the published correspondence and the existing biographies of Einstein, with full acknowledgments and an excellent bibliography. The new and original aspect of this book is the context in which Einstein is placed. The context is a study in depth of the social pathology that gripped Berlin from the day Einstein arrived there in 1914 to the day he left in 1932.
The tragedy is a play in two acts, the first act being the years of war and the second act the years of the Weimar Republic. The most remarkable feature of the first act was the general belief among Einstein’s friends in Berlin that the war was winnable. The war was widely welcomed as an opportunity for Germany to achieve its proper status as a great power. Einstein observed that his academic friends and colleagues were even more deluded with patriotic dreams of grandeur than the ordinary citizens that he met in the street. In a conversation with his Swiss friend Romain Rolland in 1915, he described how Berlin had gone to war. “The masses were immensely submissive, domesticated,” he said. “The elites were worse. They were hungry, driven by their urge for power, their love of force, and the dream of conquest.” As late as the summer of 1918, after the failure of the final German offensive on the western front, many of the leading German academics were still confident of victory.
The state of mind of the mandarins in Berlin was very different from the state of mind of their enemies in Paris and London. In Paris the war was seen as a desperate struggle for survival. The guns on the western front were close enough so that everyone in Paris could hear them. In Britain the war was seen as a tragedy that had done irreparable harm to Britain and to European civilization, no matter who won it. When the war came to an end in November 1918, the British public looked back on it as an unspeakable horror that should never under any circumstances be allowed to happen again. But a large partof the German public looked back on it differently, as a test of strength that they could have won if they had not been stabbed in the back by traitors at home. This book explains how that fatal German sense of betrayal came into being.
The second act of the tragedy is the story of the slow collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rapid rise of Hitler. Einstein was a firm supporter of the republic, but he saw which way the wind was blowing. One episode in the tragedy epitomizes the whole story. Erich Remarque’s book
Im Westen Nichts Neues
was published in 1929 and immediately became an international best seller. It is the finest of all fictional accounts of World War I, seen through the eyes of a group of young Germans who die pointlessly in the carnage of the western front. In 1930 it was made into a Hollywood film,
All Quiet on the Western Front
. The film was shown all over the world, except in Germany. When the distributors of the film tried to show it in Berlin, Hitler’s friend Joseph Goebbels organized a riot in the theater. Further Nazi demonstrations and violent protests against the film followed. And then the Weimar government banned the film throughout Germany. The Weimar authorities did not allow the German public to see the film because the Nazis considered it unpatriotic. This episode explains a mystery in my own family. One of my relatives is a lady, now ninety-four years old, who lived in Germany all her life and grew up in the Weimar years. Many years ago, I gave her Remarque’s book to read and she found it very moving. “This book is wonderful,” she said. “Why didn’t they let us read it when it was published? That was before the Hitler time, but we were told that it was disgusting and shameful and respectable people should not read it.” So the respectable Germans of her generation, even those who were not Nazis, did not read Remarque. I always wondered why, and now I know. 2
1. Random House, 2003.
2. The lady who did not read Remarque until it was too late
The tragedy is a play in two acts, the first act being the years of war and the second act the years of the Weimar Republic. The most remarkable feature of the first act was the general belief among Einstein’s friends in Berlin that the war was winnable. The war was widely welcomed as an opportunity for Germany to achieve its proper status as a great power. Einstein observed that his academic friends and colleagues were even more deluded with patriotic dreams of grandeur than the ordinary citizens that he met in the street. In a conversation with his Swiss friend Romain Rolland in 1915, he described how Berlin had gone to war. “The masses were immensely submissive, domesticated,” he said. “The elites were worse. They were hungry, driven by their urge for power, their love of force, and the dream of conquest.” As late as the summer of 1918, after the failure of the final German offensive on the western front, many of the leading German academics were still confident of victory.
The state of mind of the mandarins in Berlin was very different from the state of mind of their enemies in Paris and London. In Paris the war was seen as a desperate struggle for survival. The guns on the western front were close enough so that everyone in Paris could hear them. In Britain the war was seen as a tragedy that had done irreparable harm to Britain and to European civilization, no matter who won it. When the war came to an end in November 1918, the British public looked back on it as an unspeakable horror that should never under any circumstances be allowed to happen again. But a large partof the German public looked back on it differently, as a test of strength that they could have won if they had not been stabbed in the back by traitors at home. This book explains how that fatal German sense of betrayal came into being.
The second act of the tragedy is the story of the slow collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rapid rise of Hitler. Einstein was a firm supporter of the republic, but he saw which way the wind was blowing. One episode in the tragedy epitomizes the whole story. Erich Remarque’s book
Im Westen Nichts Neues
was published in 1929 and immediately became an international best seller. It is the finest of all fictional accounts of World War I, seen through the eyes of a group of young Germans who die pointlessly in the carnage of the western front. In 1930 it was made into a Hollywood film,
All Quiet on the Western Front
. The film was shown all over the world, except in Germany. When the distributors of the film tried to show it in Berlin, Hitler’s friend Joseph Goebbels organized a riot in the theater. Further Nazi demonstrations and violent protests against the film followed. And then the Weimar government banned the film throughout Germany. The Weimar authorities did not allow the German public to see the film because the Nazis considered it unpatriotic. This episode explains a mystery in my own family. One of my relatives is a lady, now ninety-four years old, who lived in Germany all her life and grew up in the Weimar years. Many years ago, I gave her Remarque’s book to read and she found it very moving. “This book is wonderful,” she said. “Why didn’t they let us read it when it was published? That was before the Hitler time, but we were told that it was disgusting and shameful and respectable people should not read it.” So the respectable Germans of her generation, even those who were not Nazis, did not read Remarque. I always wondered why, and now I know. 2
1. Random House, 2003.
2. The lady who did not read Remarque until it was too late
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