einstein arrived, Millikan forced him to cancel a speech he was scheduled to give to the UCLA chapter of the War Resisters’ League, in which he had planned to denounce compulsory military service again. “There is no power on earth from which we should be prepared to accept an order to kill,” he wrote in the draft of the speech he never gave.22

  But as long as Einstein was expressing pro-German rather than pacifist sentiments, Millikan was happy for him to talk about politics—especially as there was funding involved. Not only had Millikan been able to secure the $7,000 Oberlaender grant by scheduling the speech, which was to be broadcast on NBC radio, he also had invited big donors to a black-tie dinner preceding it at the Athenaeum.

  Einstein was such a draw that there was a wait list to buy tickets. Among those seated at Einstein’s table was Leon Watters, a wealthy pharmaceutical manufacturer from New York. Noticing that Einstein looked bored, he reached across the woman seated between them to offer him a cigarette, which Einstein consumed in three drags. The two men subsequently became close friends, and Einstein would later stay at Watters’s Fifth Avenue apartment when he visited New York from Princeton.

  When the dinner was over, Einstein and the other guests went to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, where several thousand people waited to hear his address. His text had been translated for him by a friend, and he delivered it in halting English.

  After making fun of the difficulties of sounding serious while wearing a tuxedo, he proceeded to attack people who used words “laden with emotion” to intimidate free expression. “Heretic,” as used during the Inquisition, was such a case, he said. Then he cited examples that had similar hateful connotations for people in a variety of countries: “the word Communist in America today, or the word bourgeoisie in Russia, or the word Jew for the reactionary group in Germany.” Not all of these examples seemed calculated to please Millikan or his anticommunist and pro-German funders.

  Nor was his critique of the current world crisis one that would appeal to ardent capitalists. The economic depression, especially in America, seemed to be caused, he said, mainly by technological advances that “decreased the need for human labor” and thereby caused a decline in consumer purchasing power.

  As for Germany, he made a couple of attempts to express sympathy and earn Millikan’s grant. America would be wise, he said, not to press too hard for continued payment of debts and reparations from the world war. In addition, he could see some justification in Germany’s demand for military equality.

  That did not mean, however, that Germany should be allowed to reintroduce mandatory military service, he hastened to add. “Universal military service means the training of youth in a warlike spirit,” he concluded.23 Millikan may have gotten his speech about Germany, but the price he paid was swallowing a few thoughts from the war resistance speech he had forced Einstein to cancel.

  A week later, all of these items—German-American friendship, debt payments, war resistance, even Einstein’s pacifism—were dealt a blow that would render them senseless for more than a decade. On January 30, 1933, while Einstein was safely in Pasadena, Adolf Hitler took power as the new chancellor of Germany.

  Einstein initially seemed unsure what this meant for him. During the first week of February, he was writing letters to Berlin about how to calculate his salary for his planned return in April. His sporadic entries in his trip journal that week recorded only serious scientific discussions, such as on cosmic ray experiments, and frivolous social encounters, such as: “Evening Chaplin. Played Mozart quartets there. Fat lady whose occupation consists of making friends with all celebrities.”24

  By the end of February, however, with the Reichstag in flames and brownshirts ransacking the homes of Jews, things had become clearer. “Because of Hitler, I don’t dare step on German soil,” Einstein wrote one of his women friends.25

  On March 10, the day before he left Pasadena, Einstein was strolling in the gardens of the Athenaeum. Evelyn Seeley of the New York World Telegram found him there in an expansive mood. They talked for forty-five minutes, and one of his declarations made headlines around the world. “As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail,” he said. “These conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time.”26

  Just as Seeley was leaving, Los Angeles was struck by a devastating earthquake—116 people were killed in the area—but Einstein barely seemed to notice. With the acquiescence of an indulgent editor, Seeley was able to end her article with a dramatic metaphor: “As he left for the seminar, walking across campus, Dr. Einstein felt the ground shaking under his feet.”

