Einstein (67 page)

But the mood was soon sullied by the continued collapse of the German mark, which made it harder for Einstein to support a family whose consumption was in Swiss currency. Before the war the mark had been worth 24 cents, but it had fallen to 2 cents by the beginning of 1920. At that time a mark could buy a loaf of bread. But then the bottom fell out of the currency. By the beginning of 1923, the price of a loaf went to 700 marks and by the end of that year cost 1 billion marks. Yes, 1 billion. In November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced, backed by the government property; 1 trillion old marks equaled 1 new Rentenmark.

The German people increasingly cast around for scapegoats. They blamed internationalists and pacifists who had forced a surrender in the war. They blamed the French and English for imposing what was in fact an onerous peace. And, no surprise, they blamed the Jews. So Germany in the 1920s was not a good place or time to be an internationalist, pacifist, intellectual Jew.

The milestone that marked the passage of German anti-Semitism from being a nasty undercurrent to a public danger was the assassination of Walther Rathenau. From a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin (his father founded AEG, an electricity firm that competed with that of Einstein’s father and then became a huge corporation), he served as a senior official in the war ministry, then reconstruction minister and finally foreign minister.

Einstein had read Rathenau’s politics book in 1917, and over dinner told him, “I saw with astonishment and joy how extensive a meeting of minds there is between our outlooks on life.” Rathenau returned the compliment by reading Einstein’s popular explanation of relativity. “I do not say it comes easily to me, but certainly relatively easily,” he joked. Then he peppered Einstein with some very insightful questions: “How does a gyroscope know that it is rotating? How does it distinguish the direction in space toward which it does not want to be tilted?”
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Although they became close friends, there was one issue that divided them. Rathenau opposed Zionism and thought, mistakenly, that Jews like himself could reduce anti-Semitism by thoroughly assimilating as good Germans.

In the hope that Rathenau could warm to the Zionist cause, Einstein introduced him to Weizmann and Blumenfeld. They met for discussions, both at Einstein’s apartment and at Rathenau’s grand manor in Berlin’s Grunewald, but Rathenau remained unmoved.
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The best course, he thought, was for Jews to take public roles and become part of Germany’s power structure.

Blumenfeld argued that it was wrong for a Jew to presume to run the foreign affairs of another people, but Rathenau kept insisting that he was a German. It was an attitude that was “all too typical of assimilated German Jews,” said Weizmann, who was contemptuous of German Jews who tried to assimilate, and especially of those courtiers who became what he dismissed as
Kaiserjuden.
“They seemed to have no idea that they were sitting on a volcano.”
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As foreign minister in 1922, Rathenau supported German compliance with the Treaty of Versailles and negotiated the Treaty of Rappallo with the Soviet Union, which caused him to be among the first to be labeled by the fledgling Nazi Party as a member of a Jewish-communist conspiracy. On the morning of June 24, 1922, some young nationalists pulled alongside the open car in which Rathenau was riding to work, sprayed him with machine-gun fire, lobbed in a hand grenade, and then sped away.

Einstein was devastated by the brutal assassination, and most of Germany mourned. Schools, universities, and theaters were closed out of respect on the day of his funeral. A million people, Einstein included, paid tribute in front of the Parliament building.

But not everyone felt sympathy. Adolf Hitler called the killers German heroes. Likewise, at the University of Heidelberg, Einstein’s antagonist Philipp Lenard decided to defy the day of mourning and give his regular lecture. A number of students showed up to cheer him, but a group of passing workers were so enraged that they dragged the professor from the class and were about to drop him in the Neckar River when police intervened.
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For Einstein, the assassination of Rathenau provided a bitter lesson: assimilation did not bring safety. “I regretted the fact that he became a government minister,” Einstein wrote in a tribute he sent to a German magazine. “In view of the attitude that large numbers of educated
Germans have towards Jews, I have always thought that the proper conduct of the Jews in public life should be one of proud reserve.”
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Police warned Einstein that he might be next. His name appeared on the target lists prepared by Nazi sympathizers. He should leave Berlin, officials said, or at least avoid any public lectures.

