Divine Fury (50 page)

There were numerous exceptions that might complicate this perception, Newton most notably, though it is revealing that Newton was regularly praised in language that related his genius to that of men of letters or the arts. Newton was not simply a natural philosopher, he was an original genius, later a man inspired, who glimpsed the workings of the universe in the falling of an apple and who could read the mind of God. In the nineteenth century, the English chemist Humphry Davy sought self-consciously to present himself as a Romantic genius (with some success), and there were more than a few mathematicians who did the same.
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Still, when “scientists” called attention to the greatest of their own, they were generally more restrained. A “genius of observation” was the eighteenth century’s term of praise, used to describe not visionaries and seers of tomorrow, but men with “well-stocked memories” and piercing eyes who looked carefully at what was close at hand—men, such as Carl Linnaeus or Georges-Louis Leclerc, the count of Buffon, who were particularly adept at recognizing recondite details and discerning
patterns. In the nineteenth century, the presentation of the “scientific self” was similarly understated, conceived as the product of due diligence, patience, exacting method, and the sweat of one’s brow. Scientists, in short, were less inclined than their counterparts in other domains to imagine themselves as revolutionaries, prophets, or legislators of the world. Such self-appraisals ran in counterpoint to more extravagant popular imaginings—whether the fantasy of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein or the musings of a Jules Verne or an H. G. Wells. They also run in counterpoint to our conceptions today: Was there a more revolutionary figure in the nineteenth century than Darwin? Still, the fact remains that when the people of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imagined the pantheon of genius, they were usually inclined to give scientists a secondary place.
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Einstein changed that. More than any other figure, he is responsible for making science the default domain of genius. His timing, like Mozart’s (like that of all geniuses?), was perfect in this respect. Working at a period and in a place in which the power of science was increasingly apparent, he benefited from the enhanced visibility and prestige of both the applied and the natural sciences (
Naturwissenschaften
), which, in prewar Germany, especially, earned scientists such as Fritz Haber and Max Planck great wealth and acclaim. Such men rubbed elbows with aristocrats and the rich and famous in Wilhelmine Berlin, just as in the United States, a practical inventor, such as Thomas Edison, could schmooze with senators and captains of industry, earning accolades and front-page celebrity. Yet Einstein was more than a
Wissenschaftler
, an inventor, an entrepreneur—he was a genius, or so he became, according to the terms of the time.

