On March 14, 1919, back in Berlin, one month after his divorce became official, Einstein suffered his fortieth birthday. He did as little as he could to note the moment, but there was no getting around the calendar. He had conceived a multitude of paradoxes about time and how it can slow down, but part of those paradoxes held that it is always the other fellow’s time that passes more slowly. Your own goes clippety-clop, clippety-clop. Adding to the chariot’s natural speed was the birthing of a new world, already half-hatched in the four months since Armistice Day. At age 40, it was natural to wonder, or at least for Einstein’s friends to wonder, if he would adapt to the changes or see them only as losses.

Einstein had appreciated especially the old world’s internationalism. “A lost paradise,” Einstein said of the time when ideas leapt between cities without anybody worrying about which nationality had produced them. In 1911, Einstein had attended a groundbreaking conference financed by a Belgian, organized by Germans, chaired by a Dutchman, and whose speakers included French and British scientists. Travel between countries in those days meant simply boarding a train or a ship and going. Only the most reactionary places, like Russia, had sealed up their borders and demanded that foreigners show passports.

Now the mood was changing and borders had become as important to nations as skin is to its citizens.

March 1919 was a hard time to be in Berlin. The would-be revolution, suppressed in January, had returned with street-fighting and strikes. In an attempt to calm people the government splattered the walls with posters proclaiming Socialism is here. Too late, barricades and wires had sprung up all over the city, some erected by the revolutionaries, some by troops supporting the government. In Old Berlin’s center, at the Alexander Platz, where an ugly statue of the spirit of Berlin rose four stories above the square, troops fired mortars at civilians who threw stones and packed pistols. The government declared a state of siege. Unlucky pedestrians were stopped by troops, directed to stand against the nearest wall, and executed on the spot. Rumor said Einstein had fled into hiding and was sleeping at a different place every night, though that story was false.

Amid all this confusion two Zionists approached Einstein. Many nationalist dreamers were in Paris that season lobbying at the peace conference, but Kurt Blumenfeld and Felix Rosenblueth had stayed behind in Berlin to continue recruiting prominent Jews to the Zionist demand for a Jewish nation. Einstein had known Zionists in Prague, where he had taught for two years at the German language university. He had not been impressed by the Zionist ambition that linked nationhood with religious identity, and the war had deepened his loathing for all nations. When the killing approached its height he wrote Lorentz in neutral Holland, “Men always need some idiotic fiction in the name of which they can face each other. Once it was religion. Now it is the state.”

Lorentz shared the scorn for great-power ambitions, telling Einstein, “I am happy to belong to a nation which is too small to commit great stupidities.” Einstein always loved Lorentz for that remark and was still quoting it many decades later. It was not an attitude likely to make him any kind of nationalist.

The Paris Peace Conference, which opened on January 8, aimed at restoring many internationalist ideals, shorn of the wrinkles that had led to years of murder. President Woodrow Wilson’s list of 14 points opened with very much of an internationalist flavor and its last

point called for a “general association of nations” to maintain the independence and territory of “great and small states alike.” It seemed somehow both modern and faithful to the highest traditional ideals. But the war had happened and national sensitivities were tender to the touch.

Before the war people like Einstein had seen themselves as members of fellowships, societies with tastes and concerns common to a whole civilization. They were workers, or scientists, artists, or commercial men who each contributed to the growth and maintenance of a worldwide civilization. But in 1914 most of those people abandoned their general identities for national ones, proclaiming themselves French workers, British scientists, German writers, and so bloody on. Despite much urging, Einstein had resolutely held to an unqualified scientific identity. He was a physicist, not a German physicist. Early in the war he had been asked to sign a manifesto in defense of German culture, known outside Germany as “The Manifesto of the 93” or more commonly as “The Notorious Manifesto of the 93.” He refused to sign. That was at Germany’s zenith, when defying the pressure to sign looked like refusing to declare for the winning side. Now, with Germany in ruins, German nationalism was still not dead. Planck was again lobbying Einstein to choose sides and stay faithful to Germany in this difficult hour.