  In retrospect, Seeley would be saved from sounding too portentous by a drama that was occurring that very day back in Berlin, although neither she nor Einstein knew it. His apartment there, with Elsa’s daughter Margot cowering inside, was raided twice that afternoon by the Nazis. Her husband, Dimitri Marianoff, was out doing errands and was almost trapped by one of the roving mobs of thugs. He sent word for Margot to get Einstein’s papers to the French embassy and then meet him in Paris. She was able to do both. Ilse and her husband, Rudolph Kayser, successfully escaped to Holland. During the next two days, the Berlin apartment was ransacked thr
ee more times. Einstein would never see it again. But his papers were safe.27

  On his train ride east from Caltech, Einstein reached Chicago on his fifty-fourth birthday. There he attended a Youth Peace Council rally, where speakers pledged that the pacifist cause should continue despite the events in Germany. Some left with the impression that he was in full agreement. “Einstein will never abandon the peace movement,” one noted.

  They were wrong. Einstein had begun to mute his pacifist rhetoric. At a birthday luncheon that day in Chicago, he spoke vaguely about the need for international organizations to keep the peace, but he refrained from repeating his calls for war resistance. He was similarly cautious a few days later at a New York reception for an anthology featuring his pacifist writings, The Fight against War. He mainly talked about the distressing turn of events in Germany. The world should make its moral disapproval of the Nazis known, he said, but he added that the German population itself should not be demonized.

  It was unclear, even as he was about to sail, where he would now live. Paul Schwartz, the German consul in New York who had been Einstein’s friend in Berlin, met with him privately to make sure that he did not plan to go back to Germany. “They’ll drag you through the streets by the hair,” he warned.28

  His initial destination, where the ship would let him off, was Belgium, and he suggested to friends that he might go to Switzerland after that. When the Institute for Advanced Study opened the following year, he planned to spend four or five months there each year. Perhaps it would turn out to be even more. On the day before he sailed, he and Elsa slipped away to Princeton to look at houses they might buy.

  The only place in Germany that he wanted to see again, he told family members, was Caputh. But on the journey across the Atlantic, he received word that the Nazis had raided his cottage under the pretense of looking for a cache of communist weaponry (there was none). Later they came back and confiscated his beloved boat on the pretense it might be used for smuggling. “My summer house was often honored by the presence of many guests,” he said in a message from the ship. “They were always welcome. No one had any reason to break in.”29

  The Bonfires

  The news of the raid on his Caputh cottage determined Einstein’s relationship to his German homeland. He would never go back there.

  As soon as his ship docked in Antwerp on March 28, 1933, he had a car drive him to the German consulate in Brussels, where he turned in his passport and (as he had done once before when a teenager) declared that he was renouncing his German citizenship. He also mailed a letter, written during the crossing, in which he submitted his resignation to the Prussian Academy. “Dependence on the Prussian government,” he stated, “is something that, under the present circumstances, I feel to be intolerable.”30

  Max Planck, who had recruited him to the Academy nineteen years earlier, was relieved. “This idea of yours seems to be the only way that would ensure for you an honorable severance of your relations with the Academy,” Planck wrote back with an almost audible sigh. He added his gracious plea that “despite the deep gulf that divides our political opinions, our personal amicable relations will never undergo any change.”31

  What Planck was hoping to avoid, amid the flurry of anti-Semitic diatribes against Einstein in the Nazi press, were formal disciplinary hearings against Einstein, which some government ministers were demanding. That would cause Planck personal agony and the Academy historic embarrassment. “Starting formal exclusion procedures against Einstein would bring me into gravest conflicts of conscience,” he wrote an Academy secretary. “Even though on political matters a deep gulf divides me from him, I am, on the other hand, absolutely certain that in the history of centuries to come, Einstein’s name will be celebrated as one of the brightest stars that ever shone in the Academy.”32

  Alas, the Academy was not content to leave bad enough alone. The Nazis were furious that he had preempted them by renouncing, very publicly, with headlines in the papers, his citizenship and Academy membership before they could strip him of both. So a Nazi-sympathizing secretary of the Academy issued a statement on its behalf. Referring to the press reports of some of his comments in America, which in fact had been very cautious, it denounced Einstein’s “participation in atrocity-mongering” and his “activities as an agitator in foreign countries,” concluding, “It has, therefore, no reason to regret Einstein’s withdrawal.”33

  Max von Laue, a longtime colleague and friend, protested. At a meeting of the Academy later that week, he tried to get members to disavow the secretary’s action. But no other member would go along, not even Haber, the converted Jew who had been one of Einstein’s closest friends and supporters.

