Einstein's Genius Club (8 page)

“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.

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 extraordinary 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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….”
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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.”

After the war, Zionism must have seemed a logical alternative to assimilation: “Judaism owes a great debt of gratitude to Zionism,” he later said. “The Zionist movement has revived among Jews the sense of community.”
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He began to realize the utility of his fame as a scientist and as a Jew. Towards the end of the war, poor Jews fled Eastern Europe and poured into Berlin, crowding into an impoverished shantytown. To the dismay of assimilated, middle-class Jews, Einstein welcomed the refugees, but also urged them to
look towards Palestine as the natural homeland of “free sons of the Jewish people.” He further riled assimilated Berlin Jews in 1920, when he castigated the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith for the underlying message of its name, so suggestive of a “servile attitude” and so resistant to ethnic identity. “Not until we have the courage to see ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we acquire the respect of others.”
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In 1920, Chaim Weizmann, the driving force behind the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and its guarantee of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, became president of the World Zionist Organization. The following year, he set off on a trip to the United States to raise funds for a Hebrew University in Palestine. Einstein agreed to come along. “Naturally, I am needed not for my abilities but solely for my name, from whose publicity value a substantial effect is expected among the rich tribal companions in Dollaria.”
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For all his arch deprecation, he was proud to lend his name to the cause. Howls of outrage were hurled at him for taking such a public stand in favor of Zionism, and especially for setting foot on the soil of Germany's enemies (he stopped in England on the way home from the United States). Before setting out, Einstein heard from his colleague Fritz Haber: “If at this moment you demonstratively fraternize with the British and their friends, people in this country will see this as evidence of the disloyalty of the Jews.”
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Still, Einstein made the trip. He was greeted in the United States with such enthusiasm as would gratify a movie star. This was Einstein's first visit to the country, an exhausting, sometimes preposterous experience. The endless interviewing, hand-shaking, and touring, the crowds gaping to catch sight of him, reporters asking inane or sensationalizing questions, and he answering with “cheap jokes” taken seriously—Einstein said he felt like a “prize ox” being exhibited. In a spare moment, he made his first trip to Princeton as well, receiving an honorary degree from Princeton University and giving four lectures there on relativity (published as
The Meaning of Relativity
).

Meanwhile, he dutifully worked for the Weimar Republic. He served on a committee to evaluate German war atrocities; he joined the League of Nations' Commission on Intellectual Cooperation. He traveled widely, representing (despite his Swiss citizenship) German science and the democratic German government, in sometimes controversial efforts to overcome the animosities of the war. In the spring of 1922, the Collège de France asked him to lecture in Paris. After some hesitation, he accepted. He was the first German scientist to be invited, though many French scholars disapproved, and Einstein's German colleagues were equally unhappy.
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Increasingly certain of his commitment to internationalism, Einstein turned his fame into a pan-national passport.

Then politics turned dangerous. His friend Walther Rathenau, a Jewish industrialist with philosophic inclinations who became foreign minister in early 1922, was assassinated in June. Political murders in postwar Germany were common. One estimate reported that in 1922, left-wing death squads were responsible for twenty-two such killings; right-wing death squads were responsible for more than three hundred.
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As a Jew, a liberal, and an internationalist, Rathenau was anathema to the conservatives, diehard militarists, anti-Semites, and nascent Nazis making up the political right.

Einstein knew that he was in danger. His defiant Jewishness, his antiwar activities, his “Red” sympathies during the German revolution in 1918, and especially his world fame—everything pointed to his becoming a target of the right. He canceled his lectures and political work, and even considered resigning from the Prussian Academy for the first time since 1920, when an antirelativity rally left him wondering whether to leave Germany altogether.
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It was time for him to lower his too-familiar profile. He and Elsa sailed to Japan, where he had been invited to give lectures. Oddly enough, Bertrand Russell had made this trip possible, perhaps unwittingly. During his own trip to Japan in 1921, Russell had
been asked by a publisher to name the most “significant” people alive. His answer: Lenin and Einstein. The Japanese publisher decided on Einstein (Lenin having his hands full with the Russian Revolution). Not only did the lecture series allow Einstein to absent himself from the dangers of Berlin; it also contributed handily—a whopping £2,000 in British currency—to his constantly depleted bank account. He spent six weeks in Japan, lecturing to crowded rooms while his words were painstakingly translated into Japanese.