A question in the air for old-fashioned people like Einstein was whether fellowship itself was changed. During the war Einstein had refused to break with the fellowship of scientists. Now could he break with the fellowship of Germans? The starving Berliners whom Einstein found when he returned from well-fed, normal Switzerland were mere ghosts of past glory. Politically and personally desperate millions filled streets that before the war had been prosperous and abundant with optimism. Nighttime life in the former cosmopolis now offered seedy vaudevilles with third-rate singers and low-grade novelty acts like knife throwers, stage hypnotists, or the expert with a bullwhip who, with an artful crack of the wrist, could pluck a cigarette from a stage beauty’s lips. On gray afternoons boys young enough to have been spared conscription kicked soccer balls across muddy fields. The slightly older lads and young men who had once been part of any street scene had gone for soldiers.

Of course, the prewar ideal that Einstein most cherished was the pursuit of knowledge, but he was getting on. By 40, most physicists have done their keenest work, although for the ultras among them this exhaustion is not always guaranteed. Across the channel in England, Ernest Rutherford had won the Nobel Prize before he turned 40 and then did his greatest work afterward—teasing out the atom’s basic structure with its nucleus and orbiting electrons. In classical days Archimedes lived past 60 and appears to have done groundbreaking work all his life. Without his 60 years there would have been no medieval mathematics and the Renaissance would not have ended with Galileo’s mathematical glories. Newton was 45 when he completed his Principia and laid the groundwork for the next two centuries of scientific coherence. Maxwell was 42 when he wrote his greatest book, the one that finally gave physicists some fundamental ideas that outpaced Newton.

And aged 40 or not, Einstein still had at least three things to learn. In logical order they began with finding evidence that would persuade his colleagues he was right about light quanta. He also had to figure out how light really worked with its wave-like υ properties that somehow became a particle-like hυ. Finally, he had to find a way to unite electromagnetic radiation and the rest of the cosmos under one general law. Einstein, being Einstein, devoted the most time to the third and largest task, linking electromagnetism and general relativity, rather than to assembling disciples who would join him in an effort to persuade physicists that light quanta were real.

Fourteen years after proposing light quanta, Einstein had only ever had one disciple on the matter. That was Johannes Stark, a lecturer at Göttingen. Stark was even less politically skilled than Einstein, for while Einstein simply paid no attention to winning support among his peers, Stark seemed to specialize in making enemies. In fact, historians of science sometimes suspect that Stark was attracted to Einstein’s light quanta because the idea so dumbfounded other physicists. In 1909 Einstein had been asked to give his first public lecture. The continent’s greatest physicists assembled in Mozart’s city, Salzburg. Planck was there. Sommerfeld was present. Stark was on hand. Lorentz was there and so was Born. Many of Einstein’s professional acquaintanceships

began at that memorable meeting where he told his audience that physics must fuse waves and particles into one concept. After he spoke Planck rose to say he saw no reason yet to abandon Maxwell’s theory and support light quanta. Stark, and Stark alone, came to Einstein’s defense. That scene in Salzburg with Einstein and Stark standing by themselves in the midst of Europe’s most honored physicists pretty well sums up Einstein’s isolation. And then even Stark sat down.

For Stark and Einstein, light quanta had explanatory value, most notably in the photoelectric effect. Late in the nineteenth century Heinrich Hertz discovered that the presence of ultraviolet light increases an electrical discharge. This finding seemed as surprising as Ali Baba’s discovery that saying “Open sesame” sent a boulder rolling aside; there was no reason to believe that the first phenomenon could in any way cause the second. Hertz’s discovery preceded the discovery of electrons, so it was only in 1899 that J.J. Thomson proposed the modern view of the photoelectric effect: when light strikes metal it knocks out some electrons, the electrical discharge.