Einstein moved temporarily to Kiel, took a leave of absence from his teaching duties, and wrote to Planck, backing out of the speech he was scheduled to give to the annual convention of German scientists. Lenard and Gehrcke had led a group of nineteen scientists who published a “Declaration of Protest” aimed at barring him from that convention, and Einstein realized that his fame had come back to haunt him. “The newspapers have mentioned my name too often, thus mobilizing the rabble against me,” he explained in his note of apology to Planck.
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The months after Rathenau’s assassination were “nerve-wracking,” Einstein lamented to his friend Maurice Solovine. “I am always on the alert.”
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To Marie Curie he confided that he would probably quit his positions in Berlin and find someplace else to live. She urged him to stay and fight instead: “I think that your friend Rathenau would have encouraged you to make an effort.”
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One option he considered briefly was a move to Kiel, on Germany’s Baltic coast, to work at an engineering firm there run by a friend. He had already developed for the firm a new design for a navigational gyroscope, which it patented in 1922 and for which he was paid 20,000 marks in cash.

The firm’s owner was surprised but thrilled when Einstein suggested that he might be willing to move there, buy a villa, and become an engineer rather than a theoretical physicist. “The prospect of a downright normal human existence in quietude, combined with the welcome chance of practical work in the factory, delights me,” Einstein said. “Plus the wonderful scenery, sailing—enviable!”

But he quickly abandoned the idea, blaming it on Elsa’s “horror” of any change. Elsa, for her part, pointed out, no doubt correctly, that it was really Einstein’s own decision.“This business of quietude is an illusion,” she wrote.
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Why didn’t he leave Berlin? He had lived there for eight years, longer than anywhere since running away from Munich as a schoolboy. Anti-Semitism was rising, the economy collapsing, and Kiel was certainly not his only option. The light from his star was causing his friends in both Leiden and Zurich to try repeatedly to recruit him with lucrative job offers.

His inertia is hard to explain, but it is indicative of a change that became evident in both his personal life and his scientific work during the 1920s. He had once been a restless rebel who hopped from job to job, insight to insight, resisting anything that smacked of restraint. He had been repelled by conventional respectability. But now he personified it. From being a romantic youth who fancied himself a footloose bohemian he had settled, with but a few stabs at ironic detachment, into a bourgeois life with a doting hausfrau and a richly wallpapered home filled with heavy Biedermeier furniture. He was no longer restless. He was comfortable.

Despite his qualms about publicity and resolve to lie low, it was not in Einstein’s nature to shy away from saying what he thought. Nor was he always able to resist demands that he play a public role. Thus he showed up at a huge pacifist rally in a Berlin public park on August 1, just five weeks after Rathenau’s assassination. Although he did not speak, he agreed to be paraded around the rally in a car.
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Earlier that year, he had joined the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which sought to promote a pacifist spirit among scholars, and he had persuaded Marie Curie to join as well. Its name and mission was sure to inflame German nationalists. So in the wake of the Rathenau assassination, Einstein declared that he wished to resign. “The situation here is that a Jew would do well to exercise restraint as regards his participation in political affairs,” he wrote a League official. “In addition, I must say that I have no desire to represent people who would certainly not choose me as their representative.”
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Even that small act of public reticence did not hold. Curie and the Oxford professor Gilbert Murray, a leader of the committee, begged him to stay a member, and Einstein promptly withdrew his resignation. For the next two years, he remained peripherally involved, but
eventually he broke with the League, partly because it supported France’s seizure of the Ruhr region after Germany was unable to make reparation payments.