  Einstein was not willing to let such a slander pass. “I hereby declare that I have never taken any part in atrocity-mongering,” he responded. He had merely spoken the truth about the situation in Germany, without resorting to purveying tales of atrocities. “I described the present state of affairs in Germany as a state of psychic distemper in the masses,” he wrote.34

  By then there was no doubt this was true. Earlier in the week, the Nazis had called for a boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses and stationed storm troopers outside of their stores. Jewish teachers and students were barred from the university in Berlin and their academic identification cards were confiscated. And the Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, Einstein’s longtime antagonist, declared in a Nazi newspaper, “The most important example of the dangerous influence of Jewish circles on the study of nature has been provided by Herr Einstein.”35

  The exchanges between Einstein and the Academy descended into petulance. An official wrote Einstein that, even if he had not actively spread slanders, he had failed to join “the side of the defenders of our nation against the flood of lies that has been let loose upon it ...A good word from you in particular might have produced a great effect abroad.” Einstein thought that absurd. “By giving such testimony in the present circumstances I would have been contributing, if only indirectly, to moral corruption and the destruction of all existing cultural values,” he replied.36

  The entire dispute was becoming moot. Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate—Einstein, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, and others—helped to assure that the Allies rather than the Nazis first developed the atom bomb.

  Planck tried to temper the anti-Jewish policies, even to the extent of appealing to Hitler personally. “Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists,” Hitler thundered back. “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” After that, Planck quietly went along and cautioned other scientists that it was not their role to challenge the political leadership.

  Einstein could not bring himself to be angry at Planck, who was like an uncle as well as a patron. Even amid his angry exchanges with the Academy, he agreed to Planck’s request that they keep their personal respect intact. “In spite of everything, I am happy that you greet me in old friendship and that even the greatest stresses have failed to cloud our mutual relations,” he wrote, using the formal and respectful style he always used when writing to Planck. “These continue in their ancient beauty and purity, regardless of what, in a manner of speaking, is happening further below.”37

  Among those fleeing the Nazi purge was Max Born, who with his tart-tongued wife, Hedwig, ended up in England. “I have never had a particularly favorable opinion of the Germans,” Einstein wrote when he received the news. “But I must confess that the degree of the
ir brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise.”

  Born took it all rather well, and he developed, like Einstein, a deeper appreciation for his heritage. “As regards my wife and children, they have only become conscious of being Jews or ‘non-Aryans’ (to use the delightful technical term) during the last few months, and I myself have never felt particularly Jewish,” he wrote in his letter back to Einstein. “Now, of course, I am extremely conscious of it, not only because we are considered to be so, but because oppression and injustice provoke me to anger and resistance.”38

  Even more poignant was the case of Fritz Haber, friend to both Einstein and Mari, who thought that he had become German by converting to Christianity, affecting a Prussian air, and pioneering gas warfare for his Fatherland in the First World War. But with the new laws, even he was forced from his position at Berlin University and in the Academy, at age 64, just before he would have been eligible for a pension.

  As if to atone for forsaking his heritage, Haber threw himself into organizing Jews who suddenly needed to find jobs outside of Germany. Einstein could not resist gigging him, in the bantering manner they had often used in their letters, about the failure of his theory of assimilation. “I can understand your inner conflicts,” he wrote. “It is somewhat like having to give up a theory on which one has worked one’s whole life. It is not the same for me because I never believed it in the least.”39

  In the process of helping his newfound tribal companions to emigrate, Haber became friends with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. He even tried to mend a rift that had come between Weizmann and Einstein over Jewish treatment of the Arabs and the management of Hebrew University. “In my whole life I have never felt so Jewish as now!” he exulted, though that was not actually saying much.