In 1905, Einstein accepted Thomson’s idea that light might release electrons; however, to make the idea work, Einstein changed light’s physical description. Thomson and others had assumed light was a wave, but Einstein proposed that light worked like the soccer balls that boys were always kicking about. He suggested that when a light ball hits an electron with enough energy, it sends the electron flying. And how much energy does the light ball carry? Why the frequency of the light (υ) times h, of course. From that proposal, Einstein and Stark extended light quanta’s role to other areas; however, by 1913 Stark had picked a quarrel with Einstein over who had first dibs on a quantum explanation for how light breaks up molecules, and Einstein lost his one light-quantum disciple.

Einstein was deeply admired. His approval was sought by colleagues who fairly danced when he praised them, yet he had no school, no followers who saw the same unresolved problems that he studied and who looked for explanations where he looked. Einstein had seen this pattern before. He drew followers only after a theory proved successful and by then he had moved on. He was more the solitary artist than the peer-group scientist. His work habits were less like, say, Ernest

Rutherford’s than they were those of Thomas Mann, who that April resumed his self-appointed task of composing the story of The Magic Mountain. When you picture Einstein at work, imagine a figure in an isolated room hunched over a paper tablet pressing ideas onto paper. Do not envision anything like a laboratory where men in white coats work as a team to poke at nature.

That very spring a British team, in deep admiration for the theory of general relativity, was mounting an expedition to the South Atlantic to observe a solar eclipse and test one of relativity’s predictions, but Einstein had been alone during the long years spent developing the theory. At the time he could not understand why every serious physicist in the world was not trying to repair the break he had demonstrated in Newton’s logic. Before Einstein’s theory of relativity, the concepts of motion and gravity formed a coherent theory. After Einstein, they did not. Surely that was important. Yet no one seemed to care. Planck loved Einstein’s theory so much he had coined its name: relativity. Yet when Planck heard that Einstein was trying to revise the theory of gravity, he advised against it because failure was almost certain and success, if Einstein were granted that miracle, would not be believed. Yet Einstein had soldiered on—if one dares use that expression in his case—and found his success alone.

That had been during the prewar international fellowship, when schools of thought seemed to matter less. Einstein had been confident that success, contrary to Planck’s prediction, would bring acceptance. He was never one like Stark to create factions among his fellows. He could have done so. In Berlin he directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, a dummy organization created simply to bring Einstein to Berlin. Its office was wherever Einstein sat down, but it did have a small budget and Einstein did have grant money to distribute. He could have developed his office into anything, just as Walter Gropius did when that same spring of 1919 he opened his new Bauhaus school of design. Einstein could have used his grant money to support only research into his questions. Instead he sent money to theorists he thought worthy, no matter what their approach to physics. He never did become an intriguer.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Niels Bohr was busy organizing his

new Institute for Theoretical Physics as a training ground for young Bohrians. A few days before the Paris Peace Conference began, Bohr hired Betty Schultz to be his secretary. She would retain that post for more than 40 years, the rest of Bohr’s life, and knowing Fru Schultz would become a sign that a physicist really had spent time in Copenhagen. Of course Gropius and Bohr were masters at founding schools and acquiring disciples, so it is impossible to argue that they succeeded only because of postwar changes. Nonetheless, both were very capable mammals lucky enough to appear just as the ruling dinosaurs exited stage left.

How shocked Einstein would have been to learn of postwar intrigues in science and art. Leon Brillouin, one of France’s finest physicists and a man whom Einstein knew personally, actually preferred scientific factionalism and despised international learning. He wrote a letter that June protesting against inviting Germans and pro-German neutrals “whatever their scientific value” to international meetings. “I am thinking, for example of Debye, the Dutchman of great merit, who spent all the war as a professor in Göttingen. Naturally, also of Einstein who, whatever his genius, however great his antimilitarist sentiments, nonetheless spent the whole war in Berlin.” No doubt Brillouin would have doubled that proposal if he knew that Einstein had recently written to Ehrenfest about Germany’s continuing blockade, “Those countries whose victory during the war I had considered by far the lesser evil, I now consider only slightly less evil.”