A revolutionary, Einstein upended the rules of Newtonian physics and rewrote its laws. A visionary, he saw into the most remote workings of the universe, bending time itself. A wondrous being, he made the world wondrous, mysterious, even as he revealed. And although his labors were painstaking in their rigor, his approach to problem-solving was mystical, intuitive, inspirational. Like Planck, who was keenly aware of what he described as the “divine mysteries” of the creative process and of the close relationship between science and art, Einstein made plain that science could be as imaginative as any painting or poem, a disclosure that was further reaffirmed by the seeming consonance between his own theories and contemporary metaphysics and art. So all-encompassing were Einstein’s revelations that they seemed to his contemporaries to capture perfectly the spirit of the age. The theory of relativity described the perspectivism of Nietzsche’s philosophy or the fractured space of
Cubist painting. Einstein’s understanding of time confirmed the subjective chronology of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, or Marcel Proust. Like Newton, he struck his contemporaries not only as a scientist, but as a man in possession of something more, and that
divinum quiddam
was central to his appeal. Einstein was never a conventionally religious man. But he had a deep religious streak. Here was an individual whose soul was spiritual and profound, who could stand between mortal men and the infinity of space. He even looked the part. Rumpled and unkempt, Einstein was an eccentric, an original, an embodiment of genius.
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He was also a Jew, a fact that ensured a clash with a regime that conceived of Jews as the anti-creative people par excellence, though the conflict was more personal than that. Einstein, from very early on, had been clear-eyed and outspoken about the looming Nazi threat and the danger of the “cold, barbaric, animalistic resoluteness” of Hitler. He used his genius to denounce the regime, giving targeted vent to a general feeling he had evinced since youth. “The foolish faith in authority,” he observed when still in his twenties, was “the worst enemy of truth,” and Hitler and the Nazis were truth’s antithesis. Right-wing extremists responded in kind throughout the 1920s, denouncing relativity as a “Jewish fraud” and attacking Einstein himself as a pacifist, a communist, and an enemy of the German people. So virulent were these attacks that Einstein feared assassination, and with good reason, though he rarely held his tongue. He continued to warn of the dangers of German nationalism while preaching pacifism, internationalism, and Zionism in turn. Hitler, for his part, told a journalist as early as 1931 that Einstein would have to go. “Everything [Jewish scientists] have created they have stolen from us,” he observed. “We do not need them.”
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When Hitler came to power, then, the groundwork for a dramatic clash had already been laid. Einstein was abroad at the time, and he condemned the Nazis immediately from California. But he waited until he set foot again on European soil to formally withdraw his membership from the Prussian Academy of Science, sending a letter to that effect as he disembarked in Ostende, Belgium, on March 28, 1933. The Nazis blasted him in return, with Goebbels, among others, personally denouncing his “agitation.” Confiscating his property, they burned his books and revoked his citizenship, and later placed a bounty on his head. In the press and in official pamphlets and propaganda, Einstein was repeatedly vilified as a “Jewish criminal.” “I am now,” he was able to boast, “one of the people they [the Nazis] most love to hate.”
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Was the reason for this hatred the fact, as one historian judges, that Einstein was among “Hitler’s greatest antagonists”? Undoubtedly,
Einstein was untiring in his opposition to Hitler, but it was less his actions that generated the animus than who he was: a Jew, yes, but also a widely regarded “genius,” and as such a man who exposed through his very being the fraudulence of the Hitler myth, predicated as it was on the essential and exclusive nature of Aryan creativity. In that sense, Einstein was indeed a major antagonist, for he represented a rival myth of genius that challenged Hitler’s own. Whereas Hitler put his genius at the service of a narrow nationalism and xenophobic hatred, Einstein harnessed his to the vastness of the cosmos and the fellowship of all. Hitler was a maker of empires, Einstein a “maker of universes” without blood on his hands. Hitler was a genius of the
Volk
; Einstein a genius for humanity. The two were mutually exclusive. But they were products, in part, of the same nexus of forces. Mass media, the culture of celebrity, and the religion of genius that flourished between the wars gave rise to the genius of each, and they faced each other on far-flung and at times unlikely terrain. A 1939 survey at Princeton University asked incoming freshman to list the greatest living people. Adolf Hitler ranked first, and Einstein, who had been resident there since 1935, second. The majority of Princetonians came to see things differently, as would, in time, the majority of the citizens of the world. Perhaps, as Einstein himself is said to have remarked, “the world needs heroes, and it is better that they be harmless men like me than villains like Hitler.”
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That may well be true, but it was not at all apparent to many in 1946 that Einstein was in fact a harmless man. Former Nazis, readers of
Time
magazine, and agents of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation might well have disagreed. A man who could discern the secrets of the universe was at once an asset and a risk. Would he sell those secrets to the Soviets? Could he devise something even more horrible than the bomb? Enough of the
genius
lurked in the genius to make of even this pacifist soul a threat.
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Einstein prevailed over such doubts. But his victory had less to do with his own actions and beliefs than with those of countless other men and women, whose names are now forgotten. The same is true of the war, where Einstein’s achievements, however noble, highlight, if anything, the impotence of the individual before ideologically driven masses and the organized violence of states. Though Einstein certainly played a small role in urging the Roosevelt administration to pursue a policy of atomic weapons research—famously signing a letter to that effect penned by the Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Leo Szilard in 1939—he took no part in the bomb’s construction, and his science was of little value to its development. Einstein was not, it is clear, “the father of
the bomb,” any more than it was he who defeated Hitler or terminated the war. What he did help to end, and what would settle in time from the fallout of the destruction, was the idolatry of genius itself. Einstein, in this respect, was an iconoclast, not a cosmoclast—a genius who contributed to dismantling a faith in which he himself could be imagined as both savior and destroyer.

