On May Day, 1929, Berlin’s communists began their annual parade through the city’s working class district. As they moved along, chanting slogans and singing the International, the police began forming tactical squads. The chanting and marching continued. It was a traditional celebration and, that year, it was also an open resistance to the city’s socialist police chief who had banned all public demonstrations. The line of marchers stretched for blocks when a wing of police moved in to bar their advance. Stopped in front, the demonstrators felt the pressure of their comrades behind, coming in from the rear, unclear about what exactly was happening. What did happen next is lost in the fog of contradictory testimony. Maybe somebody threw something. At some point the police definitely opened fire. A photograph of the event tells nothing—people are running in every available direction. In the end, hundreds were wounded; approximately 30 were dead.
Berlin was becoming a poor place to live. The murderous style of politics had returned. Beatings were popular. Lies were doing battle with rival lies. Killings happened as well. Two political parties had organized as military forces. Those quick-stepping, head-bashing types who had carried Mussolini to Italy’s top had became rampant in Berlin. They pretended to be communists or nationalists or whatever else would support their thug instincts. The capital had quickly changed
into an arena for the young, the brutal, and the stupid. After Moscow, Berlin had the largest communist apparatus in the world and it had no trouble organizing a Rote Frontkämpferbund (red fighter group) of hooligans. Meanwhile, Goebbels had shown himself woefully capable of conjuring hatred from unpromising soil. Young Nazi thugs were proving as energetically mean and stupid as the red fighter membership. Men with hates organized them into automatons of action, loathers of the strain that imagination requires. In another few years, robots would be tossing books into a pyre before Berlin’s opera house, cheering and celebrating their contempt for ideas. A decade after the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had recovered its status as one of the leaders of European civilization. Its physics and mathematics along with its literature, drama, music, and philosophy would influence the world throughout the coming century. But its future in Germany itself looked bleak. The same thing had happened elsewhere. Italy lost its position in the vanguard of natural philosophy after the Catholic Church condemned Galileo to silence, and after the French guillotined Lavoisier they watched their country surrender its lead in chemistry. But the rampaging thugs in Berlin’s streets were proudly ignorant of European history and, therefore, could not take its warning.
Einstein prudently chose this time to buy a summer home in Berlin’s southwest countryside, at a village called Caputh. The house they chose (Elsa, of course, was the one who found it) was far from attractive. It had an ugly upstairs balcony that dominated the main structure, but it was practical. Caputh was surrounded by waterways where Einstein could satisfy his love of sailing. The balcony provided a relaxing space for a small social ensemble. More importantly, Caputh was remote. Reporters looking for a quick story could not get out there easily, and the house did not even have a telephone. To reach the village, visitors rode a train from Berlin to Potsdam and then transferred to a bus at the Potsdam station for the six mile jaunt to Caputh. Baedeker’s guide reported that when the bus was not available, travelers could walk from Potsdam to Caputh in two hours.
It was a grand shelter from Berlin’s sudden angers. Germany had seemed to recover from both the war and the postwar. Then the American stock market failed; foreign investment in Germany halted.
Worse, foreign investors also began calling in outstanding loans, toppling many businesses into bankruptcy. Jobs evaporated. So soon after the epic inflation, people had few savings to fall back on. By December, only two months after the crash, Germany’s Secretary of State reported that Berlin had returned to horrors not seen since the “terrible years of 1918-19.” But Einstein was safely out of the way of the gangs and in no danger of unemployment. He was still one of the people whom Berlin’s most distinguished visitors hoped to meet.
One such traveler was “Rabbi” Tagore. He returned to Germany in the summer of 1930 and made the trek to Caputh to pay his respects to the famous scientist. Einstein had been forewarned and came down the road to meet his guest. He escorted Tagore and the rest of his entourage up the hill to his home, and then up the stairs to the balcony where they could drink tea and converse. Welcoming though he was, the situation was awkward because of language problems. Tagore spoke no German and Einstein’s conversational English was still weak.