Planck did not know about Brillouin’s letter either, but he sensed the victors’ mood and he guessed at efforts to move Einstein into more acceptable settings. He persisted in urging Einstein to stay in Berlin. The Zionists, too, came back to urge him to think again about the Jewish nation. Blumenfeld and friend might not have felt their entreaties were hopeless because, unlike most anti-Zionist Jews, Einstein was not an assimilationist. He had no wish to become still more German. On the other hand, neither was he likely to see himself as part of a closed group, no matter how far the postwar world strayed from its prewar ideals. He still lived his life on his own terms, not because of events or loyalty, and he thought other people should live that way too. If he had not been a secular Jew, he would have made a

fine radical Protestant. His moral opposition to telling others what to believe was as deep and decisive as it has been for the staunchest Anabaptist. From Einstein’s perspective, men like Brillouin seemed to be taking revenge against themselves. He still held to the prewar assumption that silencing intelligent colleagues of whatever nationality risked reducing one’s own ability to understand the world.

Planck was less of an oak and bent more with the winds. Before the war he had gone along with internationalism. When war erupted, he went along with patriotism and signed the notorious manifesto. When the war went badly he regretted having signed it. But one point remained stable in Planck’s eyes—the greatness of Einstein and the enormous contribution he made to German physics by remaining in Berlin. Planck was among the first to recognize in Einstein’s original relativity paper that a “new Copernicus” had appeared. Despite the name “relativity,” both Einstein and Planck were interested in the absolutes of science. It was Planck’s greatest pride that in the quantum’s h he had discovered a physical constant, a number that never changed no matter what the physical context. The fear that postwar chaos might send Einstein from Germany struck Planck as too terrible a cost of defeat and he was determined never to pay it.

Einstein appreciated Planck’s regard. He knew that Planck was not the most quick-witted scientist, but Einstein admired his doggedness. In October 1900 Planck had written down an equation that no experiment would defeat. Its predictions about radiation were exactly right and continued to be right as measurements grew more refined, but technical success was never enough to win Einstein’s heart. What he admired was Planck’s reaction to his own success. “On the very day when I formulated this [new radiation] law,” Planck recalled, “I began to devote myself to the task of investing it with a real physical meaning.” As it stood, Planck’s formula used an abstract expression that Planck had just guessed at. It was an inspired stab in the dark that worked brilliantly, but why did it work? Planck immediately tried to understand what he had wrought.

That search for meaning won Einstein’s heart. In the intense mental struggle that followed, Planck visualized radiant energy coming from an unknown number of vibrating atoms. His reasoning was math-

ematical and general, but Planck’s ideas become clear enough if, for atoms, we imagine a group of springs, each one trembling for its own reasons, and each one sending its vibratory waves into space. Consider, for example, a set of box springs, maybe the one that supported Einstein’s own mattress. Einstein himself can be on top making love to an actress. Real mattresses behave in the classical manner described by Newton, but Planck was trying to understand what peculiarities were needed to justify his radiation equation. So besides Einstein and the actress, we have a bed with imaginary quantum springs. As the couple begins to move, the springs stay still, but then the couple crosses some threshold of action and the springs begin to bounce, slowly and then with increasing vigor. The vibratory state of any spring is a bit uncertain. We just do not know enough about all those impromptu actions that are exciting the bedsprings, just as we cannot predict with certainty where a roulette ball will land. We know, however, that over the long run the casino owner and not the casino players will come out ahead, and we can also predict that the as bed’s bouncing increases, the more energy the springs will emit. As a mathematical physicist Planck naturally designated the total energy by E.

Biologists and generalists will concentrate on the couple on the mattress, but physicists might find professional interest in the box springs below. Individually, each spring emits its own energy. Planck called the energy of an individual spring ε and used that letter to indicate the spring’s energy, weighted to reflect the probability of it being in a particular vibratory state. The springs in the box’s middle might be vibrating quite rapidly while those over toward the edge are almost still. Planck’s theory had to take into account the probability of atoms (springs) shaking at different rates. The total energy available to the lovers will be the sum of all those trembling springs. Planck’s challenge was to figure out how the energy from each of those springs added up to E. When probabilities enter the math, equations tend to grow more complicated, but, in essence, Plank’s equation added every quantum’s little ε.