As he sailed back, en route to a planned stop in Palestine, he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Despite the news, Einstein continued his trip to Jerusalem. He was the honored guest of the British High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a fellow Jew.
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The Nobel Prize had long been a certainty, with only one question in the air: Why had it taken so long? The quandary faced by the Nobel committee had much to do with Einstein's eminent qualifications for the award. He had been repeatedly nominated for his major works: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and relativity. The latter, perhaps the most logical choice for the award, evidently ran up against a seeming technicality: The Nobel Prize is awarded for a discovery, not a theory. More to the point, despite definitive proof by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, relativity stirred controversy. In Germany, promulgators of the nascent “German Physics” (including the rabidly anti-Semitic Paul Weyland and Ernst Gehrcke) denounced the theory. In Sweden, the committee members had difficulty understanding it. In the end, it was decided to give the award to Einstein not for relativity, but for his discovery of the photoelectric effect. Thus, the paper he called “revolutionary,” the first published paper of his “miracle year,” was the feat for which Einstein won his Nobel.

By the terms of their divorce agreement, the prize money went to Mileva. (She continued to care for their two sons, and especially for Eduard, whose mental health was increasingly fragile.)
Ironically, the awarding of the prize led to a small international quarrel. Germany wanted to claim this latest laureate as its own, insisting that members of the Prussian Academy were automatically German citizens—thus, Einstein was deemed to be German, despite his Swiss citizenship. Einstein objected vehemently. Since protocol required that the winner's national representatives take part in festivities, the quarrel was more than academic. Who would deliver the medal to Einstein? Finessing the problem, Nobel Foundation officials dispatched a Swedish minister to Einstein's apartment, where he handed over the honorific medal and scroll.

Though adamant about his Swiss citizenship, Einstein had always claimed to be a man without a homeland—a member not of a nation, but of the international community. But during the 1920s, he began to identify strongly with Zionism and Jewish causes. It was the closest he ever came to nationalism. Though passionate in his feelings, Einstein never hesitated to criticize the nascent Jewish state. Hebrew University in Jerusalem enjoyed his early support, but by 1928, despairing of its quality, he resigned from its board.
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He repeatedly encouraged “peaceful cooperation” with Arabs, blaming British policy for the deepening and dangerous animosity. Yet his love for Israel and his identification with Jewish causes never wavered. His feelings were enthusiastically returned: From his sudden fame in 1919 to his death, Einstein was seen by most of the world's Jews as their greatest living figure. When Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, David Ben-Gurion, then prime minister of Israel, decided to offer the presidency to Einstein:

There is only one man whom we should ask to become President of the State of Israel. He is the greatest Jew on earth. Maybe the greatest human being on earth.
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Quite sensibly, Einstein refused. Still, he was deeply moved by the offer from “our state Israel”:

All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions…. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people had become my strongest human bond, ever since I became aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.
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It now requires an effort of historical imagination to recall how much dignity Einstein lent to Jews. Supreme in science, manifestly decent, he was a living refutation of racial and religious slurs. That such a great mind saw himself as a Jew like all the rest; that he said so at a time when millions of poor Jews still lived in Eastern Europe or congregated as immigrants in the slums of New York or Berlin, often resented by their more fortunate brethren; that he spoke out tirelessly to defend them or attack their enemies—these efforts made him not only admired but beloved by his fellow Jews. When Hitler took power in 1933, Einstein's immediate denunciation of the Nazi regime carried powerful weight around the world. His early support of Zionism was of incalculable value, and Weizmann knew it, though he was often annoyed by Einstein's naïveté or obstinacy. In 1918, when Einstein became a Zionist, that cause was largely ignored or unpopular among the mass of Jews; a few thousand emigrated to Palestine, many millions to America and other Western countries. He was the “Jewish saint,” Einstein said ironically, but he never shirked the responsibilities involved. Russell was born into the ruling class of the most powerful empire on earth—Einstein the Zionist was an early patriot of a nation that did not even exist until 1948.