In 1918 Albert Einstein’s face did not yet capture the living union of tragedy with genius. His hair had yet to shoot crazily from his broad, serious brow, and his eyes did not yet laugh and x-ray at the same time. He was still decades away from sticking out his tongue at a camera. Instead, photos from that period show a man not quite 40 years old who seemed firmly settled into middle age. His hair had gone gray; his eyes had lost some sparkle that had been evident in pictures taken only four years earlier. Anybody who saw him the day he rode a tram to the Reichstag probably took him to be just one more exhausted burgher looking for food in a starving city.
Outside Einstein’s tram window, Berlin was cracking open like Humpty Dumpty. Until recently people had thought the Great War was going well. The Russians had surrendered and the Kaiser’s troops along the western front had again begun to advance toward Paris. “Victory all along the line” had been the watchword, and then suddenly World War I was over. Germany cried uncle and the whole imperial system collapsed like a handsome marionette whose puppeteer has been felled by a stroke. One flinch and down it went.
There had still been some dreamers. The industrialist Walther Rathenau had wept when the war began, but now he appealed to the people to “rise in defense of their nation.” The generals knew such
pleas were hopeless and ignored him. Germany’s navy mutinied; soldiers on the Russian front had been radicalized by Bolshevik propaganda, while masses of troops on the western front began deserting. The police had disappeared from sight. Rumor alone was in charge.
Max Wertheimer also rode aboard Einstein’s tram. Remarkably, he looked younger than he had back in 1914. The Kaiser’s army had forced him to shave off his great black beard and take on a soldier’s air. Wertheimer, a Czech-born Jew, was Prussian in neither outlook nor manner, but he had served Germany ably enough to win an Iron Cross. Einstein had been among the war’s strongest opponents and shocked even other pacifists with his treasonable opinions that favored Germany’s outright defeat. Yet the beardless soldier and the long-haired peacemonger were good friends, united by a common delight in ideas. Both men knew what it was like to be seized by a notion and not to rest until the puzzle was resolved. Once, in 1910, Wertheimer had been riding a train when he suddenly had a new idea. Descending at the next station, he checked into a hotel and began experimenting. A week later he emerged with the blueprint for what came to be known as Gestalt psychology. Then he boarded another train and continued his journey.
That had happened a world ago, before rumor had gained command, before a whisper had been force enough to remove the Kaiser from his throne. In a desperate effort to stop a revolution, the emperor’s chancellor had said in a telegram that “the Kaiser and King has resolved to renounce the throne.” It was a lie. The Kaiser still dithered about whether to resign or stand firm, but such indecision did not matter once Berlin’s streets heard about the telegram. The Kaiser was finished. He fled his capital, lucky to have avoided the last tsar’s fate. The German throne took its great fall. The architect Walter Gropius was on furlough from the Italian front and saw a Berlin crowd insulting officers. This is more than just a lost war, he told himself, a world has come to an end.
The city that Einstein saw rushing by his streetcar window was paying the monstrous price of having lived on a tangle of lies. Berlin still looked whole. It had seen no enemy aircraft (as London had) and felt no artillery shells (as Paris had), yet Berlin had become a desperate,
starving, refugee-filled city of dismay. All that had previously seemed real had proved false as a dream. And now, adding to the torment of sudden damnation, a plague was taking liar and prophet alike. Sweeping around the world, the flu had arrived in town, killing 300 Berliners a day and turning every little November cough into a reason for terror.
Einstein was bound for Berlin’s revolutionary center. When news spread about the emperor’s supposed abdication, a crowd assembled outside the Reichstag and demanded to see Germany’s leading socialist politicians, who, just then, were surviving the Allied blockade by dining on watery soup. Eventually a politician strolled out to the Reichstag balcony and pronounced a few words, “The old and the rotten,” he shouted to the crowd that strained to catch his speech, “the monarchy has collapsed. Long live the new!” Then, getting carried away, he added, “Long live the German Republic!” There was a cheer and the politician returned to his soup. Until that moment, the plan had been to create a new, constitutional monarchy with the emperor’s grandson as the new king, but somebody had said republic and that was enough smoke and mirror for there to be no more German kings.
A third man rode the tram to the Reichstag with Einstein and Wertheimer. This was Einstein’s colleague in physics, Max Born, and he had a cough. Born had been in bed when Einstein telephoned him to report the latest crisis, that revolutionary students had seized the university and were holding some professors and its rector hostage. Einstein thought he might have some influence with the students and asked for Born’s support. So faithful Max Born had left his bed and now Einstein, Born, and Wertheimer were riding toward the parliament to see what they could do to rescue the hostages.
That hour, throughout the city—the country even—little groups were scurrying about, trying to save something of the old while revolution created something new. When Gropius realized that a world had come to an end, he told himself that Germany had to find a radical solution to its problems. Many, probably most, Germans agreed, but they hesitated, too. Young boys expected to keep their tattered soccer balls while their parents worried over the few dog-eared marks they had tucked away. Even Rosa Luxemburg, leader of the socialists’
most radical wing and longtime revolutionary, argued to prevent Leninist terror from becoming Germany’s new order.