Typically, mathematicians like to solve complex problems by shrinking parts of an equation down to 0 and then forgetting about that part, but Planck found that he could not shrink energy forever.

This is the point where normal bedsprings and our imaginary bedsprings differ. Normal bedsprings can always vibrate just a little less. Planck found his bedsprings cannot vibrate below some minimal amount of energy. That is, if a spring is to contribute any energy, it needs a minimal amount to get started and when it does start it moves with a pop as all the energy needed for that action is released as a unit. What’s more, in these special springs, the energy continues to increase with little pops, so that the couple above, if they were not otherwise distracted, might notice that the bed’s violence grows with leaps and bounds rather than with the steady, continuous growth of most things.

Planck’s physical explanation for why his radiation equation worked was to show that it could be derived by assuming that a vibrator’s radiating energy bundle combined some minimum chunk of action with the vibrator’s frequency. That minimum action was Planck’s beloved constant, h. The equation for the energy in each individual spring became ε = h. Planck did not think of hυ as a real thing the way Einstein did, but he had shown that by speaking in terms of units of action, what he called quanta, he could understand why his earlier radiation equation worked.

Einstein saw his own work as an effort to take the kind of step that Planck had managed, and he was frustrated by how little of quantum radiation made coherent physical sense. In a letter to Max Born that June Einstein said, “One really ought to be ashamed of [the quantum theory’s] success because it has been obtained in accordance with the Jesuit maxim: ‘Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.’” Even with the misattribution (the passage is from the Gospel of Saint Matthew) the joke flashes a glint of what the Einstein school (had there been such a thing) would have been about: finding physically meaningful coherence.

Mathematicians reign over a dreamlike world where they can insist that every rule and axiom fit logically and completely. Physicists, however, are stuck with untidy reality and they must often tolerate some contradiction between laws. They tend to view these discrepancies as unavoidable ragpiles to be cleared up later. Einstein wanted to make physics as simple and neat as mathematics and once asserted that “science by no means contents itself with formulating laws of experi-

ence. It seeks, on the contrary, to build up a logical system based on as few premises as possible, which contain all laws of nature as logical consequences.” This distinction between laws of experience and laws of nature was basic to Einstein’s thought. Laws of experience allow predictions but carry people no closer to deeper truths. They are merely efficient. Laws of nature are of another order and move people toward understanding how nature works.

Compared with the paradoxes and blank walls of the quantum, the postwar torments Germany faced with its vengeful conquerors offered Einstein a relaxing break. Right after moaning to Max Born about the Jesuitical quantum, he shifted to say, “I do not see the political situation as pessimistically as you. Conditions [in the Versailles treaty] are hard, but they will never be enforced.” Meanwhile the rest of Germany was in agony over the Allies’ insistence that Germany proclaim officially that the war had been all its fault.

The howls of distress could not distract Einstein for long, however. His thoughts always returned quickly to his science. In his ambition to create a perfectly logical, unified physics, Einstein had two heroes: Euclid and Newton. Euclid was the god of Einstein’s logic; Newton the prophet of logical physics. Euclid had managed to derive the whole of plane geometry from a few axioms. Richard Feynman has pointed out that most of Euclid’s theorems were known already to Babylonian and Egyptian engineers, but for them geometry’s rules were technical facts that revealed no deeper reality. By showing their logical connections, Euclid transformed geometry from a mere set of rules into one of the pillars of wisdom. After Euclid, people recognized geometry’s importance for all educated citizens. Philosophers and savants of all sorts turned to it as a source of understanding.

For thousands of years no other subject combined geometry’s practical importance and philosophical meaning. Then Newton brought Euclid’s transformation to physics, deriving his mechanics from a few laws of motion. Again, the practical side of this matter was already well known. Seventeenth century artillerymen and machine makers used the mechanical principles every day, but Newton’s axioms became important laws of nature that all educated people needed to know if they were to think successfully about reality. Early in the

twentieth century Einstein altered the foundations of Newtonian mechanics, but he was determined to retain a physics that mattered to ordinary people because it dug down to reality.