CONCLUSION

The Genius of the People

B
Y THE TIME
T
HOMAS
H
ARVEY
was finished, there were close to 240 pieces of Einstein’s brain, carefully sliced, labeled, and preserved. Harvey was the medical examiner of Princeton Hospital, and he had been asked to perform a routine autopsy. But the corpse that lay before him on the 18th of April, 1955, was hardly routine. Once before, he had encountered Albert Einstein in the flesh. Performing a house call, Harvey had gathered a specimen of the great man’s urine, and it induced a special thrill. But this was an opportunity even more thrilling. Unaware of the clause in Einstein’s will stipulating that his body be cremated on the day of his death, and his ashes scattered in a secret location, Harvey removed the brain and spirited it away. The ophthalmologist Henry Abrams, Einstein’s friend, took the eyeballs, which are locked in a safe deposit box to this day. But Harvey kept the best bits for himself.
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Men of more delicate conscience might have paused at the thought of sawing into a Jewish skull in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, when the world first learned of the sinister “experiments” of Joseph Mengele and the Nazi effort to demonstrate the physical inferiority of the Jewish brain. Yet Harvey’s intentions were avowedly more pure. As a medical student, studying pathology, he had been intrigued by the work of Paul Broca, and would later claim that his decision to take Einstein’s prized possession was inspired by the example of Oskar Vogt and his quest to solve the mystery of genius through an analysis of the brain of Lenin. Had not Einstein himself allowed his head to be wired to electrodes at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1951, while the needle of an electroencephalogram (EEG) rode the waves of his mind? Surely scientists in the West could not pass on the prospect of studying the brain of the greatest genius the world had known.

Others agreed. When Lieutenant Colonel Webb Haymaker of the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology learned of the bountiful harvest, he summoned Harvey to Washington, in full cognizance of the fact that the Soviets were busy studying their own elite brains. Haymaker himself had worked on the brain of Benito Mussolini after US soldiers had recovered the dictator’s battered corpse in 1945. He had hoped to find a sign—of genius, madness, or degenerative disease—that would explain Mussolini’s power. He held out similar hope that the study of the brain of Einstein would reveal, as he told the press, “a general pattern for the brain of a genius.” But despite Haymaker’s plea, he could not induce Harvey to surrender the relic in his keeping.
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The legal status of corpses is complicated, and like so many of the grave robbers who pilfered the skulls of geniuses in the nineteenth century, Harvey was never prosecuted for his theft. And even though he lacked the training and expertise to study the specimens on his own, he was never forced to hand them over. Princeton Hospital eventually dismissed him for his failure to exploit the scientific possibilities of the specimens, and, as Harvey’s life and career headed south, so did Einstein’s brain. Their subsequent peregrinations are a tale in themselves: driven across the country in the trunk of Harvey’s car, stored in a cardboard box behind a beer cooler in Kansas, stamped and posted via US Mail, Einstein’s brain got around. But Harvey had grown attached to his relics, and he found it difficult to give them up. Inquiring here, and soliciting there, he eventually provided four small samples to a group of neuroanatomists working in California. In a study published in 1985, they concluded that Einstein’s brain exhibited a higher-than-average concentration of “glial” cells that aid neurons in the processes of neurotransmission. A later study—published in 1999 in the British medical journal
Lancet
, but based on a different sample of fourteen pieces of the brain—noted irregularities in the Sylvian fissure and concluded that Einstein’s parietal lobe (associated with language, spatial understanding, and mathematics processing) was 15 percent wider than normal. These studies generated a great deal of publicity, although their scientific value is questionable. But today interested observers can scrutinize Einstein’s brain for themselves. Bequeathed to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, following Thomas Harvey’s death in 2007, Einstein’s brain has since been digitized and is now available as an iPad app in 350 microscopic slides. For a mere $9.99, genius may be downloaded to your touchscreen and venerated in your home.
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