Einstein was as much a bohemian as Picasso, following the demands of neither civilization nor property, but living out his life from his own necessity. Since boyhood he had seemed to despise everything about the old Germany and its authorities. Hatred for the old and the rotten was a familiar tune for him. He had been born a German but so loathed Germany’s hereditary prerogatives and enforced soldiering that he renounced his citizenship when he was 16 years old and became a Swiss. Yet, now that the plumed hats and strutting uniforms had committed suicide, Einstein found that there was something in the old that he wanted to save after all. He returned to Germany before the war because, whatever else he might have thought about it, Berlin was science’s capital. A wit during prewar times had said that only 12 people in the world understood Einstein’s theory of relativity and 8 of them lived in Berlin. The greatest physicist in the world had found that the fabric of scientific society bent his path right back toward the Prussian heart. The life of the mind had prospered under the emperor and Einstein wanted the scholarly life to continue in the new Germany, whatever the new turned out to be.
But how to save it? Although Einstein often charged at windmills, he rarely had a plan of action. He saw them spinning and made his move. His idea that day seems to have been to appeal to the students as reasonable people who had inadvertently taken innocent men prisoner. Einstein’s party was not going to ask for the students to surrender control of the university but to press for them to let the professors and the rector return to their homes.
Seven years earlier a Czech novelist named Max Brod had known Einstein in Prague and noticed the absurdity of ever sending this particular man to confront a hive of schemers. In a historical novel, Brod used Einstein as the model for his portrait of Prague’s greatest scientist, the astronomer Johannes Kepler. In it he wrote that Einstein/Kepler “was the opposite of an intriguer; he never pursued a definite aim and transacted all affairs lying outside the bounds of his science as in a dream.”
It seems unlikely that any other passengers aboard the tram no-
ticed Einstein. He was not yet world famous and his theory of relativity was generally unknown. Physical discoveries that had made popular splashes were X-rays (the mysterious, invisible something that saw bones through skin), radium (the stone that glowed in the dark), and the theory of the “Solar System” atom with electrons flying like planets around a sun-like nucleus. Einstein had written a supposedly popular account of relativity, but his idea was too specialized and difficult to have attracted much public notice. One promising student who struggled to master it was Werner Heisenberg, at the time in a secondary school in Munich, and even he thought Einstein’s account made for tough sledding. Relativity was not anything you could ever expect to seize the public’s imagination the way X-rays and radium had.
Berlin’s parliament appeared in the distance. The Reichstag was a large, heavy building designed with a huge dome and the massive arches of Renaissance Rome. It had been built in the 1880s as part of the Kaiser’s effort to transform backward Berlin into a capital that could rival London. Across the building’s front ran the phrase, “To the German people.” The Kaiser had hated that slogan—objecting to it as “revolutionary”—and he had resisted having any such sentiment carved into his building, but in 1916, while the Battle of Verdun ground up Germany’s young men by the hundreds of thousands, something had to be done to express the solidarity between the people and their government. The revolutionary sentiment had been carved into stone.
Max Born was the most handsome of Einstein’s trio. He was trim and looked fit. He was also a veteran, had been Wertheimer’s commander in fact, and yet he too was a friend of Einstein’s; perhaps he even loved Einstein. Partly it was because Einstein was a champion physicist while Born was merely a great one, and partly it was because Einstein was a very good man, but mostly it was something else. Einstein, in his absentminded way, was a charmer. He had a grace about him that good people appreciated, so they forgave him for not being like them, for not being, as so many chums are, a mirror in which we see and forgive ourselves.
Einstein had been no help to the Kaiser during the war, even though Berlin’s most honored physicists enticed him to the city spe-
cifically to reinforce Germany’s scientific leadership, and even though many close friends had turned their science to waging war. One of Einstein’s friends had directed the development and manufacture of mustard gas and other poisons for use in the trenches. Max Born had supervised artillery range-finding technology, and Wertheimer had used his psychological expertise to create sound systems for locating Allied artillery. Wertheimer then expanded on his location techniques to create the first sonar system placed in U-boats. During the Great War, most scientists had made their brains available to their local warring power. (Britain’s leading physicist, Ernest Rutherford, had duplicated Wertheimer’s antisubmarine work, but, of course, for the Allies’ cause.) The days when crowned heads dismissed and choked science seemed long past. The deliberate embrace of stupidity that had once silenced Galileo was replaced by an effort to make science lay its golden eggs for those in power. It took courage to deny a state its eggs.