Tagore’s group included two women, thought to have been his sister and her daughter. Both wore saris of many colors. Doubtless they looked splendid as they came up the hill to the summer house, and the dull birds in the Einstein party highlighted the Indian colors even more. Besides Elsa, there was her youngest daughter Margot and Margot’s husband. A photo of the visitors and their hosts shows that the westerners were dressed in shades of black with little touches of white.
Tagore’s secretary was also on hand. He translated and took notes. Margot’s husband took notes as well and, to Einstein’s displeasure, a few weeks later published an account of the meeting in the New York Times. The transcript, Einstein felt, should never have been published, but inevitably it was. Who could resist reporting a meeting of East and West? Einstein enacted his natural role as defender of the West’s central “Faustian” belief that fixed laws define the reality beyond us, while Tagore played the mystical, “oriental” guru who turned inward for his truth.
The transcripts produced during the conversation were short on “please pass the cookies” type moments, and they read something like
a radio interview, but for all his differences with Tagore, Einstein appears to have found the exchanges agreeable. A month later, when Tagore returned to Berlin from a tour of the German hinterlands, Einstein took the bus and train into the capital to meet him again.
The heart of the hilltop conversation that captured the contrast between the two began when Einstein asked, “If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful?” The record does not show whether the translator needed to elaborate on what the Apollo of Belvedere was.
“No!” Tagore said and Einstein needed no translator.
“I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.”
“Why not?” Tagore asked.“Truth is realized through man,” giving the answer Bohr might have given had he been prone to making clear statements.
“I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.” Einstein’s talk of religion was probably a bow toward Tagore. In answering questions from a Japanese scholar a year earlier he had said that the term “‘religious truth’ conveys nothing clear to me at all.”
Tagore, according to the Times story, spoke with “majestic tranquility, as if reciting a poem or a sermon.” He answered Einstein, “Beauty is in the idea of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being. Truth is the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our accumulated experience, through our illumined consciousness—how otherwise, can we know Truth?”
Einstein might have said he recognized Truth through the authority of tested experience, the logic of explanation, and the understanding that the two together provide. Instead, he adopted a humble tone. “I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of Man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of Man there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first endangers a negation of the existence of the latter.”
Tagore disagreed, “Truth, which is one with the Universal Being,
must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called Truth—at least the Truth which is described as scientific and can only be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human.”
A startling feature of this exchange is that the parts that are comprehensible to western ears parallel the issues in the ongoing debate Einstein was having with Niels Bohr. Particularly notable was Einstein’s coda to his claim that if there is a reality beyond humans, there is also a truth that is independent of us: “The negation of the first [a reality independent of humanity] endangers a negation of the existence of the latter [truth].” Why add this business, which seems self-evident after the first part? Perhaps Einstein was spelling out to himself what was at stake in the dispute with Bohr. If you cannot find reality, how can you find truth? And if you cannot find truth, what claims can you make for science?
“The problem begins,” Einstein said a few minutes later, “[with] whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.”
“What we call truth,” Tagore insisted, “lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.”
It is notable that Einstein never probed Tagore’s references to “the super-personal man.” That was clearly an Indian doctrine, a novelty for Einstein, a different way of thinking about the “Old One” whose secret Einstein chased. However, he seems to have had no interest—not even the superficial interest of the generous host—in Tagore’s religious ideas; indeed he expressed the depth of his separation from Tagore a few minutes later when he blurted in wonderment, “Then I am more religious than you are.”
He should have said, “Then I am more western than you are,” because he was reacting in a witty, professorial way to Tagore’s statement, “If there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.”
Einstein, and Bohr, too, had been reared in the western one-God-of-Abraham tradition in which the true, real, eternal is out there and we are nothing compared to it. Even western atheism accepts that
premise, merely rejecting the consolation of a God who oversees creation and is concerned for the anguish of our lives. Both Einstein and Bohr had devoted their energies to studying what lay outside themselves, and neither of them knew what to think of Tagore’s definition of his own, Indian, religiousness: “My religion is the reconciliation of the Super-personal man, the Universal human spirit, in my own individual being.”