The unEinstein school rejected Einstein’s great ambition and was satisfied to formulate those “laws of experience” that would predict accurately what would happen in particular cases. Successful laws of experience have been good enough to let civilizations invent their machinery, erect their buildings, and perform their experiments with confidence. The unEinsteinians doubted that people could discover laws that were so objective that they exposed the absolute reality behind our subjective experiences. Their science was one of technique and method with no extra implications that interested nonscientists.

During Einstein’s schooldays common opinion taught that Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s physics were both true; yet there were skeptics. An Austrian physicist-philosopher-psychologist, Ernst Mach, argued that Newton’s mechanics was philosophically incoherent and that it was sheer vanity to believe laws based on Newton’s absolutes (space and time) described nature as it really is. At the same time, a French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, argued that Euclid’s geometry was no more “true” than any of the other geometries that mathematicians had invented. Einstein studied both of these skeptics and, although he accepted their criticism of the established gods, he never joined Mach in believing that there were no real, natural laws to be had anywhere. Mach’s criticism just made him think harder.

Mach did have his disciples, but they were a minority among physicists. The majority agreed with Planck, Einstein, and Lorentz that physical laws were more than laws of experience. If you looked outside physics, however, it was easy to find examples of scientific ideas that got at the experience of a thing, but plainly did not describe objective reality. The unreal, scientific doctrine causing the most commotion in 1919 came from Sigmund Freud. Although many people did take literally his notion of an unconscious, it was easy to accept that Freud’s components of the unconscious—the ego, the id, and the superego—were useful fictions rather than physical realities lodged somewhere in the brain. An unEinstein physics would have held similarly that Einstein’s laws of nature—the constancy of the speed of light,

for example—were efficient concepts for working out what we experience but were not ultimate truths.

Before World War I, Einstein’s view of science had been generally taken for granted, but by the war’s end only very old-fashioned people, or, as in Einstein’s and Planck’s cases, people who had met unusually great success at reasoned efforts, could insist that the world made sense all the way down. In physics, the growing skepticism was heralded by 70-year-old Franz Exner, an experimental physicist of excellent reputation who had taught for decades in Vienna. In 1919 he published a lecture series in which he denied science’s universal lawfulness. He suggested that even a falling body, if it were examined over short enough times, would be found to move at random, going up as often as down. Exner argued that nature’s apparent lawfulness was merely a statistical illusion. Events that appear regular to our senses would, at the microscopic level, be random. Instead of digging down to the truth, this kind of scientist expected to dig down to lawless chaos.

The most eminent physicist in the unEinstein camp was Niels Bohr. He leaned Exner’s way, suspecting that statistical randomness lay behind much experience. In the summer of 1919, Bohr wrote his old school chum, C.G. Darwin (Charles’s grandson), that he was “inclined to take the most radical or mystical views imaginable” concerning quantum interactions between light and matter. By “most radical,” Bohr meant he was willing to abandon the keystone of realistic science, the insistence that matter and energy is conserved. Conservation was the physicist’s way of saying you cannot get something for nothing, or to use the proverb of a later age, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Without conservation, cause and effect would disappear. Law would disappear. We see a rock flying through the sky and know it must have come from somewhere. Rocks do not just appear out of nothing and nowhere. But they could if the conservation of matter did not hold. When something like a soccer ball begins to bounce across Berlin fields, the energy for the motion has to come from somewhere. Somebody or something sent it flying. Likewise, when a light quantum (if there were such a thing) passes through a camera’s shutter and strikes the film, it must knock at least one atom about, the way a soccer ball knocks a goalie back, passing its energy into its target.

Bohr’s letter to Darwin proposed that on the quantum level, this energy conservation did not apply. Therefore cause and effect did not apply. Meaningful law did not apply. He added that it was “quite out of the question” that photoelectricity had a causal explanation. Quantum effects did not begin with an energy input (that is, with a mechanical cause).