As Einstein’s delegation descended from their streetcar, students wearing red armbands swarmed about the parliament building, enjoying a political lark, pretending that the world made easy sense and that they knew what was what. Einstein and the two Maxes made their way toward the armbands. As men of imagination they inevitably discomforted all claimants to power, but as scientists they were used to being respected. The emperor had fled, but they did not suppose the fury that had deposed a king might be turned their way. At that minute, rioting students were holding their colleagues hostage, yet they did not worry that anybody would suggest they too should be taken under the revolution’s wing. Could they recall the scenes from history, a great chemist fleeing through narrow back streets, pursued by a mob that knew exactly whom it was chasing? Years later Einstein shook his head when he reminded Born about the confrontation at the Reichstag. “How naive we were, even as men forty years old!! I can only laugh when I think about it. Neither of us realized how much more powerful is instinct compared to intelligence.”
Instinct at first held its ground. Enter the Reichstag? Not possible. Intelligence had no ready retort, but then instinct’s arbitrariness showed itself. A newspaperman recognized that it was the great Einstein trying to gain admittance, and he told the student guards to let the group pass. The students cheered the hero-pacifist as he came among them.
Most of the students would not have applauded Einstein in 1914. When the war began, almost all Germany cheered it. The socialist politicians, who had seemed to hate Prussia’s aristocrats and generals, voted their proud support for the coming slaughter. Intellectuals cheered as well. The novelist Thomas Mann supported the war with his full throat, and many an ordinary German marched happily away. Back then Einstein’s refusal even to cheer the boys as they stepped off in their new uniforms had been shocking, but the battlefield meat grinder, the government’s lies, and the sudden defeat on the western front had shown Einstein to be a prophet. The socialists, restored now to pacifism, assumed that surely he was one of their own. Once the student guards realized who he was, they happily waved Einstein and party through their lines.
Inside the building lay signs of the sudden change in national management. Cigarette butts were scattered everywhere and the carpeting was littered with paper, dust, and dirt. A rifle pile lay in the lobby. Attendants dressed in parliamentary livery served as memorials to what the place had been. Einstein’s party and their reporter escort entered a meeting to find the most radical students busy declaring themselves enemies of liberty. The party watched in silent dismay as the students passed a resolution that only socialist doctrines should be taught at the university, only socialists should be accepted as professors, and only socialists admitted as students.
After their vote the students looked to the prophet for praise and support. What did Einstein think? Einstein knew too much about efforts to silence professors with unpopular opinions. He himself had been targeted by student protesters when they objected to his pacifism and wanted him thrown off campus, or better yet, chained up as the Brits did with Bertrand Russell. Einstein told the Reichstag students that freedom of thought was German university life’s most precious staple, and he was sorry they had voted as they had. Their faces fell. Max Born never forgot their astonished gawks. Their pathfinder was defying them all.
Einstein changed the subject. He had not come to the Reichstag to debate intellectual freedom, but to see about their colleagues’ physical freedom. Couldn’t they be released? Einstein waited. Would the
students yield or would they go against their hero? They eluded the test by stepping back and denying any authority over the matter. They told the trio that they had already passed control of the university to the new revolutionary government. A politician might have said something—you are revolutionaries; surely you have the authority to act in revolutionary solidarity with one who has long dreamt of this day—but Einstein turned and led his entourage away. The reporter knew he had a story and still tagged along.
When the trio and its journalist escort made their way into the governmental headquarters at the Reich Chancellery, they entered a world of impossible problems. The discomfited academics whom they hoped to rescue were nulls in comparison with other matters that harassed the government. Peace had not ended the Allied blockade; indeed, armistice had made the blockade more effective, for it destroyed the wartime system for evading the stranglehold. But chaos proved an advantage to Einstein’s group. First, they were able to walk in and present their cause to Friedrich Ebert, the head of the revolutionary government. Then, too, Einstein’s party had brought a problem that Ebert could actually solve. The blockade, British hatred, French demands for vengeance, the incoming refugees, the flu, and the hunger had no solutions, but Ebert could sign a bit of paper ordering the release of the academic hostages.
Leaving the Reich Chancellery with their ad hoc document, Born recalled, the threesome exulted “in high spirits feeling that we had taken part in a historical event, and hoping to have seen the last of Prussian arrogance … now that the German democracy had won.” They moved on to the university, clutching Ebert’s signature like a medieval messenger bearing a white flag.
If Einstein were handed a paper like the one he presented to the students, he might have wondered whether there was anything behind it, but the university’s occupants lacked Einstein’s profound ability to doubt the unsupported, and the paper did its work. In the end, people need to point to something and say, “There, that’s my authority.” Einstein pointed to a chit and, in confused Berlin, nobody could trump him with a counterchit, so a scrawled paper signed (allegedly) by Friedrich Ebert proved authority enough.
With their colleagues released, Einstein, Born, and possibly even the ultraskeptical Wertheimer went away delighted with both the world and themselves. Berlin was starving, plague-ridden, and tempted toward bolshevism, but Einstein, having charged a windmill and seen it surrender, could hope that reason and justice were about to triumph.