He treated the League, as he did so many parts of life, with a slightly detached and amused air. Each member was supposed to give an address to Geneva University students, but Einstein gave a violin recital instead. One evening at a dinner, Murray’s wife asked him why he remained so cheerful given the depravity of the world. “We must remember that this is a very small star,” he responded, “and probably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy.”
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The unpleasant atmosphere in Germany made Einstein willing to take the most extensive tour of his life, a six-month excursion beginning in October 1922 that would be the only time he would travel either to Asia or what is now Israel. Wherever he went, he was treated as a celebrity, arousing within him the usual mixed emotions. Upon arrival in Ceylon, the Einsteins were whisked away by a waiting rickshaw.“We rode in small one-man carriages drawn at a trot by men of Herculean strength yet delicate build,” he noted in his travel diary. “I was bitterly ashamed to share responsibility for the abominable treatment accorded fellow human beings but was unable to do anything about it.”
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In Singapore, almost the entire Jewish community of more than six hundred turned up at the dock, fortunately trailing no rickshaws. Einstein’s target was the richest of them all, Sir Menasseh Meyer, who was born in Baghdad and made his fortune in the opium and real estate markets. “Our sons are refused admission to the universities of other nations,” he declared in his speech seeking donations for Hebrew University. Not many of his listeners understood German, and Einstein called the event a “desperate calamity of language with good tasting cake.” But it paid off. Meyer gave a sizable donation.
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Einstein’s own take was even greater. His Japanese publisher and hosts paid him 2,000 pounds for his lecture series there. It was a huge success. Close to twenty-five hundred paying customers showed up for
the first talk in Tokyo, which lasted four hours with translation, and more thronged the Imperial Palace to watch his arrival there to meet the emperor and empress.

Einstein was typically amused by it all. “No living person deserves this sort of reception,” he told Elsa as they stood on the balcony of their hotel room at dawn listening to the cheers of a thousand people who had kept an all-night vigil hoping to glimpse him. “I’m afraid we’re swindlers. We’ll end up in prison yet.” The German ambassador, with a bit of edge to his pen, reported that “the entire journey of the famous man has been mounted and executed as a commercial enterprise.”
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Feeling sorry for his listeners, Einstein shortened his subsequent lecture to under three hours. But as he rode to the next city by train (passing along the way through Hiroshima), he could sense that something was amiss with his hosts. Upon asking what the problem was, he was politely told, “The persons who arranged the second lecture were insulted because it did not last four hours like the first one.” Thenceforth, he lectured long to the patient Japanese audiences.

The Japanese people struck him as gentle and unpretentious, with a deep appreciation for beauty and ideas. “Of all the people I have met, I like the Japanese most, as they are modest, intelligent, considerate, and have a feel for art,” he wrote his two sons.
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On his voyage back west, Einstein made his only visit to Palestine, a memorable twelve-day stay that included stops in Lod, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa. He was greeted with great British pomp, as if he were a head of state rather than a theoretical physicist. A cannon salute announced his arrival at the palatial residence of the British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel.

Einstein, on the other hand, was typically unpretentious; he and Elsa arrived tired because he had insisted that they travel in the coach-class car of the overnight train from the coast rather than the first-class sleeping car that had been prepared for them. Elsa was so unnerved by the British formality that she went to bed early some nights to avoid ceremonial events. “When my husband commits a breach of etiquette, it is said it’s because he’s a man of genius,” she complained. “In my case, however, it is attributed to lack of culture.”
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Like Lord Haldane, Commissioner Samuel was a serious amateur
in philosophy and science. Together he and Einstein walked the Old City of Jerusalem to that holiest shrine for religious Jews, the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) that flanks Temple Mount. But Einstein’s deepening love for his Jewish heritage did not instill any new appreciation for the Jewish religion. “Dull-minded tribal companions are praying, faces turned to the wall, rocking their bodies forward and back,” he recorded in his diary. “A pitiful sight of men with a past but without a future.”
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The sights of industrious Jewish people building a new land evinced a more positive reaction. One day he went to a reception for a Zionist organization, and the gates of the building were stormed by throngs who wanted to hear him.“I consider this the greatest day of my life,” Einstein proclaimed in the excitement of the moment. “Before, I have always found something to regret in the Jewish soul, and that is the forgetfulness of its own people. Today, I have been made happy by the sight of the Jewish people learning to recognize themselves and to make themselves recognized as a force in the world.”