Darwin replied that Einstein had, years before, considered dropping the law of conservation, but found that quantum theory without energy conservation “was no better than with.”

Einstein was ready to discuss these issues with anyone who looked him up. A good place to catch him was on the tram that he rode between the university and home. One who often chatted with him there was a philosophy student named Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider. She recalled how Einstein “was at all times ready to listen patiently to questions and to answer them in detail.” He loved escaping what he called the “merely personal” in talks like these; yet the whirlpool of the personal pressed in. He closed his June letter to Max Born by saying: “With sincere regards to you and your wife, also from my wife.” My wife? Yes, on June 2, 1919, Einstein and Elsa went to the registry office and quietly married. Berlin’s intellectuals often sneered at Elsa and suggested she was unworthy of so splendid a thinker, but she served him as a valuable presence. She was good humored, proud of her genius husband, tolerant of his life in an imaginary world, and alert to his practical needs (such as reminding him to put on underwear). What she got in return—apart from status and income—is not so clear. She had had status and income before, but she divorced it, so perhaps she did indeed marry for love of her “Albertle.”

The wedding had come only five days after the solar eclipse that would confirm or deny Einstein’s great theory, but Elsa was not a scientist, professional or amateur. Her husband did talk to her about physics, but he was talkative by nature. Almost any sounding board would do, so long as the chosen ear was willing to listen to what Einstein said. Elsa joked that Einstein had explained relativity to her many times, but understanding it was “not necessary for my happiness.”

Perhaps, however, being Einstein’s wife was necessary for her hap-

piness. Many people who wanted him as their champion did not easily give up when he showed no interest. The Zionists persisted throughout 1919’s spring and summer, seeing Einstein’s embrace as too valuable a prize to be abandoned without the utmost effort. Finally Kurt Blumenfeld saw his opening. Instead of talking about the Jews as a group, he drew Einstein’s attention to nationalism’s opposite side, its benefits for the individuals. Zionism was intended to “give Jews inner security … independence and inner freedom.” Einstein believed everyone should have the strength and security to follow an internal compass, and he knew that anti-Semitism made that freedom more difficult. He began to take his Zionist missionaries more seriously. Meanwhile there was that fateful eclipse to wonder about. The British had taken their photographs and gone home, but what they saw remained unknown.

Like the Zionists, Planck would not give up. He pressed Einstein to make his commitment to stay in Berlin. Finally Einstein wrote to assure his friend that he would not abandon Germany, especially not as it was finally turning toward democracy. Germany had signed the peace treaty. The Allies had lifted the blockade. An optimist might think he had detected a dawn.

Hardly was the ink dry on his letter to Planck, however, than Einstein began to feel pressure from the Dutch to join them. Paul Ehrenfest wrote him to urge a move, promising that the normal maximum salary would be Einstein’s minimum and that, “You can spend as much time as you want in Switzerland, or elsewhere, giving lectures, traveling, etc., provided only that one can say ‘Einstein is in Leiden—in Leiden is Einstein’.” Such offers would become so common in later decades that it would not seem odd for a university to boast about scholars without actually making them available to students, but it was very remarkable in 1919. Einstein, whose name was still unknown to most of the world, had become in certain circles like a champion athlete whose endorsement is sought and readily paid for, but whose actual contribution to the endorsee is a matter of indifference.

And the Zionists were still pitching woo. Anti-Semitism was beginning to swell in Germany. Impotent resentment against their conquerors’ demands was being redirected against the Jews, the way a

frightened, wounded elephant, afraid to charge a hunter will rip apart a thorn bush in misdirected fury. Eric Warburg reported seeing Einstein give a lecture on relativity and hearing students shout anti-Semitic slurs as he spoke. In the end, Einstein told his Zionist pursuers, “I am against nationalism, but for the Jewish cause.” That remark and the letter of reassurance to Planck were probably the first indicators that the internationalist Einstein would find some place in the new world of nations and national factions. As for the postwar taste for ignorance and its skepticism of reason, no, there were never such indicators.